A Dangerous Movie? Hollywood Does Psychoanalysis

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Journal of Religion and Health ISSN 0022-4197Volume 53Number 6 J Relig Health (2014) 53:1841-1856DOI 10.1007/s10943-014-9930-3

A Dangerous Movie? Hollywood DoesPsychoanalysis

Donald R. Ferrell & Martin A. Silverman

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PSYCH OLOGI CAL EX PLO RATION

A Dangerous Movie? Hollywood Does Psychoanalysis

Donald R. Ferrell • Martin A. Silverman

Published online: 27 August 2014� Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract After the appearance of David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method in

2011, dealing with the relationships of Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung and Sabina Spielrein,

Dr. Donald Ferrell published: A Dangerous Method, A Film Directed by David Cronen-

berg: An Extended Review (Ferrell 2012) in the Journal of Religion and Health. Upon its

publication, Dr. Ferrell’s article was nominated for a Gradiva Award by the National

Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. On November 1, 2013, the Associ-

ation for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society held its annual conference at Rutgers

University, New Brunswick, NJ. Dr. Billie Pivnick, a member at large of the Board of

Directors of the APCS and also on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Religion and

Health, persuaded the 2013 Conference Program Committee that Cronenberg’s film would

make an interesting subject for discussion for conference participants. To that end, Dr.

Pivnick invited Dr. Ferrell, C. G. Jung Institute of New York, Dr. Steven Reisner, Coalition

for an Ethical Psychology, and Dr. Martin Silverman, Training and Supervising Analyst

and Supervising Child Analyst at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education, NYU College

of Medicine, Training and Supervising Analyst at the Center for Psychotherapy and

Psychoanalysis of New Jersey, and Associate Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly to

serve as panel members to discuss: A Dangerous Movie? Hollywood does Psychoanalysis.

Presentations on Cronenberg’s film and the early history of psychoanalysis were given by

Drs. Ferrell and Reisner, followed by a response to their presentations by Dr. Silverman.

Dr. Pivnick chaired the session. The articles presented here were given originally at the

APCS conference by Dr. Ferrell and Dr. Silverman. Dr. Reisner declined the invitation to

submit his presentation for publication. Dr. Silverman’s remarks were based not only on

the presentation given by Dr. Ferrell at the session on A Dangerous Movie?, but also on his

D. R. Ferrell (&)C. G. Jung Institute of New York, 46 Grouse Lane, Dorset, VT 05251, USAe-mail: [email protected]

M. A. SilvermanInstitute for Psychoanalytic Education affiliated with NYU School of Medicine, 551 Ridgewood Road,Maplewood, NJ 07040, USAe-mail: [email protected]

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J Relig Health (2014) 53:1841–1856DOI 10.1007/s10943-014-9930-3

Author's personal copy

close and careful reading of the extended review of Cronenberg’s film Dr. Ferrell published

in the Journal of Religion and Health, as well as Dr. Reisner’s presentation. It was

appropriate for Dr. Silverman to serve in his capacity as discussant since he had earlier

published a critical review of A Secret Symmetry. Sabina Spielrein Between Jung and

Freud by Aldo Carotenuto (Silverman 1985).

Keywords S. Freud � C. G. Jung � S. Spielrein � Narcissism � Psychoanalysis � Shadow �Transference � Will to power

Introduction

After the appearance of David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method in 2011, dealing

with the relationships of Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung and Sabina Spielrein, Dr. Donald

Ferrell published: A Dangerous Method, A Film Directed by David Cronenberg: An

Extended Review (Ferrell 2012) in the Journal of Religion and Health. Upon its publi-

cation, Dr. Ferrell’s article was nominated for a Gradiva Award by the National Associ-

ation for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.

On November 1, 2013, the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society

held its annual conference at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Dr. Billie Pivnick, a

member at large of the Board of Directors of the APCS and also on the Editorial Board of

the Journal of Religion and Health, persuaded the 2013 Conference Program Committee

that Cronenberg’s film would make an interesting subject for discussion for conference

participants. To that end, Dr. Pivnick invited Dr. Ferrell, C. G. Jung Institute of New York,

Dr. Steven Reisner, Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, and Dr. Martin Silverman,

Training and Supervising Analyst and Supervising Child Analyst at the Institute for

Psychoanalytic Education, NYU College of Medicine, Training and Supervising Analyst at

the Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis of New Jersey, and Associate Editor of

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly to serve as panel members to discuss: A Dangerous Movie?

Hollywood does Psychoanalysis. Presentations on Cronenberg’s film and the early history

of psychoanalysis were given by Drs. Ferrell and Reisner, followed by a response to their

presentations by Dr. Silverman. Dr. Pivnick chaired the session.

The articles presented here were given originally at the APCS conference by Dr. Ferrell

and Dr. Silverman. Dr. Reisner declined the invitation to submit his presentation for

publication. Dr. Silverman’s remarks were based not only on the presentation given by Dr.

Ferrell at the session on A Dangerous Movie?, but also on his close and careful reading of

the extended review of Cronenberg’s film Dr. Ferrell published in the Journal of Religion

and Health, as well as Dr. Reisner’s presentation. It was appropriate for Dr. Silverman to

serve in his capacity as discussant since he had earlier published a critical review of A

Secret Symmetry. Sabina Spielrein Between Jung and Freud by Aldo Carotenuto (Silv-

erman 1985).

‘‘Pursuing Shadow Through Cinematic Narrative’’

Saturday, November 2nd, 2013

Annual Conference, Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Rutgers

University, New Brunswick, NJ

Good afternoon. I am grateful to Billie Pivnick for prevailing upon me to participate in

this session on David Cronenberg’s film, A Dangerous Method. I am also grateful to her for

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the imaginative title she chose for this session, A Dangerous Movie. Her title forcefully

reminds us that we are dealing with a cinematic treatment of a significant period in the

lives of Freud, Jung and their protege, young Sabina Spielrein. Consequently, we are

focusing on a chapter in the early history of the psychoanalytic movement. The discovery

of Sabina Spielrein’s letters and other documents in Geneva, Switzerland in the late 1970s

became the subject of significant research by scholars such as Aldo Caroteneuto, John Kerr

and others, and has led to a critical and psychoanalytically informed treatment of this early

history.

