A sensitive biography of a woman whose emotional and intellectual strengths were the ballast of her marriage and family.
The making of two psychoanalysts: Carl Jung and his loyal, ever supportive wife.
When she was 17, Emma Rauschenbach, the quiet, shy daughter of an “unimaginably wealthy” Swiss business magnate, met the impoverished medical student Carl Jung (1875-1961). Already engaged to a young man from her own class, she refused Jung’s first proposal of marriage. But eventually, encouraged by her mother, she was won over by her handsome, intelligent, boisterous, and persistent suitor. Award-winning documentary producer Clay (Trautmann’s Journey: From Hitler Youth to FA Cup Legend, 2010, etc.) tries to push Emma to the center of this sympathetic, carefully researched biography, but Emma’s volatile, difficult husband intrudes, resulting in a portrait of a troubled marriage and the rivalrous beginnings of psychoanalysis. Clay diagnoses Jung’s neurosis as a kind of split personality: a “loud, opinionated, energetic Steam-Roller” Personality 1 alternated with Personality 2, a depressed, neurotic, “inferior wretch” who flew into inexplicable rages; withdrew from family life (the Jungs had five children); and was haunted by disturbing dreams. Confronting her husband’s dramatic mood swings was one challenge for Emma; another was his conviction that infidelity was a requirement for a good marriage. Clay chronicles many “infatuations,” including notorious liaisons with two deeply unstable patients: Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff. Wolff came to live with the Jungs, with Emma’s acquiescence, serving as Carl’s “anima figure.” Spielrein, Wolff, and Emma herself became analysts, demonstrating the fluid nature of professionalism in early psychoanalysis. Clay maintains that Emma’s close involvement in her husband’s work provided her analytical training. As is well-known, Freud first considered Jung to be his heir, but Jung came to reject Freud’s views and, to Emma’s dismay, broke off their relationship. “So we are rid of them at last,” Freud wrote to a colleague, “the brutal holy Jung and his pious parrots.” Emma forged her own friendship with Freud, often sharing her analysis of her husband and herself.
A sensitive biography of a woman whose emotional and intellectual strengths were the ballast of her marriage and family.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-224512-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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