I Watched This: A Dangerous Method

Of all the experts on sex in A Dangerous Method, I'm siding with some guy named Otto Gross (Vincent Cassell). Like Freud and Jung, Gross is an analyst. But unlike them, Gross has no compunctions about mixing business with a lot of pleasure. Gross has sex with his patients and is galled that his dad doesn’t approve of the half-dozen kids with a bunch of different women. We first meet Gross as he looks up at Jung's hospital where, at Freud's urging, he (Gross) is going to spend some time as a patient. His hair looks three-days removed from its last wash and his beard looks three-days removed from its last shave. He taps cocaine from a vial on to his finger, snorts, then rubs his gums. At least his teeth get regular cleaning. Cassell is his French-punk self, a shit-disturber in black turtleneck and black blazer. "Strange how one of life's most pleasurable activities," he tells Jung, "is such a source of hysteria and repression." Strong arguments he makes (“Never repress anything”), and Jung, a girl he wants to make his mistress on his mind, can only so conveniently agree.

It's 1912 or so and Carl Gustav Jung (Michael Fassbender) is a psychoanalyst on the rise. Like everyone in the field, he works in the shadow of that giant, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson). Jung's eager to try out Freud's theory of the 'talking cure' and he seems to have found the perfect patient in Sabina Speilrein (Keira Knightley), a troubled Russian rich girl. She kicks and slaps at the windows of the horsedrawn during the ride to the hospital, giggles as a half-dozen men carry her through the entrance. But she's also responsive to Jung's therapy. "A hand, my father's hand," she replies when Jung asks about an image in her mind during a pregnant pause.

When Jung eventually meets Freud and they discuss the case, the two men bond, mentor and protégé, father- and son-figure. Sabina is a virgin they agree. They discuss patients who have anal-fixations (“They’re typically stingy with money”). Jung describes a dream he has had of a slowed-down horse and Freud, cigar clenched in the side of his mouth, explains that the dream represents Jung's fear that his family-life will slow-down his professional-life. Oh, that and there's some sexual repression Jung has to work-out. Thing is, Jung’s wife is a bit of a cold-fish and she's too busy having his kids. Cured of her hysteria and studying to be an analyst herself, Sabina conveniently offers to fuck the shit out of Jung. That father's hand? She liked when it spanked her and would like more, please. Jung diagnoses and he has just the cure for all that.

It's a curious thing that, even as Sabina is tied wrists to bedpost and grunts with each slap, Jung never even removes his shirt. He might have unbuttoned a bit. His hair is always an immaculate side-part. His expression, here, isn't much different from when he tends to his other patients. He's as professional during spankings as he is taking notes as his nurses bathe a nympho. "With me," Sabina tells him, "I want you to be ferocious." They have the same calling. They both love Wagner. He is her doctor and she is his patient and they both know about transference. So there's a reasonable story behind their affair. Reason, we get tons, passion we get none. How unmoving and unmoved Jung is in his sexual awakening. In Shame, Fassbender displayed such a range of emotion in his portrayal of a man incapable of love and sympathy. There was the anguish as he tried to ignore the sounds of his sister and his boss as they moaned in the next room. There was the heat in that stare he gave the married woman on the subway. Here, though, he's a limited to a portrayal of a cold fish in a cold era. Sure, at some points Jung's unwavering earnestness regarding sex provides some humor. For instance, there's the scene in Freud's dining room, Jung piling his plate with meatloaf as he discusses, loudly, the term 'libido'. Too harsh a term, he suggests to Freud. The camera cuts to the rest of the dining table and Freud's children listening and waiting patiently for their turn at the food. “Don’t feel you need to restrain yourself in my home,” Freud says.

The relationship and falling-out between Jung and Freud is the other central relationship and it’s just as cold. Initially, like any son regarding his father, Jung subscribes wholly to Freud's thinking. "I have to be careful," Jung tells Sabina after his first meeting with Freud. "He's so convincing." Eventually, Jung finds Freud too obsessed with sex and diagnosis and not obsessed enough with trying to help patients re-invent themselves. On the other hand, Freud disapproves both of Jung adding some soft-science to his psychoanalysis and of his (Jung's) relationship with Sabina. "Help him," Jung's wife tells Sabina, "he hasn't recovered since the falling out with Freud."

However, their relationship never feels organic and we never understand what Jung needs to recover from. At their first meeting, Freud points out that they've been talking for thirteen hours straight, but, other than niceties -- Freud calls Jung "my young colleague" -- there's no music or warmth to their banter. Their eventual falling-out feels constructed, too. There are one-off mentions of Jung's wealth and Freud's semi-poverty, of Jung's whiteness and Freud's Jew-ness. Freud interprets one of Jung's dreams to mean that Jung wants Freud dead in one-way or another. They board a ship to America as friends, spend time there off-screen, and return to Europe as rivals.

There are challenges in trying to make an interesting movie about people being all clinical about sex. There are opportunities, too, in portraying a time when the idea that sex isn't only about reproducing was a new one. There is a nice sequence when Jung prepares his wife for an experiment. He moistens two panels with a sponge, which squishes against the brass, before placing her hands on them. His pocketwatch ticks loudly as he times her answers to a word-association, more ticks between certain words. Sex : male. Child : soon. His wife is a good sport, a much more obedient patient than Otto Gross. She can sit still, but he can't. There`s a mania to him that recalls Goldblum all sugar-highed in The Fly and Irons in Dead Ringers. At one point, Gross seduces one of the nurses. She leans against a ladder as he stands behind her and squeezes her breasts. He has pants and suspenders on, but no shirt. If only he`d taught Jung, too, about the importance of bare-chests during sex.