‘Nice story’, Freud says when Jung gives him an account of a patient’s pathology. The tone is amused, but a sense of shock lingers, an ironically disguised disapproval of everything the master learns about transgressive behaviour. Jung is shocked too, but also excited. But then the patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a horse-drawn coach (the date is 1904) and being delivered to a posh sanatorium in Switzerland. She goes rigid when she tries to talk, can’t at first get her words out, but finally tells her story to the kindly Jung. Her father used to beat her when she was a small child and … she liked it. It’s early days in the plot – it doesn’t end until 1913, with war on the horizon and intimations of the extermination of Jews – but the film begins to get a little lost around here.

LRB 8 March 2012 | PDF Download