And now, we have a film version of this history from the hands of a contemporary

auteur/director who has achieved a significant body of work and who, I believe, has

contributed to the value of contemporary cinema as an artistic medium. Those of us

engaged in the psychoanalytic analysis of culture and society may well find Cronenberg’s

film of interest in exploring both how our movement looks to the outer world when seen

cinematically and what our work as psychoanalysts might mean to that same world. So one

of our questions for this session today is:

In what sense may it be said that Cronenberg’s film about this early history of

psychoanalysis, a form of treatment William James believed was based on a ‘‘most

dangerous method,’’ is itself a dangerous movie, and if it is, for whom is it dangerous?

In making David Cronenberg and his film the primary focus of this presentation, I am

making the assumption that most of you have seen the film and that many of you, perhaps,

have read some of the studies now available on the Freud–Jung relationship that began as a

remarkable collaboration and ended tragically 7 years after it began. I am also assuming

that many of you have explored the relationship both men had with Sabina Spielrein. My

extended review of the film, published in 2012, provides the historical background to the

film. I will only summarize it briefly here before turning to a more detailed exploration of

Cronenberg’s potentially dangerous movie.

Sabina Spielrein came into Jung’s life in 1904 when she, at the age of 19, was brought

by her uncle, a medical doctor, to the Burgholzli mental hospital in Zurich where Jung had

recently taken a position as Assistant Staff Physician. Since its founding in the late 1860s,

the Burgholzli was known throughout Europe as an institution for the humane care of the

mentally ill as well as a center of psychiatric research. By the time Jung arrived at the

hospital, then under the direction of Dr. Eugen Bleuler, the Burgholzli had a decidedly

dynamic orientation. It was here that Jung first became aware of Freud’s work. He was

eager to attempt the treatment of a patient using Freud’s method of psychoanalysis. So

shortly after meeting Spielrein in the course of her admission to the Burgholzli, Jung

became convinced that she should become his first psychoanalytic patient.

Those of us who have had years of psychoanalytic training can only be amused, if not

appalled, at Jung’s naivete that without any training at all, including a training analysis, he

could possibly hope to function effectively as a psychoanalyst. We should remember that at

this point in its development, psychoanalysis as a medical discipline for the treatment

primarily of hysteria was hardly more than a gleam in Freud’s eye. Moreover, it is

important to see in this moment in Jung’s career, as framed by Cronenberg in the opening

scenes of his film, Jung’s enormous ambition and his growing fascination with Freud and

his work. For Cronenberg, we are to see Jung as an idealistic young scientist in search of

the knowledge and human technology that could uncover the depth, mystery and secrets of

the human mind and bring healing to the human soul.

According to Jung’s notes, Ms. Spielrein arrived at the Burgholzli in a deeply disturbed

state. She had grown up in a Jewish family in Russia, a family of doctors and rabbis. She

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was intellectually gifted, fluent at a relatively young age in French, German, English,

Hebrew and, of course, Russian. The death of her sister at a young age brought traumatic

loss into Spielrein’s life that contributed to her growing emotional vulnerability. However,

as Jung discovered, the source of her trauma lay not only in the experience of the loss of

her sister, but also in a deeply disturbed relationship with her father. Probably physically

abused himself as a child, her father was prone to suicidal depression and suffered out-

bursts of rage. Sometimes he would punish his daughter by hitting her on the buttocks in

front of her brothers to humiliate her. Once, as he was trying to lift her skirt to beat her, she

begged him not to hit her. Her father relented but forced her to kneel on her knees and kiss

a picture of her grandfather and to swear always to be a good child (Ferrell 2012).

The sequela from the trauma of this early paternal abuse was manifold in Spielrein’s

psyche. As a child, she developed a ritual of sitting with the heel of her foot pressed against

her anus, preventing herself from defecating while experiencing the urge to do so. This

ritual led to sexual arousal and over time to masturbation. At the Burgholzi, Jung noted that

his patient could become sexually aroused and driven to masturbation by fantasies of

violence or abuse. As might be predicted, the dialectic of the father’s sadism and her

masochistic transmutation of traumatic pain into erotic pleasure led to a decidedly mas-

ochistic sexual pattern that was relatively well formed by the time Spielrein came into

treatment with Jung.

It is now well known and documented that Spielrein underwent a relatively brief period

of intensive in-patient psychoanalysis with Jung from August 1904 to June, 1905. With her

release from the Burgholzli, Jung’s relationship with Spielrein changed dramatically when

he continued her treatment on an out-patient basis. Over the course of the next 4 years, she

became more integrated and began to function at increasingly higher levels, which resulted

in her decision to study medicine at the University of Zurich. Ultimately, like Jung, she

became a psychiatrist. Her transferential love for and identification with Jung seems to

have led her out of the deeply traumatized state she was suffering when she first met him to

a more consolidated and creative state of optimal well-being with only traces of her former

disturbance manifesting in much more manageable form. It could be said that the Sabina

Spielrein who emerged from her analytical relationship with Jung became an early poster

child for the efficacy of psychoanalysis in its earliest stage of development.

What Jung failed to understand, however, when he began his analytic work with

Spielrein, driven as he was by his own professional ambition and later by his relationship

with Freud as role model and mentor, was that nothing in his personal or professional

experience had prepared him for the profound impact that Sabina Spielrein’s personhood

and presence in his life would have upon his own psyche. In effect, seized by the power of

his own unconscious woundedness (Cavallli et al. 2014) and his erotic countertransference

to her, Jung broke the boundaries of his analytic relationship with Spielrein, which caused

her great confusion and suffering. Furthermore, Jung nearly became undone himself by the

activation of psychotic-like ‘‘non-ordinary ‘‘ (Isabel Clarke 2001) material from his own

unconscious that took him years to understand and integrate.

Jung’s recovery process from his counter-transferentially ambivalent attachment to and

regression toward Spielrein as well as his profound wound at being rejected by Freud is

what some Jungians see in his creation of The Red Book.

In his film A Dangerous Method, it is Spielrein’s suffering, Jung’s near collapse and the

scandalous attempts to reconstitute himself in his work with her that have captured Cro-

nenberg’s imagination. With this thought in mind, I turn now to David Cronenberg as

filmmaker and his film on Freud, Jung and Spielrein. Is A Dangerous Method a dangerous

movie?

