20: A Dangerous Method: Sabina Spielrein, Carl Jung, Otto Gross

Ordinary Unhappiness

Abby, Patrick, and Dan watch David Cronenberg’s 2011 film A Dangerous Method, which dramatizes the complex relationships between Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sabina Spielrein in the first two decades of the twentieth century. They discuss Freud and Jung’s fraught relationship and eventual break; Jung’s relationship with Spielrein in life and on film; Spielrein’s biography and her pioneering work as a psychoanalytic theorist and clinician in her own right; other key figures in the development of psychoanalysis, including Eugen Bleuler and Otto Gross (especially Gross’s commitments to anarchism and his concept of mutual analysis); the role of Zurich and the Burghölzli Hospital as a key center of early psychoanalysis; Freud’s one and only trip to America; women as objects of exchange in the development of psychoanalysis; Freud’s Judaism versus Jung’s Protestantism and Jung’s maddening (to Freud) tendencies towards mysticism; and the ways that Spielrein’s work prefigures the late Freudian concept of the death drive.
Books discussed include:

Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein, by John Lauren
Sabina Spielrein: the Woman and the Myth, by Angela M. Sells
The Essential Writings of Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of Psychoanalysis, edited by Ruth I. Cape and Raymond Burt
Freud’s Women, by Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester
The essay by Sabina Spielrein that Patrick discusses is entitled “Destruction as a Cause of Coming Into Being”

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