Keira Knightley's Sabina arrives at Burgholzli Clinic in an agonizing internal battle. Jung (Michael Fassbender) introduces himself as her doctor and establishes the conditions of the treatment: they will talk most days–just talk–and try to understand what troubles her. While Sabina's mouth contorts, Jung gently inquires into the shameful feelings she cannot shape into words. She is a prisoner of self-punishment, and trust is hard to come by. But, the treatment begins well with Jung's thoughtful talk. Sabina opens up and, with great difficulty, admits that "any type of humiliation" excites her. Made to kiss her father's hand after he beat her, love, sexual excitement, and humiliating punishment are interchangeable. These confused feelings enter–and threaten–the analytic relationship for the first time when Jung unexpectedly announces he is going away.

To Sabina, Jung's leaving is no simple matter. In her troubled mind, she translates this sudden separation into a rejection of her, confirmation of her "vile and hopeless" nature. Who, then, is Jung? Her punisher? Her father? When Jung innocently beats the dirt from her discarded coat (as she feels he has just discarded her), she runs in panic from her confused, excited, jealous longings. Jung returns and, at Herr Director's request, says she will assist him in his research. Helping Jung record galvanic skin reactions, she realizes their subject is his pregnant wife. Rivalry and desire are set in motion. The unconventional framework (by today's standards) for the psychoanalytic treatment–working together, walking, boating, and sharing their common interests–does not help to keep Sabina's fantasies properly contained or understood. Later , after Jung's visit to Freud and with Sabina already in medical school, they talk about psychoanalysis and sex. She suddenly kisses him; and what we see come to pass is a re-creation of Sabina's relationship with her father. In this enactment, Jung fails to understand Sabina's desperate need for her father to love her, not Jung himself.  Her kiss, then, is a frantic attempt to prove she is not unworthy of love.

Analytic love is not about acting love out. Sabina needed Jung to hold to the task at hand; weather the storms of hurt, rage, and rejection; not turn cold in the role of doctor. Above all, she needed his kind and truthful understanding –especially, of such complex maneuvers as her wish to be lovers to elude awful feelings of jealousy and despair. If Jung hadn't lost his footing, he would have talked to Sabina about what it meant for him to refuse her. He would have helped her understand that being her doctor rather than her lover was erroneously construed in her mind to mean he loathed her. By talking to her, he might have dispelled her anguished fantasy that he chose and loved someone better. These are reasonable–and, I would emphasize, loving–things for an analyst to talk to his patient about. Besides it being the early days of analysis–Why couldn't Jung?

His alter ego, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassell), talked him out of just talking. Gross, an ill psychiatrist who lived by the mantra "never repress anything," perverted analytic theory to justify the satisfaction of every imaginable hunger. Jung, struggling with his own "unruly sexual desires", allowed Gross to persuade him to pursue the object of this desire (never mind she was his patient).  Gross urges, "just take her out back and thrash her within an inch of her life! I don't understand why people make pleasure so complicated!" Jung, trying to recover from another mix-up of analyst-patient roles, rightly replied before succumbing: "Well, pleasure is complicated, as you well know." Pleasure was terribly complicated for Sabina–who turned her father's abuse into self-punishing sexual excitement. Yet Jung couldn't think about his patient. Driven far, far from reality, he turned against his better analytic judgment–allowing the two of them to be swept into a folie a` deux.

Feelings have no logic–and a patient is not held accountable for this irrationality. It is the analyst's job to make sense of things. But, Jung lost his objectivity–something an analyst cannot afford to do. With his patient, Sabina Spielrein, Jung's own insatiable needs got the best of him; he confused them for hers. That is what analysis is not. And, that is the danger in the method.