”Only clash of the darker forces can create something new.”

Can people do whatever they want to fulfil every desire? Who decides, and for whom? Why suppress natural, basic instincts, and what is the harm in doing so? Harm comes from the abuse of unlimited power.

“There is no hope for me. I am vile, filthy and corrupt. I must never get out of here,” says Sabina S. who is admitted to psychiatric hospital.

This is a movie in which Freud and Jung discuss the stage of anal fixation. What kind of characteristics do people with this state of mind have? They are finicky, compulsively tidy, stubborn, and extremely stingy with money. Sabina is an exception. Exceptions are more interesting. An individual, a woman capable of analytical thought.

“Is she a virgin?” Freud asks. Jung says yes, certainly. Almost certainly. No, certainly.

The movie asks, as Jung does: Do you think all neuroses are sexual? Do you think Freud is obsessed with sex because he never gets any? Asks Otto Gross from Jung. At the dinner table, Freud’s children are present, and he talks to them about the things he studies. There are no forbidden topics, so I think Freud is more open-minded than most people. The same goes for Jung. Creation comes from obstruction and on the other hand openness to new ideas and people.

“The measure of the true perversity of the human race is that one of its very few very lively pleasurable activities is the subject of hysteria and repression,” says Otto Gross, a pupil, a psychoanalyst, who believes in the liberating possibilities of sex. Sex is ultimate freedom. Jung his tutor hesitates. Sex can also unleash the destructive side of human nature when totally uninhibited. One of Otto Gross’s patients chose to kill herself. Having sex with a patient is on the table. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Gross

How do patients get better if doctors abuse them, is the question. Is having sex with patients a way for the doctor to heal himself and free the patient to choose death? Jung is a bit puzzled, as he should be. The science of the mind can go wild and conclusions and assumptions how we think as well. People still like to think therapy is a place where people cry, as I am told, a place of being weak and vulberable as such things are laughed at outside. To be weak and vulnerable has been strongly beaten out of us through out history and talking about our weaknesses and issues has been something to be very vary about, so talking with a psychiatrist was truly revolutionary. As Sabina thinks of herself as crazy and unfit to live a normal life and be part of society. Her father beat that idea out of her and gave her illness which is like a slimy creature against her skin in her bed.

Freud and Jung are perfect characters in movies for exploring the clashes of the darker forces that originate in the human mind. How the human mind works through sexuality is the truly fascinating core of what Freud and Jung explore in the film. The dangerous side of us indeed opens up human pathology, but it can also lead to wrong conclusions and horribly false assumptions about why people do what they do and why they are the way they are. Is it always our parents and childhood?

Artists are easily perceived as troubled, inept and dangerous individuals, while curators are the ones who bring light and reason when an artist is discovered and their work is placed in an art institution, an official place for art. Art is seen as a form of therapy and a window into the artist’s mind. I find this way of looking at art troubling, even harassing and simplistic at times. It underestimates and patronises the artist and reflects the way culture has come to define what art is and what it means, where art comes from. Why artist’s sick mind is on the walls? Why this person chooses to call himself/herself an artist and not just mentally ill? What is the focus? A scandal, voyerism?

Jung takes the leap and begins an affair with his patient, played by Keira Knightley, who is very ill and has begun to suffer from strange symptoms and was admitted to hospital unwillingly. Her father was very violent and threatening. What role does the father play in everyone’s life? The one who rules through force? The father is the one who sets the atmosphere at home in this movie and time of Freud and Jung, who approves or disapproves, who judges and punishes. Creates.

Otto Gross also tells a story about how his father disapproved of his grandchildren. Otto Gross thought his father wanted grandchildren. It is baffling how violent fathers can be towards their children and how deeply parents affects their children. Children and parents are one. Jung is interested in the sexual side of this. His patient, Sabina Spielrein, suffers from wild symptoms and erratic behaviour, hysteric. She tells him that the beatings began when she was very young and that they aroused her, even though she was terrified of her father. The mere threat he pulled was enough to make her panic, while at the same time making her wet. Later, she would masturbate.

Beating is also a kink. It would be interesting to know how the father sees his position and what he feels when he beats his four-year-old child. What is he beating, and why does he threaten his children? Or is he threatening only one particular child, the daighter?

“Pleasure is not simple,” says Jung.

