STAGE REVIEW : Play Probes the Conflict Between Jung and Freud

Imagine a day in the lives of Freud and Jung in which the gods of psychoanalysis fall down from their pedestals to squabble like ordinary men.

What a revenge fantasy, especially for a female patient who, admittedly, has felt at the mercy of both.

In this case, the patient is also a playwright. And the experts stalking her consciousness are none other than Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and his star pupil, Carl Jung, the guru of analytic psychology.

Playwright Lynne Kaufman, who reveals in the program biography her own experience with couch time, depicts a watershed day in which Jung wars with his wife--and with Freud--in her play “The Couch,” now playing at the North Coast Repertory Theatre through July 21.

It’s a minor, odd, but intriguing little play, nicely produced by the North Coast, which has an affinity for the sort of offbeat, provoking piece that sends you home thinking--even if you don’t agree with its precepts.

What makes “The Couch” minor, ultimately, are the simplifications that abound in Kaufman’s attempts to assert that Jung’s inability to commit to Freud’s theories was equivalent to his inability to be monogamous with his wife.

Jung wants “roads, not fences,” as he says in the play. He wants to affirm life’s urges in all their shapes and forms, not repress them for the greater good, as Freud advises.

In this scenario, Freud comes across as an inflexible old man, terribly threatened at the idea that Jung, his star protege and heir apparent, was planning to challenge his theories.

What’s missing is the tragic dimension of Freud fighting for his life, rather than just his ego. Is it paranoid for Moby Dick to fret about Ahab being out to get him?

Was it unreasonable or prescient of Freud, skeptical of religion and civilization, to feel threatened by the pro-religious, pro-German Jung falling out with him in 1913, when, 25 years later, Freud found himself labeled guilty of being Jewish in a rising tide of Nazism?

Before he died in exile in England, his books were among the first to be burned by the Nazis as the fruits of a “Jewish science.”

But Kaufman blocks out the world outside Jung’s house to concentrate on the dynamics of two real events fictionalized as happening on the same day: the time Jung broke from Freud and broke from even the appearance of conventional monogamy, living openly with his wife and mistress with his wife’s consent.

A talented cast aids director Olive Blakistone in this tricky mix. Susana Moore is consistently funny as the acerbic, deadpanning Mrs. Jung. Stina Sundberg is lovely, sometimes breathtakingly so, as the mistress (although she comes across more as histrionic vamp than as the intellectually gifted helpmate she is described as being in the play).

La Jolla Country Day School eighth-grader Rachael Lawrence is invigorating as Jung’s precocious teen-ager who seeks to charm her father by making up imaginative phallic dreams. Gary Seger brings out the frailty under the imperiousness of Freud, and Ocie Robinson brings heft, though not complete elucidation, to Jung--by far the most emotionally complex characterization in the play.

Bernard Harland’s set design is warm, inviting and inventive, as are Ocie Robinson’s additional scenic choices and lighting design. Sound designer Marvin Read’s choice of classical piano pieces softens the mood, though more could be done to suggest the sounds of the countryside where the Jungs live.

The play is not deep or cutting enough to change the way anyone may think, but it does make you think--not only about the life of the mind and the spirit and civilization itself--but about the North Coast Rep as a quality podium on which playwrights can air an alternative viewpoint such as this.

‘THE COUCH’

By Lynne Kaufman. Director is Olive Blakistone. Set design by Bernard Harland. Scenic art and lighting design by Ocie Robinson. Sound by Marvin Read. Costumes by Kathryn Gould. With Ocie Robinson, Gary Seger, Susana Moore, Stina Sundberg and Rachael Lawrence. At 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays with selected matinees at 2 p.m. through July 21. At 987D Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach, (619) 481-1055.