Australian distribution company Hopscotch Films has announced on its Facebook page that Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, 300) and Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) will star in director David Cronenberg’s The Talking Cure. The company describes the project as follows:
A beautiful young woman, driven mad by her past. An ambitious doctor on a mission to succeed. An esteemed mentor with a revolutionary cure. Let the mind games begin…
First announced in 2007, the film is an adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s 2002 play. Knightley would play Sabina Spielrein, a Russian-Jewish psychiatric patient, who is said to have inspired some of Carl Jung (Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud’s (Waltz) most remarkable discoveries.
Hampton’s play focuses on the relationship between Spielrein and Jung, when he was treating her at the Burghölzli mental hospital near Zurich in 1904. Jung used Freudian techniques to try and overcome Spielrein’s association of paternal punishment with physical arousal.
