David Cronenberg is directing a film about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, starring Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Michael Fassbender and Jung. The film is based on “The Talking Cure” by Christopher Hampton. Ace Showbiz has some stills.
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(Thanks James K!)
April 15, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Jung or Freud – Father and Son?
Jung was a highly complex man and any attempt to simplify his experience will inevitably deliver the interpolating agency into the hands of the opposites. We will see this film and observe the persona of a young and ambitious physician in the process of becoming world famous, but it is only half the story. There are two of Jung and it is inevitable that any contemporary exposition about the first Jung, for the sake of completeness, will have to glimpse into the future of this unusual man’s life and portray the second Jung, the evolution of which, really did not blossom until he had withdrawn his Old Wise Man archetypal projection from Freud.
To begin to understand the second Jung, we must first look at The Red Book. It is Jung’s mystery and myth, (at least up until his embolism in 1944, when, according to his account, his soul entered the repository anew). This book is a mystical confession of the unconscious that is so obscure in its mythological origins that Jung suppressed its publication completely, for fear it would undermine his credibility as a physician. Jung’s unprecedented confrontation with the unconscious, as is detailed by the Red Book, casts a completely different picture of the man. Contemporaries talked about Jung’s charisma, he himself would have used the term: mana personality. This mana is the numinous effect of Jung’s plunge into the depths of the unconscious and it would be wise for us to bear this in mind when we observe the portrayal of Jung in the film. Any relations that Jung undertook prior to his integration of the Red Book (psychical) objects, would inevitably have been laden with these latent contents and the intensity of relations with his female patients can be explained in terms of a highly dynamic Anima transference. No less is his relation with Freud, where Jung’s Old Wise Man archetypal complex would have been involved in the highly intense transference that inevitably arose between these two giants. We should therefore bear in mind, it was therefore, not only Jung’s undoubted therapeutic skill that effected so many of his cures, it was also his numinous capacity as a healer.
With this timely film, we must rely on the power of the unconscious to control the intuition of Cronenberg and his actors to deliver a viable record, despite their own complexes. The one thing that is certain, and Jung knew this more than anyone before him, is that the Mercurius Duplex archetype will have its way with any artist or film maker, just as it does with all human lives.
Jung’s number two personality foresaw our current disasters, just as it anticipated the sea of blood that engulfed Europe during the 1914-18 World War and if we look to the turmoil that has surrounded human experience on our planet since 9/11, where war famine and disaster strike almost every month, it is clear that Jung’s latter-day invocation: Aquarius sets aflame Lucifer’s harsh forces, cannot be disregarded as a program for human life, now and into the future, or at least while mankind is in its transition to a more conscious and spiritual state – something, Jung wished and eternally strove for all his life.