A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein - Softcover

Kerr, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679735801 ISBN 13: 9780679735809

Publisher: Vintage, 1994

Synopsis

“Has all the elements of a juicy novel . . . riveting. . . . Reudite and elegant.” —Newsday

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, Directed by David Cronenberg and starring Keira Knightly, Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, and Vincent Cassel.
 
In 1907, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung began what promised to be both a momentous collaboration and the deepest friendship of each man’s life. Six years later they were bitter antagonists, locked in a savage struggle that was as much personal and emotional as it was theoretical and professional. Between them stood a young woman named Sabina Spielrein, who had been both patient and lover to Jung and colleague and confidante to Freud before going on to become an innovative psychoanalyst herself.

With the narrative power and emotional impact of great tragedy, A Dangerous Method is impossible to put down.

About this title

About the Author:

John Kerr (1950–2016) is best known for writing A Most Dangerous Method, a book that became the basis for a play and a movie. Kerr was trained as a clinical psychologist at New York University. He was an editor at The Analytic Press, a scholarly press specializing in works on psychoanalysis, and was coeditor and a contributor to Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis. He died in Portland, Maine at age 66.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A solid new interpretation of the short-lived but oft-analyzed collaboration between Freud and Jung, in which the mysterious Sabina Spielrein figures prominently. Using Spielrein's correspondence and journals--discovered in the 1970's and first appearing in Aldo Carotenuto's A Secret Symmetry (1982)--Kerr traces a fascinating, credible web of influence and cross-fertilized ideas that he weaves skillfully into a record of psychoanalytic history. Spielrein--a young, neurotic Russian who was in Zurich to receive psychoanalytical treatment and attend medical school--was Jung's patient and, later, his lover; but even though a falling out prompted her to move to Vienna to become a Freudian, the ties between analyst and patient remained strong--so much so that Kerr contends that Spielrein can be seen as the model for Jung's concept of the ``anima'' (the female part of the male psyche). By chronicling this progression of events from 1904 to the final, fragmentary evidence of the pair's contact in the 1920's--before Spielrein returned to Russia in hopes of building a psychoanalytic movement, only to run afoul of Stalin-- the depth to which Jung and Spielrein influenced each other's thinking appears clear. Spielrein left her mark on Freud as well, in the form of a 1912 essay positing a link between an individual's desire for death and the sexual instinct. Most important to Kerr's history, however, is the intense interplay between Jung and Freud, with the decay of their mutual admiration into animosity and recrimination hastened by Spielrein's presence. More attentive to Jung's side of the equation, perhaps, but still a neat, substantial piece of psychoanalytic puzzle-solving, provocative and eminently readable. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0679735801
• ISBN 13: 9780679735809
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 624