Kerr - A most dangerous method: the story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein

Acclaim for
JOHN KERRS
A Most Dangerous Method

An invaluable corrective to received views about the Jung-Freud relationship. We gain insight into the sexual ethics of the earliest psychoanalysts and the sexual politics that affected the shaping of both Freudian and Jungian theory.

The New York Review of Books

At some points, it reads like an epistolary novel; at others, it reads like one of Freuds or Jungs famous case histories. [Kerr] superbly re-creates both the social and personal contexts for the emergence of the dominant mode of self-understanding of our time.

San Francisco Chronicle

A Most Dangerous Method amounts to a new history of the early years of psychoanalysis. Kerr is clever and thorough, ingenious and reasonable. His overall picture is convincing and in many ways surprising.

The Independent on Sunday

John Kerr has written a detailed and enthralling book fascinating. Sabina Spielrein emerges as a still small voice of much endurance and integrity. Now she takes her place as the original model for Jungs animathat archetypal feminine force by which men unconsciously are so often held in thrall.

Daily Telegraph

Fiction could not better this. It would be difficult to imagine a more fascinating device to tell the story of Freuds acrimonious break-up with Jung than the introduction of the character of Spielrein. With tremendous skill Kerr has not only rescued her from obscurity, he has told an amazing story, and simultaneously given an authoritative history which deserves to be regarded as the unexpurgated rise of psychoanalysis.

The Herald

Kerr eyeballs the human oddities that were preserved, like bugs in amber, in the text and texture of the new science.

Village Voice

Kerrs masterful feat is his demonstration of how rapidly [the] dimensions of personal intimacy, political maneuvering and developing theory merged into one another.

Newsday

A welcome and learned elucidation of the intricacies of the Freud-Jung relationship nowhere treated so exhaustively. A worthy epitaph for Spielrein. The book is sure to become a classic in its field.

The European

The story is all the more powerful for its authors scholarly but nimble style. John Kerr has constructed his own convincing synthesis.

The Observer

Kerr tells the story of Spielreins life with great narrative skill, and argues persuasively for the importance of her work. Should be read by anyone with an interest in the cultural history of the 20th century.

The Mail on Sunday

Above all, Kerr rehabilitates Spielrein. Thanks to Kerr, her psychoanalytic contribution will now be reassessed. The Spielrein-Jung liaison has all the qualities of true romance: bitter-sweet, ecstatic, jealous, adoring, anguished.

The Sunday Times (London)

JOHN KERR
A Most Dangerous Method

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

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 1994

Copyright 1993 by John Kerr

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1993.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, for permission to print an excerpt from a March 12, 1913, unpublished letter from James Jackson Putnam to Fanny Bowditch, Fanny Bowditch Katz Archive; and an excerpt from an interview of Carl Meier with G. Nameche, conducted September 11, 1970, Jung Oral History Archive, 59.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

American Medical Association: Excerpts from letters of October 10, 1910, March 11, 1911, and November 3, 1911, from Bleuler to Freud, from Freud-Bleuler Correspondence by Alexander and Selesnick (Archives of General Psychiatry, 12, pp. 19), copyright 1965 by the American Medical Association. Reprinted by permission.

Andover Newton Theological School: Excerpt from Jung and Freud by Billinsky (Andover Newton Quarterly, 10), copyright 1969 by Andover Newton Theological School. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Ayer Company Publishers Inc.: Excerpts from Sigmund Freud: His Personality, His Teaching and His School by Fritz Wittels (reprint of 1924 edition, George Allen & Unwin, London). Reprinted by permission of Ayer Company Publishers Inc., P.O. Box 958, Salem, NH 03079.

Owing to limitations of space, all remaining acknowledgments of permission to reprint published material will be found following the index.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Kerr, John.
A most dangerous method: the story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina
Spielrein / John Kerr. 1 st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78812-2
1. PsychoanalysisHistory. 2. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 18751961. 3. Freud, Sigmund, 18561939. 4. Spielrein, Sabina.
I. Title.
BF173.K42 1993
150.1950922dc20 92-54802

v3.1

Some people are lucky enough to have three parents.
This book is dedicated to

my mother
my father
and Mabel Groom

I hope that Freud and his pupils will push their ideas to their utmost limits, so that we may learn what they are. They cant fail to throw light on human nature, but I confess that he made on me personally the impression of a man obsessed with fixed ideas. I can make nothing in my own case with his dream theories, and obviously symbolism is a most dangerous method.

William James, letter of 28 September 1909 to Thodore Flournoy

T HIS BOOK owes its existence to a small number of people whose interest, patience, and generosity outlasted my ability to exhaust the available supply of all three traits. First, I must thank Paul Schrader, who introduced me to the topic and facilitated the translation of Spielreins early papers. An inadvertent mentor, Schrader not only intuited that an important story lay inside the tangle of available documents but pursued that story with a rare intellectual honesty.

Peter Swales, a friend as well as a colleague, deserves far more credit than space allows. Had I not early tumbled to Swaless researches, most of them then unpublished, which he made available with a generosity bordering on recklessness, I would have undoubtedly gotten off on the wrong track. Swales has done more independent archival research and has dug up more new information about Freud than almost any other living person. He has also gathered what is surely one of the finest private libraries in the world regarding Freud and the early history of psychoanalysis. He put all of it at my disposal. One has to be personally acquainted with Swales to grasp what a treasure-trove of information he isand how willingly he will make time for discussion of elusive and difficult points, even at one in the morning if need be.