Trailer
Plot summary
Sabina Spielrein comes to the Burghölzli, Zürich's leading psychiatric hospital, suffering from hysteria, and the young Swiss doctor Carl Jung begins treating her. Jung works with word association and dream interpretation, the psychoanalytic method of Sigmund Freud of Vienna, and finds that her condition goes back to her childhood, when her father spanked her naked and she felt humiliation and sexual arousal. Jung and the chief of medicine, Eugen Bleuler, recognize her intelligence and let her assist their experiments; she records how the subjects' bodies react during word association tests. She learns that this new science rests on the doctors' observations of themselves and their families as much as of their patients. The two men write to each other at length before they meet, and Freud comes to treat Jung as his heir.
Cast
- Franziska Arndtas Bath Nurse
- Wladimir Matuchinas Nikolai Spielrein
- André Dietzas Medical Policeman
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Dangerous Method (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Christoph Waltz was initially cast as Sigmund Freud, but a scheduling conflict forced him out and he was replaced by Viggo Mortensen.
- The score makes extensive use of leitmotifs from Wagner's third Ring opera Siegfried, mostly in piano transcription, and composer Howard Shore has said the structure of the film is based on the structure of the Siegfried opera.
- An early version of Hampton's screenplay, dating back to the 1990s, was written for Julia Roberts in the role of Sabina Spielrein, but that film was never realized.
SPOILER
The film's closing footnote gives the fates of the four analysts: Gross starved to death in Berlin in 1920, Freud died of cancer in London in 1939 after being driven out of Vienna by the Nazis, and Spielrein and her two daughters were shot by the Nazis in 1942.- Scheduling conflicts also cost the production Christian Bale, who had been in talks to play Carl Jung before he had to drop out of the film.
