Synopsis
The story of Sabina Spielrein--a student and lover of Jung and later a colleague and friend of Freud--provides insight into the split between the two men
Reviews
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.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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.
Spielrein, one of the first women psychoanalysts, was Jung's patient, student, and lover; later, she was Freud's colleague in Vienna. Her diary and letters were previously discussed in Aldo Carotenuto's A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein Between Jung and Freud ( LJ 5/15/82). Using these and other sources, including Jung's letters to Spielrein, clinical psychologist and historian Kerr reconstructs Spielrein's relationship with Jung and Freud, portraying her as an influential if peripheral figure during their period of collaboration. Kerr has written a fascinating history of psychoanalysis focusing on its origin as a clinical method of psychotherapy. Highly recommended for academic and large public libraries.
- Lucille Boone, San Jose P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
