01.01.70
Is flagellation for the purposes of lustful pleasure as English as cricket and buttered crumpets? Not if the forthcoming murkiness about the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, called A Chancy Method, is to be believed. It is portrayed in the film as being as Swiss as the cuckoo clock.
Literally, the ''dangerous method'' of the title is psychoanalysis itself, not the spanking to which Jung subjects one of his patients, played by Keira Knightley in the covering - an episode for which there is not the slightest historical evidence, disreputable in some serious ways as Jung's life unmistakably was.
But spanking is not a particularly English vice.
The English public school system is often blamed for the masochistic tendencies displayed by some respected members of our upper classes, and the figure of the schoolmaster, trembling with risqu excitement as he flogs a series of boys, is supposed to be at the psychological source of a subsequent desire to be flogged.
Source: The Canberra Times