Patient. The Russian Love of Carl Jung

Zurich, early 20th century. In the famous Burghölzli clinic, an experiment begins that is destined to enter history. Young doctor Carl Gustav Jung takes on the treatment of Sabina Spielrein — a brilliant girl from Russia, whose diagnosis seems like a sentence. However, what started as a medical practice quickly transcends the boundaries of the permissible, turning into an intellectual and emotional duel. Sabina Spielrein, the first female psychoanalyst, after her journey from Jung's patient to scholar, tries to realize her ideas in Soviet Russia, but her life is cut short in 1942 in occupied Rostov, where she perishes along with her daughter in a mass shooting of Jews, leaving behind only burned manuscripts and a forgotten name. Elena Arnoldi masterfully reconstructs the fate of Sabina — not just a "patient" or "muse," but an independent thinker who stood at the origins of psychoanalysis. In this book, personal drama intertwines with the scientific confrontation of two titans — Jung and Freud, for whom Spielrein became both a stumbling block and a fateful inspiration. Before the reader unfolds a panorama of European culture on the eve of great upheavals: from the sterile wards of the Swiss clinic to the brilliant halls of Vienna. This is a narrative about a woman's right to her own voice, about the fine line between genius and madness, and about love, which became both the highest gift and the heaviest trial for the heroes. Based on letters and documents, the book brings back from oblivion the name of a woman whose ideas were ahead of their time and laid the foundation for 20th-century psychoanalysis.