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Many of David Cronenberg’s films are not everyone’s cup of tea, especially his early

work dating to the 1970s when he developed his reputation as a director of a certain class

of horror film known as ‘‘body horror.’’ In preparation for this conference, I studied

Cronenberg’s opus. While his evolution as a filmmaker has taken him beyond his early

fascination with horror and the monstrous as they appear in ordinary human life, his later

films are relentless in exposing our vulnerability to suffering our humanity in a world we

often do not understand and over which we have very little control. Many of his films focus

on the hubris that drives us, especially the scientist/doctor, to seek to control and even

outwit the mystery that holds us in its thrall. I would mention two of his most well-known

films as examples: Dead Ringers and The Fly. Who is this David Cronenberg, we might

ask, who has given us these films?

He was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1943 to Jewish parents. His mother Esther was a

musician, and his father Milton was a writer and editor. His father was also a lover of

books and Cronenberg tells us that as a child, he walked through aisles of stacked books in

his home as if they were additional walls (Cronenberg 1992). Very early in his life, he was

drawn to writing and wrote constantly; however, when he entered the University of Tor-

onto in 1963, his intention was to study science. Yet, before his first year of study at the

University had ended, he had switched to Honors in English Language and Literature. His

capacity as a writer can be seen by the fact that he has written most of the screen plays for

his films. Still, his interest in science remained and has deeply informed the thematic

material of many of his films. He tells us what science and scientists mean to him in his

filmmaking in the following comment:

I think the best scientists are as mad, creative and eccentric as writers and artists of

any kind. I feel a lot of empathy for doctors and scientists. I often feel that they are

my persona in my films. In… a way, everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab.

We are all trying to experiment, to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off

madness and chaos. So, to me, those characters in my films represent people in

general, who somehow have to figure out what they are doing, what their worth

means, what their relationship to society is, how to use their creative energy and how

to deal with their destructive energy. (Cronenberg 1992, pp. 6–7).

Cronenberg would set no limit on what scientists can know and experiment with in the

name of science. However, ironically, as William Beard’s study has shown (2006), his

films in which scientists or doctors appear represent them as either doing harm to them-

selves or inadvertently through their experiments to their fellow human beings. This theme

can be seen clearly in Cronenberg’s 1979 film, The Brood, which for those of you who

have not seen it or may have seen it and have repressed it because of its shocking story, let

me offer here a brief summary. While still falling within the domain of his earlier body

horror films, The Brood also shows Cronenberg’s growing interest in exploring the

meaning of human subjectivity, especially under the auspices of a more contemporary

permutation of the doctor/scientist archetype in our culture, the creative and experimental

psychotherapist. It is the first film in Cronenberg’s oeuvre in which he worked with actors

of international standing, Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar. It may also be important to

know that Cronenberg made this film while in a destructive legal battle with his first wife

over custody of their daughter Cassandra. He calls The Brood his version of Kramer vs

Kramer!

It is my opinion that The Brood when juxtaposed with A Dangerous Method illuminates,

if in a grotesque and bizarre way, Cronenberg’s fascination with the fate of the doctor/

scientist who is undone by the forces of nature and psyche he believes he can direct toward

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a benevolent outcome. In Cronenberg’s reading, the heroic doctor/scientist meets this

disastrous fate by a profound failure to grasp the mystery and the power of the natural and

psychic forces he is trying to subdue. This failure is driven by his lack of self-knowledge,

his grandiosity and the arrogance of presuming to know the other. I would dare say those of

us who have been trained to work as analysts know this predicament from the inside all too

well.

I hope you will bear with me as I try to summarize the plot of The Brood because I think

it is a mythological version of the fate that Jung suffered in his work with Sabina Spielrein.

You will see how it cinematically foreshadows, if by phantasmagoric, extreme means, the

way Cronenberg portrays the predicament which Jung suffers in A Dangerous Method.

Two of the central figures in The Brood are Nola (Samantha Eggar) and Frank Carveth

(Art Hindle) whose divorce from each other has devolved into an ugly battle over the

custody of their young daughter, Candice (Cindy Hind). This struggle has brought Nola to

an emotional crisis, requiring her hospitalization under the psychiatric care of Dr. Hal

Raglan (Oliver Reed), who has placed her in isolation at his treatment center, the SomaFree

Institute. Candice is the only one in Nola’s family who is allowed to see her on weekends.

We learn early in the film that Nola’s present emotional crisis was preceded and perhaps

activated by having been physically abused by her own mother, Juliana (Nuala Fitzgerald),

as a child. Nola feels a deep hatred toward her mother for her abuse and a strong anger at

her father, Barton (Henry Beckman), whom she also loves, for not protecting her. These

emotional facts are critical to the film’s narrative.

Dr. Raglan is an innovative psychiatrist/psychotherapist who has created a new treat-

ment method he calls Psychoplasmics whose signature feature is that it enables his patients

to give material form to their inner conflicts and suffering, especially of their hatred and

rage, thus restoring their own inner equilibrium. Under Raglan’s role-playing activation,

his patients’ inner emotional states become stigmata materialized on their own bodies, as

lesions and oozing sores, a kind of psychic leprosy. He often treats his patients with this

new method on a stage at the Institute in front of large audiences, reminiscent of Charcot’s

performances with his hysterical women a century earlier.

Nola is Raglan’s favorite patient, and in his work with her, he believes that he is on the

verge of a major discovery that will revolutionize the field of psychiatry and psycho-

therapy, and, of course, place him in the unique company of Freud, Jung and other

luminaries who dare to study the human psyche. He hopes his new book The Shape of Rage

will bring fame and fortune and establish him as the rightful heir to the illustrious pioneers

who preceded him. However, Frank believes Raglan is a fraud, who is allowing Nola to

physically abuse their child, Candice, which is, indeed, true, but which Raglan at first

denies. Thus, a power struggle ensues between Frank and Raglan as to whether Candice

can continue to see her mother on weekends. This power struggle drives Frank to begin

gathering evidence to expose Raglan as a dangerous charlatan.

