John Kerr\'s scholarly, minutely researched account of the early years of psychoanalysis, concentrating on the collaboration between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and their eventual break, has been made into a major motion picture starring Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbinder and Keira Knightley. In anticipation, A Most Dangerous Method has been reissued in paperback by Vintage complete with the three stars on the cover, dressed in period costume and ready for a session around the couch.
The book is a superb (and readable) study into two of the last century\'s great attempts to fathom the reality at the bottom of human consciousness—and seems a most unlikely source for a Hollywood picture. The hook is Freud and Jung\'s doctor-patient relationship with a young Russian patient, Sabina Spielrein, sent to Western Europe by her wealthy parents for treatment. Her hysteria (a malady, as Kerr points out, common then and rare today) as well as her beauty draws the two psychiatrists, already rivals and locked in a classic surrogate father-son complex.
Director David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises) and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons) have done intelligent work in the past and will likely respect the integrity of the Spielrein story, even as they focus on those aspects of Kerr\'s pathfinding research that lend themselves to dramatization. The film will inevitably be considerably different than the book. Hopefully, we won\'t be able to say, unequivocally, that the book was better.
A Most Dangerous Method (the movie) will be released Nov. 23. The paperback is out now.
