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

"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. nbsp; 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.… (more)

Media reviews

The New York Review of Books

Kerr is at his best when showing how inevitable it was that psychoanalysis be plagued by sectarianism and, in its reconstituted core, patched together by enforced ideological conformity. Running through this book, subtly but insistently, is a parallel between psychoanalysis and a modern

totalitarian regime in which propaganda campaigns and heresy trials come to preempt free debate. That analogy becomes inescapable when Kerr recounts the activity of Freud's top-secret "Committee," convened in 1912 by none other than Freud's official biographer-to-be, Ernest Jones, and taking as its mission the shielding of Freud from criticism by promulgating whatever his latest line might be and by heaping ridicule on his opponents. This Orwellian project, which continued until 1926 and remained undisclosed until 1944, guaranteed that the sounding board for Freud's newest fancies, like those of any insecure dictator, would be an echo chamber.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member yamiyoghurt

Well..... I didn't exactly finish the book. It got too boring in the middle.

I think I much prefer reading the thoughts of a person than narrative account of that person's life.