The Talking Cure
“The Talking Cure” as produced by the National Theatre in
London is one of Christopher Hampton’s best plays, in a career of outstanding
works .that include “The Philanthropist,” “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” and
“Tales from Hollywood.” His talents extend to translations and adaptations
as well, with versions of “Uncle Vanya, “Hedda Gabler,” “A Doll’s House” and
Moliere’s “Don Juan.” His awards include a Tony for best book of a musical,
for “Sunset Boulevard” and a BAFTA award for best single television drama for
his adaptation of Anita Brookner’s novel “Hotel du Lac.”
Mr. Hampton received an Academy Award for best adapted
screenplay for the movie version of his play “Dangerous Liaisons.” He also
wrote the film adaptation of his play “Total Eclipse,” about the lives of the
French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, with Leonardo Di Caprio and David Thewlis
in the leads, and was screenwriter and director for Joseph Conrad’s “The
Secret Agent.”
“The Talking Cure, ” with Ralph Fiennes as Jung concerns
the beginnings of psychoanalysis known as a “talking cure” for the mentally
ill.
Alternately
depressed and hysterical, eighteen-year-old Sabina Spielrein (Jodhi May) is a
highly intelligent patient at Zurich’s Burgholzi clinic 1904, where Jung, a
student of Freud’s, decides to treat her with the new method. (It will be
discovered that the root of Sabina’s affliction is in her childhood
association of paternal punishment with sexual arousal.) Jung and Sabina
become lovers, but, fearful because he has broken the prohibition of sex
between doctor and patient, he then rejects her and says their affair was her
sexual fantasy. This leads to a breach between Jung and his mentor, with
Freud (Dominic Rowan) taking over Sabina’s treatment.
The theories of the two fathers of psychoanalysis become
dramatic in the hands of Mr. Hampton, Freud’s “insistence on the exclusively
sexual interpretation of clinical material,” and Jung’s that “there’s so much
more, so many mysteries, so much further to go.” But the contribution from
Spielrein has gone largely unnoticed. In the 70s the playwright was
researching her letters and Jung’s notes for a screenplay he wrote (though not
filmed) as a tribute to her pioneer role in the Jung-Freud story. In the
play, it is she who contributes the human element, somewhere between their
interpretations.
She was to influence Jung, not only as his first patient
in successfully using the “talking cure.” She helped him with his research in
word associations and suggested to him the “anima” theory, that in the
“animus,” there is a female principle that subconsciously influences men.
Mr. Hampton also suggests that she inspired Jung’s concept of the collective
unconscious and Freud’s idea of the connection between sex and the death
wish. After qualifying in medicine at Zurich University, Spielrein went to
Vienna to study with Freud. She became the first woman member of Freud’s
group of followers, taught at Geneva’s Rousseau Institute and then, returning
to Russia in the 1920s, taught at the Department of Child Psychology at Moscow
University. Tragically, when psychotherapy was banned by Stalin and she
returned to her native Rostov to work as a doctor, in 1942 she and her two
daughters were among the Jewish victims killed by Hitler’s invading troops.
Directed by Howard Davies, “The Talking Cure” affair ends when
Spielrein, pregnant and at the beginning of her career, meets Jung for the
last time on the shores of Lake Zurich in 1913. He tells her that without her
he would not have developed his psychoanalytical concepts and that she was the
greatest love of his life.
