BEFORE: I picked up my pain meds yesterday, and after reading the long list of possible side effects (including dizziness, nausea, confusion, shortness of breath, unusual sweating, unexplained weight gain, chest/arm pain, and swelling of the hands and ankles) I've decided to try and take just one per day, instead of two. The warning of possible bad reactions (also including stomach pain, intestinal bleeding, mood swings, and I swear this is true - vomit that looks like coffee grounds) makes me wonder if it's not preferable to just deal with the pain. (Do not operate heavy machinery, do not lie down within 10 minutes of taking this medication, avoid exposure to direct sunlight, and if symptoms persist, please contact your doctor.) I'm walking a little better, but at what cost?
Michael Fassbender carries over from "Jane Eyre", and so does - well, something related to that plot point that I didn't want to mention last night. But that 2nd thing wasn't planned.
THE PLOT: A look at how the intense relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud gave birth to psychoanalysis.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Kinsey" (Movie #885), "Hysteria" (Movie #1,117)
AFTER: You might think this would be a very dry subject, lots of therapy sessions, dream analysis, and drawn-out conversations between two of the brilliant minds behind modern psychiatry. There is some of that, but really, sex is what sells movie tickets. And wasn't that Freud's point?
I'm more familiar with the theories of Freud than that of his counterpart, Jung. From what I remember from college Psych class, he liked dividing things into threes - the id, the ego and the superego, for example. He also thought that people pass through three stages of development - the oral, the anal and the genital. This was based on a complex study of human behavior, namely he noticed that after we're born we learn to eat, then get potty-trained, and eventually learn how to have sex. (Well, some of us do - others just write papers about it.)
But if anything interferes with these three stages, a person can get stuck at one of them, and this leads to problems later in life. Like someone who is not properly toilet-trained will have an inner desire to retain their bodily waste, and this leads to someone who is overly organized, frugal and set in their ways. If you ask me, Freud made a big leap in logic here, and no one ever came up with anything better, so we're still stuck with it. (Freud was an "ass man" - after all, you can't spell "analysis" without "anal".) Someone with a desire to hang on to their own waste doesn't just have a mental problem, they've got a storage problem.
But the development of dream analysis and therapy sessions - here called the "talking cure" - meant that there might be an alternative to the usual treatments for mental problems, most of which still involved bloodletting or lobotomies (or both). And the recent post-Victorian invention of masturbation meant that there were whole new worlds of sexual fantasies to start exploring. They even came up with all kinds of new terminology, like "libido" and "transferrence" (that last one is shorthand for, "Hey, my psychiatrist is kind of hot!").
In this film, Jung treats a Russian woman who is prone to mental fits, and his treatment involves putting her to work analyzing other patients, which is where we get the expression about "the inmates running the asylum". But eventually her problems are traced back to her relationship with her father, who used to spank her quite vigorously. (It's OK, she kinda liked it.) Let's see, a married doctor with a patient who's a hot, young, intelligent Russian woman who likes to be spanked. Can you see where this is heading?
Naturally, it's a therapist's responsibility to bring about acceptance, so to make her comfortable with her own desires, what does he prescribe? More spanking! Lots of spanking! Then he takes advantage of her transferrence and makes sure that her libido is in fine working order. Yep, that's one of the fathers of modern psychiatry. Well, what would YOU do? Ethics, schmethics.
This is more or less (probably less, who knows...) a true story - the woman eventually became an analyst herself, Jung failed in his attempts to reconcile psychiatry and mysticism, and Freud went on to invent the Freudian slip, which is when you say one thing but mean your mother.
Also starring Keira Knightley (last seen in "Bend it Like Beckham"), Viggo Mortensen (last seen in "Daylight"), Vincent Cassel (last seen in "Black Swan").
RATING: 5 out of 10 cigars (Freud smoked a lot of them - you know what THAT means...)
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