A dangerous method

My favorite scene is when Carl Jung administers his word association test to his
wife. Discuss your thoughts about this scene and how it relates to the history of
psychology/class material.
The scene about word association test was interesting. Carl Jung administered
his word association test to his wife Emma by asking her to give immediate
association to the words and measuring her physical and biological response. Jung
also measured her delay in response with a stopwatch. Spielrein and Jung observed
that most things in Emma’s mind were her pregnancy. They observed that his wife
needed a long reaction time to the words “family” and “divorce,” and she used the
word “No” in response to the word “divorce.” She also associated “ruefulness” with
“child.” Spielrein and Jung deduced that her unconscious responses revealed her
ambivalence about her pregnancy. Her hesitancy and denial of divorce revealed her
concerns about Jung losing interest in her and abandoning her. I thought that the
word association test was very interesting because it could reveal some subconscious
thoughts that people were not aware of sometimes from just a few words from
people’s mind.
The word association test is a psychological test that relates to the theories of
psychoanalysis - the study of the unconscious mind. According to the psychodynamic
perspective, people are controlled by unconscious forces, early childhood
experiences and unresolved conflicts. The words that the clients blurt out in the
word association test can reveal both of their conscious and unconscious or
subconscious thoughts. The clients’ response to the stimuli words can reveal their
personality characteristics, emotional disturbances or internal conflicts and so on.
The word association test also relates to the cognitive psychology discussed in class,
which study how people take in, manipulate, store, and retrieve information, make
decisions and solve problems.
Reveal conscious and unconscious thoughts of his wife
Psychoanalysis
He observes her use of the word 'No' to divorce, he observes her hesitancy in
responding to the word 'baby;' and, as a result, he deduces that his wife is trying to
hide her fear of being abandoned by him (a gut feeling that proves dead-on in light of
Jung's multiple affairs)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/reel-therapy/201111/review-dangerous-
method
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychologist-the-movies/201210/freud-
jung-in-dangerous-method
http://www.lolajournal.com/2/dangerous_method.html

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