A DANGEROUS METHOD

Shedding Light On Sexual Desire In Therapy 

 

A Dangerous Method (2011)  

Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender (shown above)

David Cronenberg’s film, ‘A Dangerous Method’, helps us understand the complicated role sex can play in hysteria and therapy – which is not about adult sexual desire at all.  What happened in Jung’s treatment of Sabina Spielrein?  And, how did sex become a part of it?

Sabina’s trauma, abuse by her father, is at the heart of her symptoms and her desire. She is not only terrified, but, confused and ashamed.  We see these feelings clearly when Keira Knightley’s Sabina arrives at Burgholzli Clinic, in out-of-control anguish. Jung (Michael Fassbender) introduces himself as her doctor and says they will talk most days - just talk - and try to understand what troubles her.  This is the task of any good therapy. 

For Sabina, like many patients, trust is hard to come by; but the treatment begins well with Jung’s thoughtful understanding. Sabina, with great difficulty, admits that “any type of humiliation” excites her.  Her confusing relationship with her father made love, sexual excitement, and humiliating punishment interchangeable.  Sabina takes a risk to tell Jung her shameful feelings – and, he, unexpectedly, announces he is going away. 

Jung’s leaving, especially right after Sabina opens up, is no simple matter. In Sabina’s disturbed mind, she takes this sudden separation as rejection; confirmation of her “vile and hopeless” nature.  Who, then, is Jung?  Her punisher?  Her father?  When Jung beats the dirt from her discarded coat (as she feels he’s just discarded her), Sabina runs in panic from her excited; jealous longings. The unconventional framework of the therapy – working together, boating; sharing common interests – doesn’t keep Sabina’s fantasies properly contained or understood.  

What Jung fails to see, in Sabina’s desire and attempts to win him over, is the real cause of her hysteria: her frightening, desperate, and sexualized longings – for her father (not Jung) to love her.  Jung does not understand that Sabina turned the beatings - which made her feel despicable – into something ‘exciting’ instead.  ‘The sex’ in Sabina’s hysteria – is the sex of insecure love; a frantic, jealous, and possessive plea to stop any rival from making her feel unlovable.

What did Sabina really need from Jung?  She needed his kind and truthful understanding of her wish to be lovers to escape awful feelings of badness and despair.  She needed him to weather the storms of hurt and rage.  If Jung had kept his footing, he could have talked to Sabina about how she translated his refusal into rejection.  Helped her understand that she misconstrued his being her doctor, not her lover, to mean he loathed her.  By talking to her, he might have dispelled her anguished fantasy that he chose and loved someone better. These are reasonable  – and, I would emphasize, loving – things for an analyst to talk directly about.

Patients should be safe to have any feelings in therapy – even sexual ones.  It’s an analyst’s job to make sense of things – not letting their own needs or fantasies get in the way.  Psychoanalysis is the best therapy for traumatized patients to work out feelings of worthlessness and jealous longings for an old unrequited love of a parent.  But, if, like Jung, an analyst loses his objectivity and replays the original trauma – that is the danger in the method.