A Most Dangerous Method - Softcover

John Kerr

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1856195120 ISBN 13: 9781856195126

Publisher: Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd (London), 1995

Synopsis

In 1907, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav 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. In between them stood a young woman named Sabina Spielrein: a patient and lover to Jung, a colleague and confidante to Freud, and one of the greatest minds in modern psychiatry. This mesmerizing book reconstructs the fatal triangle of Freud, Jung and Spielrein. It encompasses clinical methods and politics, hysteria and anti-Semitism, sexual duplicity and intellectual brilliance wielded as blackmail. Learned, humane and impossible to put down, A Dangerous Method is intellectual history with the narrative power and emotional impact of great tragedy.

About this title

About the Author:

John Kerr was trained as a clinical psychologist at New York University. He is an editor at The Analytic Press, a scholarly press specialising in works on psychoanalysis, and was co-editor and a contributor to Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis. He divides his time between Boston and New York City.

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: Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd (London)
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1856195120
• ISBN 13: 9781856195126
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 642