FREUD AND JUNG: Years of Friendship, Years of Loss

by Linda Lewis Donn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1988

Here, first-time book-writer Donn offers a novelistic account of the friendship-turned-rivalry between Freud and Jung. Donn has culled the letters of Freud and Jung for telling exchanges, and supplemented her own conversations with family and colleagues of the two psychiatrists with excerpts from earlier interviews. Setting the scene in the last years of Freud's life in pre-WW II Vienna, she traces the events that led to the momentous meeting with Jung in 1907. Donn brings to life the initial enthusiasm and growing love between the two men, leading to their enormously complex and deep association--which lasted only six years. Both Freud and Jung acknowledged homosexual elements in their bond, and there was enough father-son rivalry and power complexes in the mix to keep their analyst-progeny busy for generations. Dorm's account make the bitter rupture seem inevitable and tragic, and the pair's lifelong regret and pain vivid. Along the way, she sketches the development of fundamental concepts, such as Freud's theory of the libido and Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, as well as the political struggles and factions that accompanied them. Donn has an engaging imagination and a journalist's eye for the facts. Her chronicle is at times breathlessly enthusiastic, but overall this is a lucid and intriguing version of the ideas and responsibilities behind the two dominant streams of psychoanalytic thought.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Scribners

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1988

Categories: NONFICTION