Of hearts and minds

Christopher Hampton explains how his new play, The Talking Cure, shows the complex relationship between Freud and Jung, mediated through the character of a young Russian-Jewish woman, Sabina Spielrien, who was a patient of both men. Starring Ralph Fiennes and Dominic Rowan and directed by Howard Davies, the result is an absorbing, intense and moving work, a play of ideas clothed in flesh and blood, writes Helen Meany

'In 100 years time people will still fail to understand us," Sigmund Freud told Carl Jung when they first met in Vienna in 1907. Christopher Hampton's new play, The Talking Cure, currently running at the Royal National Theatre, London, tests that prediction, dramatising a formative period in the lives of these two pioneering psychoanalysts. From that heady first meeting, lasting 13 hours, to their irrevocable split in 1912, the complex relationship between these two men of different backgrounds and ages is mediated through the character of a young Russian-Jewish woman, Sabina Spielrien, who was a patient of both of them.

The sense of anticipation normally generated by the prospect of a new stage work by Hampton was overshadowed last month by the sudden death of the actor playing the part of Freud, James Hazeldine,, who was taken ill on the Cottesloe stage during the previews. Everyone involved with the production was determined to persevere and Dominic Rowan, who was already playing the part of a psychiatrist, Otto Gross, read his way into the role of Freud just before Christmas. The difficulty of continuing in these sad circumstances is not at all apparent in the performances by Rowan, Ralph Fiennes (Jung) and Jodhi May (Sabina), directed by Howard Davies: the result is an absorbing, intense and moving work, a play of ideas clothed in flesh and blood.

As a playwright, screenwriter, translator and most recently, film director, Christopher Hampton is well-practised at taking the biographical facts of famous artistic figures and infusing them with life and depth on stage and screen. "I try to find those people who illustrate something fundamental about art or life and thought - and not cheat, not make anything up," he says, surveying the notes and books strewn around his white eyrie in Notting Hill Gate. "I try to examine the facts endlessly, through slow detective work. Part of the enterprise is to say that they are human beings like you and me."

From his early play about Rimbaud and Verlaine, Total Eclipse, to Tales From Hollywood, which depicted European exiles in Hollywood including Brecht, Horvath and Thomas Mann, to Carrington, his film about the Bloomsbury figures Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey, he has demonstrated a gift for inhabiting the past, for pinning down abstraction and fashioning convincingly demotic dialogue from literary and epistolary sources.

Nevertheless, the founders of two distinct psychotherapeutic movements whose ideas influenced 20th-century cultural life immeasurably and who still elicit impassioned responses of devotion and repudiation proved a further challenge. "I found it difficult to find the story," Hampton says, describing the play's five-year gestation. "With Freud and Jung, two great, monstrous figures, I needed to find a slice of narrative that would illuminate them in an unfamiliar way. Sabina seemed to be the key to that."

THE story of Sabina Spielrien, Jung's patient who later trained to be a psychoanalyst, came to light with the discovery of a suitcase full of her letters, papers and diaries in Germany in the 1970s. When Hampton found that she was the first patient on whom Jung tried out the "talking cure" advocated by Freud, he travelled to the Burgholzli hospital in Zurich to read Jung's case notes of her successful treatment. (These have since been published, as has Spielrien's correspondence with Jung and Freud).

Spielrien's recovery from severe psychological disturbance, through an experimental therapeutic process that linked her childhood experiences of paternal brutality and humiliation to sexual arousal and its repression, was the subject of the initial correspondence between Jung and Freud. What Jung neglected to tell Freud, and later lied about, was the fact that he had subsequently become deeply involved with her, emotionally and sexually.

When Jung abruptly broke off his relationship with Spielrien she went to Vienna to work with Freud, whose dim view of Jung's shabby treatment of her was added to the other factors in the breakdown of relations between the two men. In broad terms, it was Freud's exclusive emphasis on sexuality as the key to motivation that alienated Jung ("there must be more than one hinge into the universe"), while Freud was hostile to Jung's burgeoning interest in universal aspects of the unconscious and in spirituality. Spielrien adopted elements of both their theories and attempted to reconcile them for the benefit of psychoanalysis ("your differences are not as great as you both think"). In Hampton's play, Spielrien is depicted as a woman of great courage, insight and intelligence, expressively played by Jodhi May.

"What has emerged is that Sabina was much more central to both men's work than had been realised," Hampton says. "Not only had she been a patient of both but she had made certain suggestions that stimulated them to develop some of their greatest insights. For example, Jung's ideas of the anima and the animus, the collective unconscious and archetypes, arose out of conversations with Sabina. And the connection she made between the sexual instinct and the death instinct was later acknowledged by Freud in his writings on this subject." The effectiveness of The Talking Cure derives from its dramatisation of the ideas it discusses. It's not simply a matter of talking heads spouting theories at each other: Sabina and Jung's lives were their laboratories. So, Sabina's suggestion to Jung that sexual love entails the loss of self in the process of fusion with the other - a loss which is resisted by an internal repressive mechanism - is illustrated by what happens between her and Jung. He pulls back from her and rejects her, lest he should be annihilated. Likewise, he feared being swallowed up by Freud, who was looking for disciples and whose relationship with Jung was coloured by father-son identifications.

"It became clear to me that although Sabina was pivotal, Jung was the centre of the story," Hampton says. "This was the time of his first great setback: his two relationships - with this extraordinary woman and with Freud - foundered in 1912 and this plunged him into the five-year breakdown from which he emerged with all his theories. So it's a story about a towering figure of the 20th century before he became that figure." Prior to his detective work for the play, Hampton had known little about Jung and had been "a complete Freudian".

Acknowledging that much of Freud's work has been discredited for its reductiveness, he says, "I now think of Freud as an artist - a wonderful writer - rather than as a doctor. While Freud was a great pioneer, like Darwin, he was also backward-looking. He was a classicist. Jung was much more modern and searching, engaged with the world, open-minded - and a Romantic."

Hampton agrees with the view expressed by Spielrien in the play that their rift was detrimental to the development of the discipline. The pessimism Freud expresses in the play about the legacy of their work has been born out, he thinks, "The conclusions of psychoanalysis were fantastically resisted and are still not generally accepted. The profession itself does not escape blame for this though, with its series of undignified squabbles."

Hampton originally wrote a film script about Sabina Spielrien but found that the subject scared people off. On reflection, he decided that the material would suit the theatre very well and was happy to hand it over to Howard Davies, who directed his spectacularly successful adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. While he has taken up film directing in recent years, and has just finished making a film from his own script called Imagining Argentina, with Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson, he prefers other people to direct his stage work, freeing him to concentrate on the text.

His writing for the stage takes a long time and is, he says, "a gamble". "But I never wanted only to write plays, and I've had offers, such as the adaptation of The Quiet American, that are hard to turn down. I'm fortunate that the other work that I do sustains the central endeavour. "Also," he adds, with a laugh, "I'm attracted to subjects that people are leery of." Those of us who are not leery are grateful.

The Talking Cure runs at the National Theatre, London until January 28th. Booking on: 00 44 207 304 4000.