Christopher Hampton's The Talking Cure deals with the early years of C.G. Jung, and his decision to experiment, using Freud's controversial new method of psychoanalysis, with a young Russian patient, Sabine Spielrein. The success of the experiment and the blossoming of his relationship with Sabine inaugurates, haunts and ultimately poisons Jung's friendship with Freud; and the ideas and conflicts which engulf the three of them embody, as Jung comes to realize, the destructive forces which are to overwhelm the disastrous century ahead.