Jung and Freud join minds to cure a woman’s madness in this “fascinating” novel based on a true historic case—“an elaborate psychological detective story” (The New York Times Book Review).
When her parents abandon young Sabine Schanderein at the Burgholzli Institute, a mental hospital in Zurich, she’s swathed like a mummy in filthy rags, raging like a banshee, and violently repelled by the imminence of strangers. To all but psychiatrist and anthropologist Dr. Carl Jung, she is hopeless. More than intrigued by his enigmatic patient, Jung believes he can cure her. But in unwrapping the first layer of the mystery, Jung becomes enmeshed in Sabine’s primal dreams that reach back to the ancient fertility rituals of Western civilization. Confounded by her erotic digressions and compulsions, Jung contacts his mentor, Sigmund Freud, for consultation. Together, they work to put together the pieces of Sabine’s past. Though unprepared for where the harrowing, sensually charged road to Sabine’s recovery will take him, Jung willingly, helplessly, and obsessively follows it.
“Atavistic dream visions and the mysteries of abnormal psychology come vividly to life in this captivating fictionalized account” of one of Carl Jung’s most celebrated true cases—one of love, betrayal, redemption, and the mysteries of the mind at the dawn of psychoanalysis (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
