The best movie you've never seen: Jung, Freud, and the birth of psychology

A Dangerous Method is intellectual drama like nothing else you've seen. In this movie ideas are heroes and villains, the characters as well as the plot itself. Freud and Jung go on long walks, create and destroy a friendship, and try to work out the logic of the human psyche.

Fassbender plays a brooding, profound Carl Jung with a gift for great comebacks. Many of Jung's iconic lines find expression in dramatic scenes. You get a sense that Jung was burdened by his visions. Ideas did not float into his brain like feathers, but hijacked him like fevers

For Freud life is less an adventure to go on, and more a terrible bargain to be understood and accepted anyway. He swears by reason, the scientific approach, and modest aims.

"Psychic health" is for realists only.

For Jung, the "real" world is full of forces bigger than us, trying to communicate via dreams, coincidences, and art. A thing does not have to be coherent to the scientific mind to exist - the horizon exists whether a puny scale can measure it or not.

Jung expresses his anger at Freud's narrow mindedness, irrational trust in science, and general aversion to non-materialist explanations of the world:

In "A Dangerous Method," everything is deeper. It's heartbreak is more profound, its conversations more kaleidoscopic than any podcast, its speed both faster and slower than modern life. Yes, it's "just a" movie, but it also hints at a age when everything had more weight.

It takes what it takes. The length of the lap is the length of the lap. The pain is the price of entry.

"Only the wounded physician can hope to heal." - Carl Jung.

Enjoyed this film review? You will love my analysis of Fight Club!

Follow me for more such writing!