Otto Gross, whom Jung also tries to help, disagrees and encourages Jung to fuck his patient, Sabina S. Jung hesitates but is clearly tempted. This abuse of power is something humans find hard to resist. It is a betrayal, even though the patient is very grateful, as Jung has helped cure her through talking, using the new treatment known as psychoanalysis.

Humans solve things by talking. It is a revolutionary method that can really help people explore the issues they go through, both consciously and unconsciously.

Jung thinks Otto Gross, played by Vincent Cassel, is dangerous. Otto likes to fuck. He is out there and expresses himself as he thinks is right. His needs control him, but which man needs control his urges when the world is a playground?

Otto writes to Jung that he is now healthy and asks him to tell his father that he is dead. What a perfect way to free oneself from an overbearing, despotic parent. Do what the parent hates.

Jung famously viewed human consciousness as a small island floating in a vast ocean of the unconscious. Carl Jung used the term collective unconscious to describe a shared, inherited layer of the human mind that is common to all people and distinct from personal life experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious

https://iaap.org/jung-analytical-psychology/short-articles-on-analytical-psychology/the-collective-unconscious-2/ Freud says, even mentioning the things they discuss is professional suicide. Freud thinks being Jewish allows and obligates them to study human mind as far as they can fearing no area or topic.

The unconscious is what we are not aware of, even though we think we know ourselves and may think, feelings and the unconsious are some thing of little importance. It is something to fear and a threat is learning who one really is. The human mind is powerful and neuroses plus other things control us. We control very little. How does a person create themselves, or are they created by others? How do we get fucked up and what is the fucked up or who? How do all people carry trauma that influences their actions is something to find out. It is about empathy towards oneself.

Is all trauma a bad thing then or just a way of finding out and finding oneself? One can ask what trauma actually is. Is it something to cry about and remain stuck in? How can one move past one’s hurt or work through it? The question is what to do with hurt and with those who hurt.

We all experience all kinds of bad things. What is the ultimate hurt, and can we find a state of not hurting, as Otto Gross did by declaring himself dead to his father? He found freedom through sex and leaving.

Jung decides to give in, too. He is now a friend to Sabina. He knocks on Sabina’s door. She is a virgin and bleeds after sex. Jung’s wife is sorry that she gave birth to a girl and wishes that Jung would be polygamous, like Otto Gross. Man should be free, woman not, is the ultimate barrier and feminism is accused of destroying the west as is psychoanalysis and communism. His wife comes from money, which is very helpful, and she adores her husband. A gentle woman doing what women should do. Her role agrees with her. She seems happy.

We now live in an age of recognising trauma. Perhaps we are still scandalised by it, but we also experience a kind of hallelujah moment when we discover trauma and say it out loud. Instead of being stigmatised by it, we celebrate it. This is not necessarily a good thing, but being seen as a victim looking for hugs and sympathy, hurt can become a source of recognition and finding a collective shoulder.

Therapy is conducted in public in this way, and with AI, as real therapy is expensive and scary. Are we finding ourselves or merely exposing ourselves and profiting from it or who is the real profeteer of our illness? Big Pharma I suppose: The concept of the ”real profiteer” of illness refers to the medical-industrial complex—a multi-trillion-dollar web of pharmaceutical corporations, private insurance companies, and massive hospital networks that structurally financialize chronic disease rather than prioritizing prevention or permanent cures.[1, 2]

When the underlying structure of a healthcare system operates on a for-profit basis, it treats patients as consumers and health as a commodity. This misalignment often results in several major entities driving up costs at the expense of public well-being: [1, 2]

This is the reality-TV plot also. Victims are interesting as are those who abuse their power. Although reality TV is scripted, so it is not really reality. What we see as confession and baring one’s soul is fake on reality-tv, yet we take it as real. The question is, can we relate and is this collective action and weeping doing the healing needed or creating new opportunities to be seen and get abused? The methods are getting even more dangerous as our data is available and open which means we are extremely vulberable.

Sabina S. says to Jung, I want you to punish me. This is another country, another thing than being with your wife, it would be better to stop, says Jung. She is not after having children but after fucking. She wants Jung to be ferocious. 

How, then, are women liberated? This movie explores the dangers of having sex, being openly sexual, discovering and acknowledging oneself as a sexual being first and foremost, but what then? This applies to women, too, not just to Otto Gross, who is addicted to sex and believes that sex is freedom. For him, freedom means being entitled to whatever he wants.

The image of Freud standing next to a female statue makes the point: What is a woman? It is rather funny that we still don’t know and the further we experiment the more tangled we get.