To get under Freud's skin for A Dangerous Method, he not only learned to write like the psychoanalyst but also bought first editions of the books that the good doctor would have had on his study shelves.
At the more pathological end of the spectrum, we have what the psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg called malignant narcissism, the source of much "evil in the world".
Later, in his 30s, he lived life "through an artificial self" in "a state of dissociation", which drove him into the clutches of a fiendish psychoanalyst.
The minor humans, a fairground of oddities, are named with Dickensian ear: Elvet Gander, a creepy psychoanalyst, Avram Snitkin, an itinerant ethnomethodologist, Mickey Impey, a pretty pop poet, Jonty Surtees, an agitator, Eva Wijnnobel, a terrible astrologer.A knowledge of the earlier books does, however, help.
With one psychologist or psychoanalyst for every 164 inhabitants, Buenos Aires is possibly the most psychoanalysed city in the world.
Trained as a psychoanalyst, Dichter saw human motivation as an "iceberg", with two-thirds hidden from view, even to the decision-maker.
It also captures the essence of Siri Hustvedt's latest novel, which is about the secrets that can survive even the closest relationships, and the mysteries that can make it impossible ever truly to know someone.Days after his father dies, Erik, a divorced middle-aged psychoanalyst, is sorting through the deceased's study in Minnesota with his close sister, Inga.
Accompanying her is Sophie, hair "reddish, open to experiment", a psychoanalyst who has suffered a string of failed relationships.
Instead he lived quietly with his parents until his marriage at the age of 35, and intermittently thereafter whenever his wife, Italy's first practising psychoanalyst, was travelling.
Surprisingly often, says Manfred Kets de Vries, a psychoanalyst turned business guru, leaders seem to have had a determined mother and a remote or absent father.
It is a tribute to both men's ideas, and the creativity of the film-makers, that Jungians (and Cronenbergians) are equally free to see the myth-haunted Swiss psychoanalyst as a tragic incarnation of Orpheus, who should never have looked back at Eurydice when rescuing her from the underworld of Hades.
