Over and again [here] I link existential philosophy to dasein and dasein to the complexities of human psychology. But I don’t pretend to grasp all the complex ways in which the “professionals” go about understanding it “out in the world”.
I like this film in part because I am always attracted to movies in which the “action” revolves around an exchange of intellectual narratives. In particular, those grounded at least in part in the actual behaviors of human “subjects”. And let’s face it, sexuality is everywhere.
Does “psych-o-analysis” work here? Sure, for some. But, obviously, not for others.
In some respects this is a film about men trying to rationalize sex. In both a psychoanalytic and a philosophical sense. But it is perspective largely set apart from, say, pregnancy. Or STDs. Or socialization. Or politics. Especially back then.
That stuff just doesn’t seem to come up.
IMDb:
“Otto Hans Adolf Gross was an early disciple of Sigmund Freud who became an anarchist. Carl Jung said his worldview changed when he attempted to analyze Gross and had the tables turned on him. Gross was ostracized by the psychoanalytic movement and not included in histories of the psychoanalytic and psychiatric establishments. He died of pneumonia in Berlin on 13 February 1920, after being found in the street, near-starved and freezing.”
A DANGEROUS METHOD
Directed by David Cronenberg
[b]Jung: Now. Have you any idea what may have brought on these attacks you suffer from?
Sabina [contorted, struggling to answer]: Humiliation.
…
Emma: Perhaps she’s the one.
Jung: What one?
Emma: The one you’ve been looking for. For your experimental treatment. The talking cure.
…
Jung [of his military service]: It’s a complete waste of my time. Writing prescriptions for athlete’s foot and examining cocks from morning to night.
Emma: Is that what you do?
…
Jung: Tell me about the first time you can remember being beaten by your father.
Sabina: I suppose I was about four… I broke a plate… or… yes… and he told me to go in the little room and… take my clothes off. Then he came in and spanked me. I was so frightened, I wet myself, so he hit me again and again.
…
Jung: And after that first time, he beat you a lot?
Sabina: Oh, yes… yes… and when he was away, my mother beat me… but that wasn’t at all… it wasn’t the same as…
Jung: That first time, how did you feel about what was happening?
Sabina [after a long silence, scarcely audible]: I liked it.
Jung: Would you repeat that, please? I couldn’t quite hear.
Sabina: I liked it. It excited me.
Jung: And did you continue to like it?
Sabina [after a long groan]: Yes… yes… before long he only had to say to me to go to the little room and I would start to get wet…
…
Sabina: Whenever he beat one of my brothers - or even just threatened - that was enough…I’d have to go and lie down and touch myself…later, at school, anything would set it off…any kind of humiliation…I looked for any humiliation…even here… when you hit my coat with your stick, I had to come back right away… I was so excited. There’s no hope for me. I’m vile and filthy and corrupt. I must never be let out of here.[/b]
This is totally alien to me. What am I supposed to make of a reaction that seems so bizarre?
[b]Jung: Perhaps the terms themselves should be reviewed: if, for instance, we could come up with some milder term than ‘libido’, we might not encounter such emotional resistance, it would make the teaching side of things much easier…
Freud: Is euphemism a good idea? Once they work out what we actually mean, they’ll be just as appalled as ever.
Jung: I take your point, but I still think it’s worth trying to sweeten the pill when it comes to questions of sexuality…
…
Jung: …we continue to unearth new material: for example, the extraordinary procedure she devised as a small child, where she would sit on one heel, attempt to defecate and, at the same time, try to prevent herself from defecating. She said this gave rise to the most blissful feelings.
Freud: A nice story. Those of my patients who remain fixated at the anal stage of their erotic development often come up with the most amusing details. And of course all of them are finicky, compulsively tidy, stubborn and extremely stingy with money. No doubt your Russian conforms to this pattern.
Jung: Well, no: she doesn’t.
[Freud frowns: he puffs at his cigar, evidently somewhat put off].
Jung: The masochistic aspects of her condition are much more deeply rooted than any anal fixations we may have uncovered.
Freud: Well, perhaps it’s a Russian thing.
…
Jung: But might the objections of the medical establishment and the general public not be caused by your insistence on the exclusively sexual interpretation of the clinical material?
Freud: All I’m doing is pointing out what experience indicates to me must be the truth… And I can assure you that in a hundred years’ time our work will still be rejected. Columbus, you know, had no idea what county he’d discovered; like him, I’m in the dark: all I know is that I’ve set foot on the shore and the country exists.
…
Freud: This log in your dream.
Jung: Yes?
