The healing through the spirit
Healing through the Spirit is a trilogy by Stefan Zweig published in 1931 . It comprises the biographies of three personalities who have dealt with the relationship between health and illness and spirit and religion: Franz Anton Mesmer , Mary Baker-Eddy and Sigmund Freud . Zweig began working on the texts in 1930 during a trip to Italy and completed them in Hamburg that year. He dedicated the work to the physicist Albert Einstein .
content
Similar to his great moments of mankind published three years earlier , which originally comprised five life descriptions, Zweig is not concerned with the reproduction of data and historical analyzes. His representations are novellist, pointed narratives, each of which focuses on a biographically exaggerated person who has made his contribution to an area that is fundamental for all of humanity. Nevertheless, the author does not want to take sides for any of the persons and medical directions he describes. He writes in the introduction:
"So I hope, by depicting these figures exclusively out of psychological creative joy, I have remained independent and in Mesmer's picture not a mesmerist, in that Baker-Eddys not a Christian scientist, in that Freud's not a complete psychoanalyst."
Along with Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, Zweig was one of the first German writers to acknowledge Freud's teachings and to deal with them in their own works. He himself attended Freud's office hours. In The Healing through the Spirit he aims less to present Freud's teaching than to classify it in terms of spiritual history. He is particularly positive about her educational character.
Very early in human history, the idea of curing illnesses had something to do with religion and belief in spiritual powers. The people believed in gods and expected help from the priests. However, it was later found out that healing can also be linked to material things. Medicinal plants helped people with all kinds of diseases.
The era of the Enlightenment had brought great progress in the field of medicine, but mental illnesses were helpless even in the 18th century. Franz Anton Mesmer came to Vienna to take part in the latest medical knowledge and became a student of Maria Theresa's personal physician , Gerard van Swieten . Through his experiments with magnetic stones, later through the use of suggestive power, he was able to activate people's self-healing powers in many ways. A way of healing through the Spirit was found.
The American Mary Baker-Eddy believed that you can overcome any disease if you just understand it. In the following years she developed her theology of Christian Science and in 1875 published her main work Science and Health with Key to the Holy Scriptures . Zweig is open to her ideas, but is not uncritical about them. So he notes that belief and business obviously go well together.
With this book, Stefan Zweig does not want to present a scientific study, but to illustrate the possibilities of spiritual and spiritual healing.
reception
The book was only partially well received by the critics. Sigmund Freud praised the Mesmer essay, but found Mary Baker-Eddy far too favorably presented. Basically, he was probably less likely to be “brought before the public in the company of Mesmer and Mary Eddy Baker”. After all, he expressed his “satisfaction” that Zweig “correctly recognized the most important thing in my case”, even if he emphasized “the petty-bourgeois correct element in me all too exclusively”. “I know from the cabaret that the format forces the artist to simplify and omit, but then a wrong picture emerges ... I am probably not going wrong in assuming that the content of the psa. Teaching was alien until the book was written. It deserves all the more recognition that you have made so much your own since then. "
Reviewers of the volume praised Zweig's distant reluctance towards psychoanalysis. In Zweig research, the Freud essay is partially received as a form of self-analysis.
expenditure
- The healing through the spirit. Mesmer, Mary Baker-Eddy, Freud. