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The delicate fabric of transference and countertransference is seldom exposed to the elements outside the rarified atmosphere of the consulting room. Over the years, analysts have learnt from the experience of their elders to utilize intuitively yet contain and conceal their own feelings, and by providing a psychic 'playground', restrain their patients from enacting and acting out their feelings in the real world.
'A Secret Symmetry' draws aside the veil of time and confidentiality, revealing a hitherto untold story of an 'uncanny' bond between analyst and analysand, in which the inevitable discrepancy of status and emotion was removed and the natural asymmetry, disturbed.
The patient, Sabina Spielrein, was a 20-year-old Russian girl suffering from a 'psychotic hysteria'; the analyst was Carl Gustav Jung. The love that developed between them is the focus of heart-searching deliberations in Sabina's recently discovered diary. The development and dissolution of this relationship is the subject of a three-way correspondence between herself, Jung, and Freud, who became confessor and intervener to them both. All these letters (with the exception of the Freud–Jung letters published elsewhere and Jung's letters to Sabina withheld from publication) are presented in the book, including 20 from Freud to Sabina.
By far the most interesting aspect of the book is a rich and thoughtful analysis of the transference/countertransference situation by the editor, Italian training analyst, Aldo Carotenuto.
Sabina began treatment with Jung in Bleuler's Burgholzli clinic in Zurich in 1904. Her symptoms, from which she'd suffered for six years, included an inability to look at anyone (without fantasizing them engaged in defaecation or sexuality) alternating with 'fits of weeping, laughter and screaming'. She manifested these symptoms 'in alarming fashion' from the age of 14, following years of practising faecal retention and masturbation, night terrors, hallucinations and a belief that