I only saw the trailer and was sqicked out by Spielrein being in an asylum and the trailer gave of the impression that her experience there is somehow connected with her sexual desires. As if it has made her mad.


She and Jung talk about her masochism in therapy, but as I understood she kept that secret initially. She's institutionalized by her father presumably because of the screaming fits, i.e. "hysteria" in the understanding of the time, I guess. At least she was screaming incoherently and flailing a lot when she first arrived. It did seem somewhat implied that the characters thought that talking about being turned on when her father beat her as a child somehow cured the hysteria or something like that as proof of their "new method", but like I said it wasn't all that clear to me how they all conceptualized what was going on here. As a viewer you mostly think she had screaming fits to get away from her family and then felt better once she could do her own thing. However to me it did not seem as if they were pathologizing the sexual desires all that much or singling out the spanking preference from the fact that it's an extramarital affair.