As the drama between Nola, Frank, Candice and Raglan unfolds, three violent homi-

cides occur in which Nola’s mother and father, and Candice’s teacher, Ruth (Susan Hogan)

are all murdered. The murders are carried out by dwarf-like creatures, who resemble

human beings, but are in fact humanoid mutants who do their terrible work on screen

wearing children’s snowsuits closely resembling the snowsuit Candice is seen wearing in

several scenes in the film. After Ruth’s murder in her own classroom, the two homicidal

creatures who murdered her lead Candice away from the school and back to her mother at

the Institute. By now, the viewer understands that the murderous appearance of the mutants

is clearly connected to the individual and private sessions Raglan is having with Nola, in

which he role-plays Nola’s mother, father and Candice’s teacher whom Nola believes is

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having an affair with Frank. At his point in the film, Candice has lost her two grandparents

and her teacher to murder and has been separated from her father by the action of the

mutant murderers. Unbeknownst to her father, Candice is now with Raglan and her mother.

Unable to find Candice at her school, Frank drives to the Institute. He has learned that

the Big Thing Raglan is working on involves a group of deformed children who are living

in the work-shed of the Institute. He has also learned that Raglan has released all the other

patients in order to concentrate his therapeutic method solely on Nora. Frank goes to the

work-shed to see if Candice is there. There he and Raglan meet. Frank, distraught,

demands that Candice be returned to him.

Raglan acknowledges to Frank that Candice is indeed with the children in the work-

shed. He further explains that these children are in fact the unique products of his

experimental method with Nola. Raglan explains that these mutant child-like creatures are

materializations of Nola’s negative inner feelings and are activated when Nora becomes

deeply aroused by her feelings of hatred, jealousy and rage. Clearly, Raglan is aware that

his experiment has gone terribly wrong; that he is practicing a very dangerous method.

To get Candice back, Raglan tells Frank he must seduce Nora into believing he wants to

be married to her again. Meanwhile, Raglan will try to rescue Candice from the brood.

Though distrustful of Raglan, Frank agrees.

He enters Nola’s room to find her wearing a flowing white dressing gown. Frank tells

Nola that he wants her back. ‘‘Then look’’ she says. She then opens her gown with her arms

extended upward. The sleeves of her gown draped from her wrists make her look almost

angelic. As she exposes her upper body, we see a look of total horror on Frank’s face. As

the camera moves from his face to Nola’s body, Cronenberg gives us his own cinematic

vision of the Medusa. Attached to her abdomen is a sack-like uterus, inside of which is one

of her brood, parthenogenically created. Unlike the Virgin Mary’s conception of the Divine

Child, however, this is no love child, but a deformed and hideous incarnation of Nola’s

rage and hate. This is how she has made use of Raglan’s Psychoplasmic technique: to bring

forth upon her body a brood of mutated beings, who carry out her murderous feelings upon

those she loathes.

Seeing the horror on Frank’s face, Nora realizes that he does not truly love her and vows

that she will kill Candice rather than let Frank have her. The brood is thus awakened inside

the work-shed where Raglan is trying to rescue Candice. Nola realizes that Raglan is

working with Frank against her. While Raglan, as Nola’s transferential father, is devoured

by the brood, Candice momentarily escapes. Frank realizes that he must kill his estranged

wife to save his daughter. Like Perseus before him, but without his shield and sword, Frank

seizes Nola by the neck and strangles her to death. As Nola dies, the brood dies with her

and Candice is saved.

In the final scene with Candice and Frank reunited, the camera focuses on Candice’s

arm where lesions are breaking out on her skin. Cronenberg leaves no doubt that Candice,

too, in the wake of a relentless determinism of transgenerational trauma and suffering, has

already succumbed to its destructive effects. She will inevitably suffer its toxic legacy

within her own psyche and her own object world.

There are many levels of meaning in The Brood that would be valuable to explore as

psychoanalysts. I wish to draw our attention to the following thesis. From a Jungian

perspective, I would argue that what we see in The Brood, as in many of his other films, is

Cronenberg’s desire to make what Jung called the shadow of the psyche conscious. Cro-

nenberg seeks through the conjuring of the grotesque and the monstrous to make the

shadow manifest in both individual psychology as well as the way it is embodied in social

and cultural practices. In The Brood, it is the shadow of the professional healer that is of

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most importance in bridging us to Cronenberg’s later film, A Dangerous Method. But first a

brief word about Jung’s concept of shadow.

For Jung, the shadow is that part of the human personality that lies outside the light of

ego consciousness and is therefore held in the personal unconscious, in the dark so to

speak. It is the result, primarily, of the ego’s defensive repression of aspects of the per-

sonality that are not in harmony with the ego ideal. For Jung, we repress not only the

aspects of ourselves the ego ideal rejects as negative, that is, those parts of ourselves which

arouses our self-hatred and shame. Ironically, we also repress parts of ourselves that a more

comprehensive and inclusive ego ideal might consider as positive, but our more rigid and

narrow ego ideal lacks the courage to embrace. There are then in our unconscious both

positive and negative aspects of shadow material. Because the shadow in us is unconscious,

it appears first only in projected form. Hence, the work of analysis from a Jungian per-

spective in its initial phase is for the analyzand to become conscious of shadow material as

this material is projected in daily life, in the transference and especially as it appears in

dreams. All this work is done in the name of becoming more whole (Whitmont 1979).

Jung understood that assimilating the shadow into ego consciousness is a painful and

difficult task. As Erich Neumann, an early follower of Jung, wrote: The work of making the

shadow conscious is:

A process in which the ego is compelled to recognize that it is evil and sick in mind,

antisocial and a prey to neurotic suffering, ugly and narrow-minded—an analytical

technique which punctures the inflation of the ego and obliges it to experience

exactly how and where it is limited and one-sided,.. prejudiced and unfair—all this

represents such a bitter form of self-encounter that one can readily understand the

resistance that it arouses. (Neuman 1972, p. 79)

Dr. Hal Raglan, as Cronenberg creates him, is a successful psychiatrist/psychotherapist,

a man of great vision and creative originality. For reasons that we are not told, he has

developed as his specialty the treatment of rage. He has developed the new and yet

controversial therapy called Psychoplasmics, has founded an Institute in its name and is in

great demand as a psychiatrist/psychotherapist. He is also very ambitious and seems to

think of himself as the true successor to Freud and Jung as can be seen in a photographic

triptych of Freud, Jung and Raglan hanging in Nola’s room at the Institute. It is also clear

that Nola is his favored patient with whom, Raglan knows, his therapeutic technique has

produced the most remarkable results, her ability to create from her own rage and jealousy

a mutant form of life, a subspecies perhaps of human beings, who destroy those in her life

she despises.

