Analyze this

From left, Miss O (Onalea Gilbertson), Mr. V (David van Belle), Miss J (Jamie Konchak) and Mr. K (Duval Lang) explore the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in Why Freud Fainted. (Trudie Lee/Alberta Theatre Projects)

On Aug. 20, 1909, while lunching with his disciple Carl Gustav Jung at a restaurant in Bremen, Germany, Sigmund Freud suddenly lost consciousness.

Why did the father of psychoanalysis faint? Was it because he’d just realized he harboured homosexual feelings for Jung? Was it because he believed that Jung, his symbolic son, wished to kill him in an Oedipal fantasy? Or was it just an adverse reaction to some bad salmon? It’s a question that has long preoccupied the biographers and devotees of both men, and it’s the unlikely inspiration for a sexy little musical now making its world debut in Calgary.

Why Freud Fainted, which opens Feb. 6 at the Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays, is a lighthearted look at the doctors who gave us the Freudian slip, the Oedipus complex, the collective unconscious and other concepts that have inundated our culture.

“We all have an access to Freud and Jung,” says Calgary playwright-composer David Rhymer over coffee in the courtyard of the city’s Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts. “Their ideas permeate our language, our thoughts, our jokes. We use their phrases on a daily basis.”

Like most cultural icons, they’ve been reduced to caricatures — Jung as the patron saint of New Age flakiness and Freud as the sex-obsessed shrink who blames everything on your mother. But Rhymer and co-writer/director Vanessa Porteous think the two men still deserve to be taken seriously.

“When we started going back to see what they said, we were shocked at how relevant and important it still seems,” Porteous says. “Especially when you put [their ideas] together.” She and Rhymer didn’t want to write another one of those biographical dramas where, in her words, “Freud and Jung sit across from each other in armchairs and talk about their theories.” Instead, they sing, dance and act them out.

From left, Miss J (Duval Lang), Mr. K (Jamie Konchak) and Miss O (Onalea Gilbertson) in Why Freud Fainted. (Trudie Lee/Alberta Theatre Projects)

Why Freud Fainted is set in 1920 at New York’s Heterodoxy Club, the real-life proto-feminist salon in Greenwich Village dedicated to exploring the radical ideas of the time. For the edification of their fellow club members, a couple of Freudians – Miss J and Mr. K (played by Jamie Konchak and Duval Lang, respectively) – have teamed up with Jungian counterparts Miss O and Mr. V (Onalea Gilbertson and David Van Belle) to perform a series of skits and songs about the two men and their rocky friendship. Along the way, they re-enact two of Freud and Jung’s most famous cases: Freud’s analysis of “Dora,” a teenager whose hysterical loss of speech he attributed to hidden sexual feelings for her father; and Jung’s treatment of the neurotic Sabina Spielrein, who began as his patient and ended up his mistress.

As the performance unfolds, Miss O’s not-so-hidden sexual feelings for Miss J, as well as Mr. K’s simmering rivalry with Mr. V, begin to interfere with their presentation, inadvertently mirroring Jung and Freud’s own clashes of ego and id, which ultimately led to their falling out.

The play begins and ends with the famous faint, which may have been the first sign of their ideological split. While treating neurotics at his private practice in Vienna, Freud had come up with his theory that most psychological problems are rooted in childhood, if not infancy, and often involve sex. Unconscious sexual feelings are the cause of our hang-ups, he felt, and it was the job of psychoanalysis to identify them so they could be controlled. Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, admired Freud and embraced his theories at first, but eventually began to formulate his own beliefs about human motivation, drawing heavily on mythology, mysticism and religion. Unlike Freud, he felt our primordial impulses should be released.

Jung had just begun to hint at his new ideas when he and Freud met in Bremen prior to boarding a ship for the United States, where they would introduce Freud’s methods to Americans. “The trip was going to place psychoanalysis on the map. It was a watershed moment for them,” Rhymer says. But at lunch, Jung insisted on talking about recently discovered prehistoric remains of victims of human sacrifice. Soon after, Freud passed out. “When he came to, Freud accused Jung of wishing he [Freud] was dead.” In typical fashion, both men set about trying to identify the deeper psychological reason for Freud’s swooning.

“Freud eventually agreed it was perhaps some kind of repressed, latent homosexual feeling towards Jung,” Rhymer says. Neither would accept that its only cause was Jung’s grisly conversation topic, or a tainted dish of salmon. As Freud himself could’ve put it, sometimes a faint is just a faint.

Why Freud Fainted pokes fun at the men’s tendency to over-analyze, as well their notoriously patriarchal approach to female psychology. Rhymer says he and Porteous set the musical in a 1920s women’s club to show how exciting and revolutionary psychoanalysis was back then. While Freud has become the bane of feminists — thanks to notions like “penis envy“ — enlightened women in the ’20s appreciated him, Rhymer claims. “He spent 10 hours a day for 18 years listening to women. Prior to Freud, the solution to curing hysterical women was [female circumcision]. So Freud’s psychoanalysis was a great step forward, and women of the time recognized it.”

A scene from Why Freud Fainted. (Trudie Lee/Alberta Theatre Projects)

The show’s retro musical numbers – including a vaudeville routine in which the wisecracking duo of “Gus” and “Sigi” sing a comic ditty called What Do Women Want? – evoke the period. Rhymer says his songs were inspired by the popular music of the era – although it’s doubtful A Flirtatious Frolicsome Flurry of Natural Masculine Urges, with its mock-poetic lyrics about female genitalia, is something your grandparents would’ve sung around the parlour piano.

For Rhymer, the idea of putting psychoanalytic theories to music wasn’t the least bit daunting. The silver-maned tunesmith is a veteran of unusual musicals, going back to the 1980s when he penned the songs for the One Yellow Rabbit troupe’s Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp, their now-legendary satire of Holocaust denier James Keegstra. More recently, Rhymer composed the score for the company’s acclaimed Dream Machine, a surreal homage to Beat writer William S. Burroughs, which played Ottawa’s National Arts Centre earlier this season.

Porteous is a relative newcomer to this kind of offbeat entertainment, having just finished an eight-year stint as a dramaturge for Alberta Theatre Projects, where most of her time was devoted to developing more traditional plays for the theatre’s annual Enbridge playRites Festival. She brings personal insight to this project: As a teenager, she was briefly in therapy with a psychiatrist who used Freudian methods. (“I hated it,” she recalls, “but ultimately it helped me.”) And her stepmother is a Jungian psychologist in Vancouver.

Porteous says she hopes this show will go beyond the headshrinker clichés to show the flawed, sympathetic sides of Freud and Jung, two formidable intellectuals who were not immune to falling in love with their patients or passing out like anemic schoolgirls in stressful situations.

“These are guys whose whole quest in life is to understand themselves and other human beings,” Porteous says, “but there are things that are obvious to the simplest child about how they feel about each other, which they just couldn’t express or release. It’s that paradox which we find so appealing. It makes them really human.”

Why Freud Fainted runs until Feb. 17 at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary.

Martin Morrow is an author and critic based in London, Ont.

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