A Dangerous Method

“Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung met on 3 March 1907. They talked for thirteen hours in a row. The last time these men were in the same room was at the Fourth International Congress of Psychoanalysis, held in Munich on 7–8 September 1913. That day, as far as is known, they did not exchange a single word with each other… even though for each of them, it was the most significant friendship they had ever had in their lives.

Thus, in silence, the most turbulent relationship in the history of ideas came to an end. Nevertheless, though they worked together for just over six years, they decisively changed the course of thought in the twentieth century.

” Between them stood a young woman named Sabina Spielrein, who was a patient and lover of Jung, a trusted colleague of Freud, before becoming an innovative psychoanalyst herself in the history of the development of psychoanalytic thought.

“A Dangerous Method” by John Kerr reconstructs the fatal triangle of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein. The study covers clinical methods and politics, hysteria, antisemitism and intellectual brilliance wielded as blackmail.

Impossible to put down, “A Dangerous Method” is an intellectual history with the narrative power and emotional impact of a tragedy.