It is, however, his will to power, his grandiose desire to achieve ‘‘something big’’ within

the psychiatric/psychotherapeutic world, his fame and success complex, we might call it,

that lies in Raglan’s shadow. He seems deeply devoted to his patients, but when he begins

to understand what Nola is unleashing on the world through his therapeutic technique, he

commits himself exclusively to her. His grandiose obsession with technological/ther-

apeutic innovation overrides any concern for the well-being of his patients or the safety of

others. Knowing that Nola’s mutant avengers have killed both her parents, he engages her

in yet another session as if the session is another episode within a benign course of

treatment. His complex makes him unconscious of his knowledge of Nola’s strange powers

of parthenogenic birthing of evil.

With his will to power/professional success and fame repressed in his shadow, Dr.

Raglan is a tragic promethean figure whose desire to heal is in the service of his unas-

similated shadow. Too late he recognizes that Nola has become monstrous as a result of his

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own dangerous method. Raglan is undone by his own power complex. There is an exquisite

irony in the fact that Raglan dies from wounds delivered by the derivatives of his own

patient’s trauma and suffering. Although Raglan sacrifices himself for Candice, Nola’s

deeply traumatized child, Cronenberg makes clear there is no redemption in this doomed

family history. If Raglan is to be seen as a Christ figure, his death is in vain. He has been

crucified on the cross of his own unconscious countertransference to Nola and the return of

his repressed shadow of power and grandiosity.

David Cronenberg created the figure of Dr. Raglan in 1979 from his own literary

imagination. He did so 32 years before he made A Dangerous Method in 2011. How much

Cronenberg may have known about the Jung–Spielrein relationship when he made The

Brood is a matter of speculation. Yet it is well known that Cronenberg has had an interest

in Freudian ideas from early in his career. When John Kerr’s book and Christopher

Hampton’s stageplay became available in the early 1990s, it is no surprise that Cronenberg

became interested in making the film version of the book and the stageplay. In making A

Dangerous Method, however, Cronenberg did not have to create a psychiatrist/psy-

chotherapist from his own imagination. He existed already in the person of C. G. Jung.

I would argue that his impulse to disclose the shadow material that we have seen in The

Brood was also at play in A Dangerous Method. Here, we see in Jung’s relationship with

Sabina Spielrein what he had to go through to discover his concept of the Shadow, which

some believe Spielrein helped him develop. While the destinies of the historical Jung and

the cinematic Dr. Raglan have very different outcomes, there are some significant parallels

from a shadow perspective between the two stories.

Cronenberg’s Jung is represented in his film as a living embodiment of the Doctor/

Scientist image we see in many of his films: creative/yet destructive; heroic/yet inflated;

overweeningly ambitious/yet blind to his own will to power; exceptionally gifted/yet

wounded to the point of madness. In his relationship with Spielrein, Jung is initially

remarkably effective in helping her achieve greater psychological health. However, as their

relationship progresses, Jung is shown becoming increasingly overwhelmed by his own

inner conflicts, activated by his erotic and regressive countertransference to her.

I have argued elsewhere that Jung succumbed to the inner forces that threatened him

with madness because of the power of Sabina Spielrein’s love for him. Even thought it was

a transferential love, it was a love that opened Jung to his own depths in such a way that his

Doctor persona was completely shattered by the shadow material that erupted from his

unconscious, including what he called his ‘‘polygamous component.’’ What began as

Jung’s experimental psychoanalytic treatment of Spielrein ended with his becoming his

own unwitting victim of the treatment. While Jung did not fall into a permanent psychotic

state, nor was he killed by Spielrein’s rage at knowing herself used and rejected by Jung,

the comparison of Jung to Dr Raglan in The Brood is, in my view, compelling. Another

woman, with less integrity, in Spielrein’s circumstance might well have sought to destroy

Jung both personally and professionally.

Thus, I would suggest that Cronenberg found in Carl and Sabina’s story an actual

historical instantiation of the gifted but flawed Doctor/Scientist/we see in many of his

films. We see the practioner’s will to knowledge and power ironically bring curse rather

than blessing not only upon the Promethean Doctor/Scientist but upon the larger world as

well. The human capacity to do harm in the pursuit of our most sacred and noble callings

such as science and technology is, I think, for Cronenberg, a significant aspect of our

cultural shadow. To encourage us to make this shadow more conscious, he has created

some of the most disturbing films in cinematic history.

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To give greater force to this need to confront shadow, Cronenberg leaves nothing to the

imagination in representing the sexual relationship between Jung and Spielrein. He rep-

resents Jung as breaking one of the fundamental ethical principles in not only psychoan-

alytic but any form of psychotherapeutic treatment, namely the absolute ethical demand

upon the therapist to abstain from any form of illicit erotic behavior with the patient,

including sexual intercourse. In doing so, at least in relationship to the sadomasochistic

scenes in the film, Cronenberg transcends what can be known historically. However, I

think he makes a plausible case that some form of erotic relationship was actually lived

between Jung and Spielrein as has been argued by Bettleheim (1983), Fisher (1984),

Silverman (1985), Loewenberg (1995) and Launer (2011).

Cronenberg represents Jung’s ambivalence about his erotic relationship with Spielrein

and astutely locates Jung’s destructiveness toward Spielrein in his deep anxiety to restore

his Doctor persona with her as well as with his professional and personal communities.

Here, he highlights Jung’s cowardly character in his brutally deceptive relationship with

Emma, his wife, his untruthfulness with Freud about the nature of his relationship with

Sabina, as well as his failure to remain faithful to the profound relationship that has

emerged between himself and Spielrein. In doing so, Jung demonstrates his failure to

assimilate the shadow material that has broken through. Ironically, the more Jung tries to

repress the shadow, in Cronenberg’s story, the sicker and more desperate he becomes. It is

only when Spielrein insists that he tell Freud the truth about the nature of their relationship

that Jung begins to take the first steps toward what ultimately became his ‘‘Descent into the

Unconscious.’’ This included his being able to live more consciously his polygamous

component by taking Toni Wolfe as his mistress with Emma Jung’s reluctant consent.

