A Dangerous Method (2012)

This movie is proof of what I always say about psychiatry--that truth is stranger than fiction.  A story that you would not believe if you read it can come tumbling out of the mouths of patients.

The main man here is Carl Jung (aptly played by Michael Fassbender, who bears a reasonable resemblance to the man himself) and the setting is Switzerland. Jung is working in a psychiatric hospital, treating hysterical women with talking therapy.  In comes Sabina Speilrein (Keira Knightly plays hysteria beautifully--she must have spent some time looking over Charcot's collection of photographs).  She is a Russian Jew who once she shares the darkest secret of her shame, she manages to go forward into the world successfully.

 Her shame?  Spanking turns her on.  Her father stripped her naked and spanked her.  Repeatedly.  It probably turned him on--there is a sexual aspect of violence.  He probably told himself that he was doing it for her own good, but really he was doing it because it felt good.  For him.  So, she is sexually inexperienced and ashamed of what gets her hot.  Not a good combination in repressed Victorian Europe.  But Jung lets her know that he finds this completely unremarkable.  She gets better--and then she beds him.

Freud (Viggo Mortensen) enters Jung's life between time that Sabina is the patient and when she is the mistress.  They talk frequently about the transference that occurs between patient and doctor, and Freud is disapproving of anything coming of that--the love of a patient for the doctor is a false love, dangerous to the patient.  It is Otto Gross, a man credited with being the grandfather of the Counterculture movement almost a century later, a drug addict and a sex addict, who convinces Jung to act upon his desires with Sabina.  Otto senses that still waters run deep in Jung, that his wife is not a good erotic match for him, and he points out that Freud is probably so down on the idea because he is not getting enough sex.  And who wouldn't want to romp in the bedroom with the lovely Keira Knightly, experimenting with who knows what along the way?  The film plays this out to the end, which doesn't go all that well, but it is well acted and the film largely doesn't play fast and loose with the historical facts.