Main description:

Pierri clearly links modern psychoanalytic practice with Freud's interests in the occult using primary sources, some of which have never before been published in English.
Assesses the origins of key psychoanalytic ideas.

Contents:

Introduction

Stefano Bolognini

Prologue: a result of character: the cocaine, this magical substance

1. Vienna, Porta Orientis of the Unconscious

The force of suggestion: the "wonderful somnambulists"

Hypnosis

Vienna, laboratory of modernity

2. The Young Freud

A passionate young researcher into nature

First love

Martha and Bertha: the languages of passion

3. The Lesson of Jean Martin Charcot

At the Salpetriere

The apparatus of language

The magic of words

4. The lesson of Josef Breuer and the "descent to the mothers"

Studies on hysteria

A difficult separation: not all debts can be paid

A foundation myth: a false pregnancy and a cure with a defect.

5. Sigmund Freud's lesson

The discovery of a false connection

Irma's throat and the feminine at the origin of psychoanalysis.

Dream as desire

6. Fliess and the invention of psychoanalysis

A secret correspondence

My friend in Berlin

Freud's heart trouble

7. The discovery of infantile sexuality

Self-analysis and the writing cure

Cherchez la femme: the case of Emma Eckstein

8. Original thought requires a rupture

The "reader of thoughts"

The accusation of plagiarism

A future in the image of the past: predestination and superstition

9. Occultism made in the USA

Spiritualism

Medium, media, and "mental telegraphy"

First hypotheses about the unconscious

10 Jung, spiritualism, and countertransference: the world of the dead

Jung, Poltergeist phenomena, and seances

The arrival at Burghoelzli

First visit to Vienna

Easter 1909: Jung's spiritual complex and Sabina

The dangerous fascination of the "beautiful Jewess"

11. Ferenczi, the unclassifiable

The sultan and his "clairvoyant"

A psychoanalyst "of a restless mind"

Ferenczi and the hidden treasure of Spiritualism

The encounter with Freud: a postponed transferential appointment

12. A journey to America

Three men and an eventful, mutually analytic crossing: the outward journey...

... and back again

13. The Danaan gift

The clairvoyant who reads Ferenczi's mind

The patient who reads Ferenczi's mind

The Palermo incident, or the interpretation of paranoia

The psychic work of the clairvoyant: two unfulfilled prophecies

14. An epistolary novel

Ferenczi and incestuous countertransferential storms: from mother to daughter

What is still missing is the fatherly blessing: fatefulness and Oedipal coincidences

Elma Palos, fragment of the analysis of a seduction

The open wound in Ferenczi's heart, a source of creativity

15. The Saturday goy: getting to know Dr Jones

The Welsh liar

Difficult beginnings

Freud's first pupil from Britain

Dr Jones's stethoscope: rationalisation and censorship of excess countertransference

A prescribed training analysis in Budapest

16. The intergenerational transmission of psychoanalysis

Love and death: the three women of the three pupils

"If you go to women, don't forget the whip"

At school with Freud: the transmission of psychoanalysis

17. The secret committee

The transformations and the desertion of Jung

A missed meeting: the "Kreuzlingen gesture"

The Committee: the Mannerbund and the defence of the "Cause" (Die Sache)

Totem and taboo: unconscious intelligence and intergenerational transmission of thought

18. 1913 - the year before the war

The last congress with Jung

A black tide of occultism

The question of telepathy

The dialogues of the unconscious

Epilogue: a fortune-teller visits Freud in Berggasse

Correspondence

Index