Jung’s story differs, then, from Dr. Raglan’s, because Jung had the capacity ultimately

to face and assimilate his shadow and not to be destroyed by his unconscionable behavior

with Spielrein. She, however, who may have been the greatest love of Jung’s life, tragically

and ironically was left in the shadows of both Jung and Freud. Far superior to Jung or

Freud in her will to live her life with integrity, Sabina was the woman who conjointly with

Jung discovered the conceptual center of what became Jung’s Analytical Psychology. And

typical of the patriarchal world of that day and Jung’s narcissism, Sabina Spielrein received

absolutely no credit or recognition.

It strikes me that Cronenberg’s film is, indeed, a most dangerous one. It is a dangerous

movie first because some Jungians have dismissed it altogether as pure sensationalism.

That, however, is not my view of the film. There is no doubt that Cronenberg’s cinematic

style lends itself to this critique. However, it is my argument that the film carries value

precisely because we are confronted so glaringly with the shadow of the doctor/scientist

that needs to be raised to consciousness.

The film is also dangerous for all of us who practice within the psychoanalytic tradition

and especially those of us who practice in Jung’s name. It forces us, if we will grant it the

authority I believe it deserves, to face the shadow, especially the power and utopian

shadows that lie within every psychoanalytic encounter, every theoretical construct our

movement generates and every training program we sponsor and administer.

But it is dangerous as well I would argue for those who are in need of the work of

making the unconscious conscious. In disclosing Freud, Jung and Spielrein as fully human,

even all-too-human as Nietzsche would say, the film might ironically dissuade those who

could benefit from a depth exploration of the psyche, from following such a path. Rather

suffering individuals might be more inclined to pursue the increasingly more popular and

less risky trend of short-term behaviorally and psycho-pharmacologically driven forms of

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treatment. Thus, this dangerous method as Cronenberg presents it could drive the psy-

choanalytic enterprise further to the margins of our culture.

If Cronenberg’s film were to have such an effect, he would not be surprised. But my

hope would be that he would be saddened that life in the twenty-first century is more like

the vision of life we see in his films—a vision of the human enterprise deformed and made

monstrous by the unconscious will to power, especially in science and technology rather

than enhanced and deepened by the courageous quest to face with integrity what is hidden

in the human psyche. Presumably, those of us who still believe in the value of a psy-

choanalytic presence in the world that explores the depths of what it means to be human

would share his sadness. The profession we practice is indeed a dangerous one no matter

how well analyzed and trained we may be. To embark upon the journey to the inner world

of the psyche with the purpose of healing and transformation is a deep risk for both patient

and analyst. Perhaps the more courageously the risk of this dangerous method is experi-

enced by both analyst and patient to go where it takes them, the greater the healing that

may come from the journey, however costly it may be in time, money and emotional

impact.

Discussion in Panel on ‘‘A Dangerous Movie’’

I am going to begin, in a rather unorthodox manner, by quoting myself. This is how I

started my 1985 review, in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, of Aldo Carotenuto’s 1982 A

Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud:

We stand upon the shoulders of those who have preceded us. Psychoanalysts owe a

special debt to the early pioneers who braved the swirling waters and shifting sands

of the human psyche to map out islands of safety for us to employ in our present-day

investigations. The turn-of-the century picture that emerges from this book is of

courageous (and at times foolhardy) men and women whose emotional strength and

moral fiber were severely tested by what they unleashed as they plumbed their own

and their patients’ psychic depths….They were protected from the storms their

researches activated within them by self-analyses that were all too brief and super-

ficial to provide them with more than an illusion of control over their own human

conflicts.

I indicated further in my review that Sabina apparently went through an effort to infuse

life and love into her self, her parents and her dead sister by transferentially falling in love

with Jung and engaging in the fantasy of creating a Seigfried-like baby with him that

possessed magical, life-giving properties. ‘‘When she finally abandoned this,’’ I stated,

‘‘she replaced it with an effort to connect up with Jung and with Freud as godlike, intel-

lectual fathers whom she attempted to reconcile to one another, at least intellectually, in an

effort to save psychoanalysis from destruction…[and to] rescue each of them from being

destroyed by narcissistic jealousy, ambivalence, and homosexual conflicts.’’

But the topic of today’s panel is not Carotenuto’s ground-breaking book, but a film by

David Cronenberg, derived from a stage play by Christopher Hampton which in turn

derived from a book by John Kerr, which apparently drew in large measure from Caro-

tenuto’s book—a kind of literary telephone game. A Dangerous Method is not even a

documentary. It is a drama, designed to entertain audiences. It is not a scholarly work by an

academic historian but a piece of historically based fiction in which dramatic license has

been taken that has allowed for introduction of elements which do not necessarily have any

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basis whatever in reality. Don Ferrell has pointed out some of these. This is quite common

in filmdom. Think of Lincoln, Patton, The Longest Day, Saving Private Ryan and many

others. Serious works of history, furthermore, are to a significant extent themselves works

of fiction. As Arnold Toynbee put it, ‘‘History is a record of events as told by the winners.’’

What then are we to make of Cronenberg’s film? Don has examined the film very

carefully and has extrapolated impressive conclusions and ideas from it about an early

chapter in the evolution of psychoanalysis, and, perhaps even more important, about what

it might have to say about the moral and ethical imperatives that pertain to the treatment of

people suffering from emotional disorders at the present time.

Carl Jung was a young, ambitious, recent medical school graduate when he came to the

Burgholzli in 1900, the year in which Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was

published. Eugen Bleuler, who headed the hospital, had opened up psychiatry to an interest

in the psychodynamic exploration of unconscious mental and emotional forces which

Freud was championing. Jung carried out association experiments and was delighted when

Freud was excited by them. The arrival at the Burgholzli of nineteen-year-old Sabina

Spielrein, in a floridly hysterical and perhaps even intermittently psychotic state, in August,

1904, afforded him the opportunity he had been seeking to employ Freud’s psychoanalytic

method. He did so, however, without formal training, without having undergone explo-

ration of his own mental and emotional makeup, and, I might add, with little understanding

of adolescent development (something that soon was to plague Freud in the Dora case).

