The movie starts with surprisingly brief but impressive scenes depicting the delivery by horse drawn carriage of a raving and ravaging young Russian woman (Sabina Spielrein played by Keira Knightley) to the elegant doorstep of the famous Burgholzli psychiatric clinic in turn-of-the-century Zurich, Switzerland. (She had evidently been transferred there from another hospital due to her unmanageable behavior, a fact not mentioned in the film.) This just happens to be where the young and ambitious Carl Jung, M.D. is completing his psychiatric residency under the tutelage of the eminent Dr. Eugen Bleuler, originator of the enduring terms schizophrenia and, as we are told by Jung himself, ambivalence. Almost immediately we see Dr. Jung (Michael Fassbender) meeting with Ms. Spielrein, his very first patient, and informing her he intends to use the "talking cure" discovered by Dr. Sigmund Freud (played believably by Viggo Mortensen) in her treatment. All this based solely on his reading of Freud's limited writings to that point, including The Interpretation of Dreams, since he and the senior Herr Doktor Freud had at that time never met nor had any contact whatsoever. Allegedly, according to Jung's own admission notes from the Burgholzli, dated August 17, 1904, Spielrein is clinically described as someone who "laughs and cries in a strangely mixed, compulsive manner. Masses of tics, rotating head, sticks our her tongue, legs twitching." (Though Keira Knightley has been lambasted by some reviewers for what they consider her "over the top" portrayal of Spielrein's so-called "hysterical" symptoms, she does an admirable job--despite the fact that she is ten years older than Ms. Spielrein was at that time. The truth is that, in all probability, Spielrein's presentation was far more bizarre and dramatic than anything depicted by Ms. Knightley. Psychotic behavior is nearly impossible to mimic. In psychiatry, truth is stranger than fiction.)  

Ms. Spielrein, appearing to be at least borderline psychotic by her behavior, but game, takes to psychotherapy like a duck to water, sitting in a chair (not on a couch) in front of (but not facing) Jung, and relating her inner feelings, memories and images regarding her traumatically physically abusive childhood to him. Her condition improves dramatically and rapidly, due, as becomes quite evident, to the warm, supportive and understanding relationship--even friendship--offered to her by the naive and inexperienced yet caring Dr. Jung. They go for walks alone together  through the forest, talk together sitting on a bench beside the impossibly beautiful lake of Zurich, take an excursion on one of the romantic steam-driven lake boats linking Zurich with the many other towns up and down the Zurichsee, and clearly grow closer and more intimate as Ms. Spielrein, the patient, becomes more lucid, rational and self-expressive. Jung even enlists her technical assistance with his extraordinary research project. (See below.) The question of therapeutic boundaries, a maintaining of what Jung later referred to as the vas temenos, the sacred container of treatment, seems not yet to concern him.

Even before his epic thirteen-hour-long marathon meeting with Freud in Vienna, summarily recreated for our vicarious viewing by Cronenberg, Jung was independently conducting his own scientific experiments at the Burgholzli hospital on the unconscious. As depicted in the film (see the official trailer here), Jung would present a list of predetermined words to a patient and ask for the first response that comes to mind. He would time the gap between stimulus and response and measure the patient's Galvanic Skin Response (the effect of sweating of the palms on electrical conductivity) and noted that certain emotionally loaded words and associations would result in different measurements. Jung surmised that what he was measuring was the indirect effects of what he called "complexes," and that his word association experiments provided scientific proof of the reality of Freud's concept of the "unconscious." Jung published his experimental findings in his book Studies in Word Analysis in 1906. What most people don't know is that Jung's experiments and laboratory equipment served as the forerunner to the modern polygraph, or "lie detector."

But Jung's highly successful therapeutic treatment of his patient takes a perverse turn when he takes Spielrein up on her offer to make it sexual. Here we see how Jung's inexperience, narcissism and his own repressed sexuality (and disconnection from what he would later call the anima) get the better of him, permitting his patient to seduce him. Jung had married one of the wealthiest women in Switzerland, lived in a fabulous home right on the lakeshore, and had no financial worries whatsoever. We see him living in luxury, style and comfort with his wife and children.Yet, he was apparently willing and driven to risk everything for this illicit (and apparently kinky) sexual liaison with the adolescent, but as he supposedly described her, "oriental and voluptuous" Ms. Spielrein, a secretive love affair that continued for many years prior to Jung finally ending it. Jung's unethical lapse in judgment is a dramatic demonstration of the irrational, compelling, creative and destructive, enlivening but dangerous daimonic power of eros. When he eventually does find the courage to discontinue the sordid affair, Spielrein, crushed, becomes enraged, impulsively grabbing a knife and cutting Jung's face: a relatively minor injury compared, as she herself later points out, to what she could have done in that terrifying moment. Jung was lucky to escape with his life. Though she restrained herself from inflicting graver damage, this perilous impulsivity lets us see some of her still unresolved emotional woundedness and narcissistic rage, suggesting what today would be perceived as a probable underlying borderline personality structure.