Jung and Freud Love Triangle The Dangerous Method

On this highly controversial play and film about the emerging talents of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud in their pursuit of unconscious meaning and therapy through the psychoanalytic processes.

Jung was a highly complex man and any attempt to simplify his experience will inevitably deliver the interpolating agency into the hands of the opposites. We will see this film and observe the persona of a young and ambitious physician in the process of becoming world famous, but it is only half the story. There are two Jungs and it is inevitable that any contemporary exposition about the younger Jung, for the sake of completeness, will have to glimpse into the future of this unusual man's life and portray the older Jung, the evolution of which, really did not blossom until he had withdrawn his Old Wise Man archetypal projection from Freud. To begin to understand this second Jung, we must first look at The Red Book. It is Jung's mystery and his myth, (at least up until his embolism in 1944, when, according to his account, his soul entered the repository anew). This book is a mystical confession of the unconscious that is so obscure in its mythological origins that Jung suppressed its publication completely, for fear it would undermine his credibility as a physician and scientist. Jung's unprecedented confrontation with the unconscious, as is detailed by the Red Book, cast a completely different picture of the man from his public persona, as it details his work with the raw psychical objects, not only of his own personal Shadow Complex, but also with The Objective Shadow Complex. Later contemporaries talked about Jung's charisma. Jung would have used the term: manna personality. This manna is the numinous effect of Jung's plunge into the depths of the unconscious and it would be wise for us to bear this in mind when we observe the portrayal of Jung in the film. Any relations that Jung undertook prior to his integration of the psychical objects of the Red Book would inevitably have been laden with these latent contents. Only those that have trod this path would know of the intensity these unconscious objects would cast upon personal relations. Jungs susceptibility therefore to particular relations with female patients could be explained in terms of a highly dynamic Anima transference. No less is his relation with Freud, where Jung's Old Wise Man archetypal complex would have also have been involved in the highly intense transference that inevitably arose between these two giants. That a woman patient formed an apex to a triangular relation between these men should be no surprise to anyone who has practised psychotherapy, or has insight into the ways of the soul. We should also not overlook the stature of the woman involved and some of the remarkable things she achieved. To write these relations off as sexual dalliance is prurient nonsense, these people were working at the boundaries of the unconscious, where morality is found side by side with its opposite. It is remarkable though that Cronenberg, with all his experience of dramatic intensity and horror did not suspect that a highly repressed homosexual content involving the two great men and its subsequent inversion on to the female patient was probably at the basis this dramatic encounter. Jung, even then in his life, was not about exclusion, modern correctness or repression. He made mistakes and he paid the price for it, but ultimately he was an exponent of the integrated soul and under those circumstances, as he was soon to become aware - plunging ever deeper into the psychi, anything could happen.

We should therefore bear in mind that it was not only Jung's undoubted therapeutic skill that effected so many of his cures, it was also his numinous capacity as a healer. This is an unknown land for those caught within the thought and language of modern therapeutic medicine, but for those involved in the dangerous method, (as the playwright chooses to call it); it is the only way forward. Analysis involves absolute commitment from the analyst to the patient it ties the participants together as no other bond can, transcending family and friendship in the most honest exchange that man can achieve, except with the daemon of his own mythology. Jung described the process as a transference that should be as challenging to the analyst as to the patient. There are no safety nets in real life, and it is an illusion for people to think otherwise. Despite all the propaganda, peddled by the state and the media to the contrary, the world remains an unpredictable and dangerous place. This condition of mankind, the will of God apart, is precipitated by the state of mans own unconsciousness. Jung set out to remedy this for those individuals that were directed into his path with the greatest of sincerity and integrity possible. It is almost impossible for contemporary people to understand the implication of Jungs life and work, for he not only knew the secrets of the soul, he also came to know the secrets of the Gods. Jung stands out head and shoulders in this department of reality and alone was able to relativise God into a function of the same reality we all share. He saw the godhead in a dimension of reality like unto to the wind, the rain and the stars under which we all dwell. Jung described God as psychical phenomenology, a phrase that will ring out for generations yet to come, if not for this. And so, with this timely film, we must rely on the power of the unconscious to guide the intuition of Cronenberg and his actors to deliver a viable record, perhaps despite themselves. It is of course wrapped up in a modern perspective, after all it is an exposition of mans unfolding myth, but the one thing that is certain, and Jung knew this more than anyone, is that the Mercurius Duplex archetype will have its way with any artist or film-maker treading upon this ground, just as it does transforming all human lives. Jung's mythological personality foresaw our current disasters, just as it anticipated the sea of blood that engulfed Europe during the 1914-18 World War and if we look to the turmoil that has surrounded human experience on our planet since 9/11, where war, famine and disaster strike almost every month, it is clear that Jung's latter-day invocation in his book Answer To Job, about the eleventh sign: Aquarius sets aflame Lucifer's harsh forces, should not be disregarded as a program for human life, now and into the future - or at least while mankind is in transition to a more conscious and spiritual state. Something, Jung wished and eternally strove for all his life. R.C - 5.12.2012