Day 82: A Dangerous Method

Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Gustav Jung (Michael Fassbender) are drawn together due to their interest in psychoanalysis. Freud hopes that Jung will take over after he is gone as he believes they share a common understanding about its practice, but irreparable problems occur when Jung wants to go beyond simply discovering mental health issues and wants to try and help people. Throughout their relationship, Jung has a monumentally inappropriate relationship with one of his patients, Sabrina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), which creates additional problems for his relationship with Freud.

Monumentally inappropriate relationship, man alive. She comes to you for help with her issues concerning her sexuality and you help her, but then you have sex with her. And during the sex you actually use what she tells you in the therapy sessions. Dude, just, no. She likes being spanked and it stems from the humiliation she felt at the hands of her abusive father, which she secretly enjoyed. While I’m totally on board with spanking, and humiliation has its place when done in a healthy and consensual way, I absolutely have a problem with him using his knowledge of her mental health history for sexual gratification. Anyway, if that wasn’t all bad enough, he then tries to break it off with her because he doesn’t want to cheat on his wife (don’t even get me started on that noise). Then later they start it up again and then he breaks it off again. You can’t be dragging her along with your problems, especially when you know she is besotted with you and is fragile in that respect. To her credit, she ends up becoming the psychologist that she wanted to become and tries to move on from him. She seems to have been doing better than him, anyway.

While I’m not really a Freud fan, I do have to side with him over Jung with one important point. Freud believed that all you should seek to do is understand the person and their mental health issues, not try to fix them. While Jung believed that just simply pointing out what is wrong with a person shouldn’t be the goal, it should be about trying to help them become who they see themselves to be. For me, the reason I want to do psychology has never been because I want to ‘help people’. That’s not to say that I would pass up that opportunity if it presented itself, I would obviously do my very best to help in any way I could. But primarily, my main interest is in understanding the many facets of the human mind and accepting them all as natural variations. People are so often quick to slap a label on someone and say that this is how they are a deviant of the norm. There is no norm, I think. And I want to hear about and try my best to understand the experience of everyone, with no judgement.

The film itself was alright, I wasn’t especially taken with it. I was expecting it to be better than it was so that’s my own fault, really. I’m not a fan of Keira Knightley but I suppose she wasn’t terrible here. Michael Fassbender’s face is equal parts kindness and danger. You confuse me, Sir.

"Never repress anything."

6/10