A Dangerous Method

Jung's central discovery is that the psyche contains a disowned counter-self, the shadow, and that health requires meeting it rather than repressing it. The film stages this discovery as biography. Jung is the picture of Swiss containment: married into wealth, buttoned, principled. Spielrein is everything he has excluded, the erotic and the violent fused into a single writhing symptom. When he begins the affair, he is not falling for a woman. He is being pulled into his own unlived life.

Watch the scene where Otto Gross, the anarchist analyst Jung is meant to be treating, tells him that repression is the only true perversion and that he should never suppress a desire. Gross is the shadow speaking aloud, the tempter who articulates exactly what Jung's disciplined persona cannot allow. Jung dismisses him and then does precisely what Gross prescribed. Spielrein herself hands Jung his future vocabulary. Her thesis that destruction is the ground of coming-into-being is individuation stated in advance. The analyst did not enlighten the patient. The patient carried the medicine, and he took it as a wound.

Jung spent his later life decoding alchemy as a symbolic map of psychic transformation, and the film's central relationship is a coniunctio, the alchemical marriage of opposites that is supposed to produce gold. Doctor and patient, reason and instinct, the man of daylight and the woman of the convulsing body: they combine exactly as the alchemical texts describe. The problem is what alchemy always warns about. The union that transforms also dissolves.

The spanking scenes are the literal nigredo, the blackening, the phase where the matter must be broken down before it can be reconstituted. Spielrein asks to be struck and Jung obliges, and the film films this without titillation, as procedure. Something is being cooked. But Jung cannot complete the operation. He retreats to his wife, his career, his respectability, sealing the vessel before the work is finished. He confuses ending the reaction with completing it. Spielrein carries the transformation onward alone, into her own practice, her own theory, and finally toward a death the film lets us feel coming.