Sabina was highly intelligent, shared Jung’s longing for personal achievement and fame,

and shared his interest in mysticism and his passion for Wagnerian opera. She also,

however, was nubile, exciting, reasonably attractive, and had come from a family that

included a loveless marriage between her parents, her mother having sent her away, when

she was 5 years old, so that she would not get in the way of her mother’s multiple

extramarital affairs, and a father who was extremely self-centered, was obsessed with

exploring his own inner workings, was given to violent rages, and beat his children. ‘‘Her

diary contains references to romantic myths involving an idealized, rabbinical grandfather

(Jung, of course, was the son of a Protestant minister) and to sympathy for her loveless

parents, trapped in a loveless marriage that had been arranged after each of them was

separated from a Christian loved one’’ (from my 1985 review).

What a Formula for Disaster!

Jung and Spielrein tumbled into an extended transference–countertransference and iden-

tification–counter identification enactment in which their respective, unconscious, emo-

tional conflicts and psychological problems were played out in the form of a torrid, sexual,

love affair that nearly destroyed both of them. Each of them, independently and together,

turned to Papa Freud to assist them to regain their sanity and their hold on reality, insofar

as they could do so. This is the central theme which David Cronenberg developed in his

film. I highly recommend Donald Ferrell’s lengthy review essay on the film that appeared

in the Journal of Religion and Health in 2012. I shall quote several passages from it a bit

later. In that essay, and again today, Don expresses himself as humane, compassionate, and

understanding as he addresses the emotional entanglement into which Jung and Spielrein

were drawn, unprepared for what they were getting into when they embarked on their wild

adventure into wild analysis.

At times, I have been tempted to put a plaque up in my waiting room reading ‘‘Lord

Save Us from Amateurs.’’ I know a little something about that from personal experience.

My path toward eventually becoming a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst began when I was in

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my early teens. My closest friend and I had to find a new venture when the Brooklyn

Entomological Society which he and I had formed, with the kind assistance of researchers

at the Museum of Natural History, had to be disbanded after the termites and carpenter ants

we were studying got loose and his mother evicted us from his basement. We found the

Psychology section in the library and read through it. Then, we began to do association

experiments, like Carl Jung. As good scientists, and inspired by the early Freud and Jung,

we practiced our art on each other. All went well until my friend began to associatively

spill out how beautiful and exciting his mother was and how he secretly hated his father.

That was the end of our psychology experiments and very nearly the end of our friendship.

A couple of years later, another close friend, who turned out to be very competitive and

ambivalently entangled with me emotionally, decided to pursue my interest in psychology,

but with a big step beyond me. He read The Interpretation of Dreams, and despite my

attempts to stop him, he began to analyze an acquaintance of ours in an effort to help him

overcome some phobias. That experiment ended when his amateurish analytic activity

pushed the object of his clumsy efforts into a psychosis for which he had to be hospitalized.

Don, in his essay, expresses admiration for the way Jung, Spielrein, and Freud managed,

finally, to bring the affair to an end and to restore a semblance of relative balance and

stability to everyone’s life. Cronenberg is less generous. In his film, no one comes off

looking good. But that’s show business. Shock does much better at the box office than

mere, complicated, messy, roller-coaster-like, up and down reality. Cronenberg, further-

more, apparently is a complex, emotionally tangled, very angry man, who, as Don has

informed us today, apparently has employed his creative gifts to sublimate, express and

contain his anger by transforming it into a series of disturbing but entertaining films that

have largely fallen within the horror film genre. Don’s examination of Cronenberg’s 1979

film The Brood is fascinating and heuristically valuable and informative. Incidentally, Don

has confirmed that while Cronenberg was making that film, which comes across to me, in

Don’s account of it, as extremely misogynistic, depicting women as dangerous and deadly,

he not only was going through a very nasty divorce but also was battling with his wife over

custody of their child.

But David Cronenberg is not the only one who is able to create a juicy screenplay out of

a piece of history. It seems to me that Steven Reisner has done so as well. He has seized

upon details of Freud’s longing for a father whom he might idealize the way he had been

unable to do with his own father and of his turning to Wilhelm Fliess as the analytic

transference object he needed for his self-analysis and then to Carl Jung as an alternate

transference object, as well as looking to him to be his gentile heir apparent within the

fledgling psychoanalytic movement he had founded, after the relationship with Fliess had

imploded—only to have Jung’s own ambivalent idealization of and envy of Freud and his

intensely competitive refusal to accept the role of crown prince while Freud occupied the

analytic throne, lead to rebellion and establishment of his own intellectual kingdom—the

perennial story of apostasy arising out of apotheosis—to create a dramatic scenario that

differs somewhat from Cronenberg’s.

Steve, aided by a bit of reworking of chronological events, has spun a story of intense

homosexual cross-transference between Freud and Jung that becomes the very source of

some of the most fundamental components of Freud’s theoretical ideas about psychological

structure and organization—although Freud’s ideas about universal, although individually

variable, bisexuality had arisen prior to and independently of what took place between him

and Jung. This too makes for a great story. Although, as Don Ferrell notes, Sabina

Spielrein did not contact Freud until May, 1909, after she had begun to recognize that she

had to extricate herself from her erotic relationship with Jung, Steve casts her in the role of

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a vehicle of homosexual liaison between Jung and Freud, reminiscent of The Story of O. It

certainly is so that she eventually insinuated herself into and contributed to the psycho-

analytic world and that she sought to facilitate a rapprochement between her two great

masters, but that appears to have been a later chapter in her life. And it is to her credit that

she relegated herself to a relatively minor role rather than attempting to ascend to the

heights of fame and power, particularly considering the grandiose aspirations of her youth.