Freud: I think perhaps you should entertain the possibility that it represents your penis.
…
Freud: Of course, there’s the added difficulty, more ammunition for our enemies, that all of us here in Vienna, in our psychoanalytical circle, are Jews.
Jung: I don’t see what difference that makes.
Freud: That, if I may say so, is an exquisitely Protestant remark.
…
Jung: I tried to tackle him about his obsession with sexuality, his insistence on interpreting every symptom in sexual terms, but he’s completely inflexible…There must be more than one hinge into the universe.
…
Jung: So you’re not a believer in monogamy?
Gross: For a neurotic like myself, I can’t possibly imagine a more stressful concept.
Jung: And you don’t find it necessary or desirable to exercise some restraint, as a contribution, say, to the smooth functioning of civilisation?
Gross: What, and make myself ill?
Jung: I should have thought that some form of sexual repression would have to be practised in any rational society.
Gross: No wonder the hospitals are bulging at the seams.
…
Jung: You think Freud’s right? You think all neurosis is of exclusively sexual origin?
Gross: I think Freud’s obsession with sex probably has a great deal to do with the fact that he never gets any.
Jung: You could be right.
…
Gross: If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my short life, it’s this: never repress anything.
…
Gross: It seems to me the measure of the true perversity of the human race, that one of its very few reliably pleasurable activities should be the subject of so much hysteria and repression.
…
Sabina: It’s clear that the subject I’m studying is entirely grounded in sexuality. So naturally I’m becoming more and more acutely aware of the fact that I have no sexual experience.[/b]
She then kisses Jung full on the mouth. Uh, oh.
[b]Jung: I knew that was going to happen.
Freud: What?
Jung: I felt something like that was going to happen. I had a kind of burning in my stomach.
Freud: What are you talking about? It’s the heating, the wood in the bookcase just cracked, that’s all.
Jung: No, it’s what’s known as a catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon.
Freud: A what?
Jung: A catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon.
Freud: Don’t be ridiculous.
…
Freud: I’ve fought against the idea for some time, but I suppose there must be some kind of indissoluble link between sex and death. I don’t feel the relationship between the two is quite as you’ve portrayed it, but I’m most grateful to you for animating the subject in such a stimulating way. The only slight shock was your introduction, at the very end of your paper, of the name of Christ.
Sabina: Are you completely opposed to any kind of religious dimension in our field?
Freud: In general, I don’t care if a man believes in Rama, Marx or Aphrodite, as long as he keeps it out of the consulting room.
…
Sabina: Is that what’s at the bottom of your dispute with Dr. Jung?
Freud: I have no dispute with Dr. Jung. I was simply mistaken about him. I thought he was going to be able to carry our work forward, after I was gone; I didn’t bargain for all that second-rate mysticism and self-aggrandising shamanism.
Sabina: He’s trying to find some way forward,so that we don’t just have to tell our patients, this is why you are the way you are; he wants to be able to say, we can show you what you might want to become.
Freud: Playing God, in other words. We have no right to do that. The world is as it is: understanding and accepting that is the way to psychic health. What good can we do if our aim is simply to replace one delusion with another?
…
Freud [fainting, pitching forward, ricocheting off the table and ending in a heap on the floor]: How sweet it must be to die…[/b]
In the interim he and Jung engage in a vitriolic exchange of letters abominating each other in the intellectual equivalent of a pissing contest. What Tom Wolfe [among others no doubt] once described as the Male Battle.
Jung [to Sabina]: What he’ll never accept is that what we understand has got us nowhere. We have to go into uncharted territory. We have to go back, to the sources of everything we believe. I don’t just want to open a door and show the patient his illness, squatting there like a toad. I want to find a way to help the patient reinvent himself, to send him off on a journey, at the end of which is waiting the person he was always intended to be.
With respect to this, I’ve got to swing more in the direction of Freud.
[b]Afterword
Otto Gross starved to death in Berlin in 1919.
Sigmund Freud was driven out of Vienna by the Nazis and died of cancer in London in 1939.
Sabina Spielrein returned to Russia, trained a number of the most distinguished analysts of the new Soviet Union and finally returned to practise medicine in her native town, Rostov-on-Don. In 1941, by now a widow, she and her two daughters were taken by Nazi occupying forces to a local synagogue and shot.
Carl Gustav Jung suffered a prolonged nervous breakdown during the First World War, from which he emerged to become, eventually, the world’s leading psychologist. He outlived his wife, EMMA, and his mistress, TONI WOLFF, and died peacefully in 1961.[/b]
