Sigmund Freud Personality Theory

Jung Love: Sabina Spielrein, a forgotten pioneer of psychoanalysis

Their game-changing theories and turbulent friendship is the stuff of great drama. But David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method, which premieres at the Venice Film Festival next week, encompasses a third figure: a young woman whom Jung first analysed then became passionately involved with, whom the two men wrote to and about for years, and who inspired some of their most important ideas.

Her hospital records note that the 'patient laughs and cries in a strangely mixed, compulsive manner. Masses of tics; she rotates her head jerkily, sticks out her tongue, twitches her legs… Cannot stand people or noise.’ The notes are written by a newly qualified Dr Jung. He diagnosed her 'hysteric’.

Ambitious and eager to join the race to uncover the mysteries of the mind, Jung decided to try out a new technique on her, one he’d read about in a book by a Viennese neurologist called Sigmund Freud. This was psychoanalysis, later dubbed the 'talking cure’ – the dangerous method of the film’s title.

Jung was particularly keen on the 'word-association experiment’: a series of random words were fired at the patient, who had to respond with the first thing that came to mind. Jung noticed that mentions of the girl’s father provoked 'grimaces and gestures of abhorrence’.

Gradually, an extraordinary family portrait emerged. Spielrein’s mother, Jung discovered, 'has the odd habit of buying everything she sees’. She then 'has to borrow from relatives’ and 'there is constant anxiety that the father might find out about this’.

According to John Kerr, the author of A Most Dangerous Method, on which Cronenberg’s film is based, she also 'competed with her adolescent daughter for the attentions of various men’. Spielrein’s father, meanwhile 'insults and tyrannises’ the family, frequently going 'wild and threatening suicide’. Spielrein is 'always afraid that he will kill himself’.

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