I’d like to return now to the very important topic of the serious boundary violation that

occurred in Jung’s relationship with his patient Sabina. What makes it important is that

such breaches of ethical and moral propriety continue to occur, and not only with therapists

who, like Carl Jung, have lacked the benefit of adequate training and personal analysis. It is

imperative that we look at, discuss, and reflect on this phenomenon—as we are doing this

afternoon. Don states in his essay that: ‘‘Out of this early experiment came the knowledge

that the psychoanalyst must fully explore his or her own unconscious material before he or

she can presume to heal the patient, and still the enterprise, by its very nature, is always a

risky adventure.’’ And it is not only the psychoanalyst who is in danger of falling prey to

the temptation to take advantage of a (usually) younger person who is made vulnerable to

being misused by readiness to idealize, glorify and/or look to a person in authority to fulfill

unrequited longings and aspirations. This is a risk for all therapists, as well as for doctors,

clergymen, professors and others whose position and stature present an appeal to young

people, and sometimes older ones, who come to them for assistance.

Jung was not simply naıve. He was a troubled human being. At the same time that we

can empathize with him, having emotional problems and human failings does not excuse

his behavior. Don, in his essay, indicates that the data ‘‘point toward a deep disturbance

within his own psyche, in which he is looking for the all-loving, all nurturing mother/

analyst who will mirror him perfectly as a self-object…without taking from him anything

for herself’’ (italics added). A bit further on, Don states that: ‘‘One is left with the uneasy

knowledge that what ultimately mattered for Jung were his own work and his own pre-

eminent position.’’ This epitomizes the kind of self-centered, narcissistic entitlement that

can dispose someone working with vulnerable individuals to misuse them in his or her own

interest and to their detriment. I have stated that Don comes across as understanding and

generous in his appraisal of Jung’s having fallen into reckless misuse of the power afforded

him by his relationship with young Sabina Spielrein. But perhaps he has been overly

generous. He states: ‘‘In the end, as he rightly acknowledges, Jung was unworthy of

Sabina’s love. [But] Perhaps the extraordinary discoveries they made together, for which,

until recently, Jung has gotten all the credit, compensate for his moral and ethical betrayal

of that love—though I suspect many would argue with that conclusion.’’ I am one of that

many. Sabina Spielrein returned to Russia, where she courageously practiced and promoted

the cause of psychodynamic therapy despite vigorous Stalinist opposition. When the Nazis

invaded Russia, as Don Ferrell observes, ‘‘Sabina and her two daughters were murdered as

Jews in a ravine outside Rostov-on-Don by one of the Nazi killing units.’’ She does not

have the capacity to speak to us about what Jung did. But there is someone who can speak

for her. Let me read to you the words of Joyce Maynard, in the New York Times, September

15, 2013, in response to another film, ‘‘Salinger,’’ about a similar experience.

In the 50 years since J. D. Salinger removed himself from the public eye and stopped

publishing, he has been viewed—more accurately, worshipped—as the human

embodiment of purity, a welcome antidote to phoniness. To many he was a kind of god.

Now comes the word… that over the years…he was carrying on relationships with

young women 15, and in my case, 35 years younger than he…Nine months after I

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arrived at Yale, having published a story that gathered Salinger’s attention, I received

a letter from him. Then many more.

Within months I left school to live with Salinger…Salinger wasn’t simply brilliant,

funny, wise; he burrowed into one’s brain…It is the quiet acceptance, apparently

alive and well in our culture, of the notion that genius justifies cruel or abusive

treatment of those who serve the artist and his art.

But we are talking about what happens when people in positions of power…use their

power to lure much younger people into sexual and (in the case of Salinger) emo-

tional relationships…And when they are done with the person they’ve drawn toward

them, it can take that person years or decades to recover.

Sadly, this is not an uncommon story…It seems the myth survives in our culture still

that a young girl’s worth, measured against that of a great man, may be of lesser

consequence. As the mother of a daughter myself I would say rather that a man who

treats those offering up their love and trust as expendable is lesser himself for having

done so.

There is art, and there are artists. Let’s not confuse the two.

I have one final comment. Don addresses the question of whether ‘‘A Dangerous

Method’’ is a dangerous movie. I don’t agree with his pessimistic view that it is dangerous.

On the contrary! Psychoanalytic treatment—and its derivative, psychodynamic psycho-

therapy—is invaluable! They can be life-saving and life-building! But they are arduous,

expensive, demanding endeavors. The people who utilize our services are quite special.

They are likely to be well aware that ‘‘A Dangerous Method’’ is only a movie. It is fiction.

And the historical events from which it draws occurred over a hundred years ago, at the

very dawn of psychoanalysis, when the people developing it knew hardly anything and

were just learning—the hard way—how to do it.

I had a friend who was in advertising. One day I complained to him about a TV

commercial which I had found particularly annoying and offensive. He listened patiently as

I vented my spleen. Then, he nodded and said, ‘‘That was a good commercial!’’ Flab-

bergasted, I asked him to explain. ‘‘You remembered the name of the product,’’ he said.

‘‘We don’t care if you love our commercial or hate it. All we care about is that you

remember the name of the product.’’ Well, we have a good product.

References

Beard, W. (2006). The artist as monster. The cinema of David Cronenberg. Toronto: University of TorontoPress.

Bettleheim, B. (1983). Scandal in the family. The new review of books.Carotenuto, A. (1982). A secret symmetry. Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud. New York: Pantheon.Cavalli, A., Hawkins, L., & Stevns, M. (Eds.). (2014). Transformation. Jung’s legacy and clinical work

today. London: Karnac Books Ltd.Clark, I. (Ed.). (2001). Psychosis and spirituality. Exploring the new frontier. London and Philadelphia:

Whurr Publishers.Cronenberg, D. (1992). In C. Rodley (ed.), Cronenberg on Cronenberg. London: Faber and Faber Ltd.Ferrell, D. R. (2012). A dangerous method, a film directed by David Cronenberg: An extended review. The

Journal of Religion and Health. New York: Springer.Fisher, D. J. (1984). The analytic triangle. Boston, MA: Partisan Review.Launer, J. (2011). Sex versus survival. The story of Sabina Spielrein: Her life, her Ideas, her genius. ISBN:

978-1-4709-7287-5.Loewenberg, P. (1995). The creation of a scientific community: The Burgholzli, 1902–1914. Oxford & New

York: Oxford University Press.

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Neuman, E. (1972). Depth psychology and a new ethic. New York: Harper & Row Inc.Silverman, M. A. (1985). Review of a secret symmetry. Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud.

A. Carotenuto (ed.). Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.Whitmont, E. C. (1979). The symbolic quest. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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A Dangerous Movie? Hollywood Does Psychoanalysis

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