Although Launer portrays an intelligent, intellectually creative woman, he fails to make a convincing case that her...
A forgotten psychoanalyst’s fevered life.
Tavistock Clinic senior staff member Launer (co-editor: Clinical Uncertainty in Primary Care, 2014, etc.) asserts that Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942) deserves more attention for her groundbreaking work: the first study of the internal logic of schizophrenic speech, her insights into children’s imaginations, and her use of Darwinian theory in her hypothesis of “the inseparable connection between death and sex.” Although Launer refrains from using technical terms, nonspecialist readers may weary of the minute detail with which he renders Spielrein’s life, which featured a severe mental breakdown, incoherent ravings, obsession with her therapist, Carl Jung, and much neurotic behavior. Granted access to newly discovered diaries and letters, the author admits that most of her papers, controlled by her estate, are unavailable to researchers. Nevertheless, he manages to fill out some mysteries of her stressful youth: Her father was alternately depressed or enraged; her mother, erratic, hysterical and overly anxious; both parents pressured her to excel academically. When her father beat her, she became sexually aroused; when her younger sister died, she fell apart. Tics, grimaces, psychosomatic symptoms and violent mood swings worsened. At 18, she was hospitalized in a mental asylum and diagnosed with hysteria; Jung was the admitting physician. Although Launer does not have evidence for the quality of Jung’s treatment, the result of their meeting was her consuming adoration, which he encouraged. “Her love for him,” Launer writes, “replaced her far more troubling obsessions….Her erotic experiences with him may have been her first experience of tender physical contact.” Later, she broke off the affair but wanted to remain friends; he cruelly spurned her. Freud became involved as a confidant of each, dismissing Spielrein when he was still friends with Jung but eager to win her over once he ended that relationship.
Although Launer portrays an intelligent, intellectually creative woman, he fails to make a convincing case that her significance transcends her time.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1468310580
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
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