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The general public may never have heard of Sabina Spielrein , a pioneer in psychoanalysis were it not for the recent David Cronenberg (2011) movie, A Dangerous Method, in which some kinky sexual scenes of foreplay and spanking depicts her as Carl Jung's first “analytic” patient with whom he had a messy extramarital affair. Also featured is the shameful cover-up by Freud of Jung's despicable transgressions.
Freud apparently felt a need to endear himself to Jung, a highly respected gentile and his chosen “crown-prince” of his burgeoning movement—comprised of a fractious and boisterous group, mostly, causing the pejorative dismissal of psychoanalysis as a “Jewish Science.” As with so many historically based movies, this one was meant more for its dramatic entertainment values—though hyped as factual.
John Launer—a prominent English physician, family therapist, educator, and writer—presents us finally with a full and authoritative biography of Sabina Spielrein. He details the essence of her diaries and correspondences, archival records and recollections by family members about her relationships with Jung and Freud as well as a veritable “who is who” in the psychoanalytic movement in Europe and Russia. In this highly readable book, Launer has knit it all together in a mosaic form with scholarly source details and helpful explication of jargoned psychoanalytic discourse. He situates her in the several major cities in which she lived and practiced: Zurich, Geneva, Vienna, and Berlin, and on her return to Russia in the early 1920s, Moscow and Rostov (where she was to experience the turbulent period of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin's crackdown on psychoanalysis).
Launer's book effectively challenges several speculative assertions in the extant often very partisan Jungian or Freudian accounts. Although this book is not a hagiography, his heart is clearly touched by the pathos of his subject's life and periods of her poverty-stricken, lonely existence—yet he remains objective in rel