A Most Dangerous Method

In 1907 Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav 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. In 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. Drawing on years of research (and a cache of recently discovered documents), this mesmerizing book reconstructs the fatal triangle of Freud, Jung, and Spielrein. It encompasses clinical method and politics, hysteria and anti-Semitism, sexual duplicity and intellectual brilliance wielded as blackmail. Learned, humane, and impossible to put down, A Most Dangerous Method is intellectual history with the narrative power and emotional impact of great tragedy.