A Most Dangerous Method
The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“Has all the elements of a juicy novel . . . riveting. . . . Reudite and elegant.” —Newsday
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, Direcetd by Dabid Cronenbertg and STARRING KEIRA KNIGHTLY, VIGGO MORENSEN, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This exciting study sheds much new light on the vexed Jung-Freud partnership and on the current status of psychoanalysis. At its hub is Sabina Spielrein (1886-1941), one of the first women psychoanalysts, whom Jung treated for hysteria when she was 18. She evidently fell in love with Jung, and he broke off their intense relationship to avert public scandal. Spielrein found in Freud a friend and mentor, confiding to him the details of her attachment to Jung. Kerr, a clinical psychologist and historian, asserts that Freud attempted to use what he knew about Jung's personal life to exert ideological control over the psychoanalytic movement. In Kerr's scenario, Jung apparently was aware of Freud's secret affair with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays--an affair which is denied by many biographiers, but that Kerr defends as plausible based on Jung's explicit testimony and on recent scholarship. It was after Jung threatened to retaliate by revealing what he knew about Freud's personal life, Kerr maintains, that their collaboration dissolved. He argues that both men had an opportunity to make psychoanalysis an open, scientifically grounded discipline, but instead succumbed to ambition, dogma and personal animus. Kerr also charges that Freud and Jung suppressed Spielrein's own fertile theory of the unconscious, which conceived of sexuality as fusion rather than pleasure.
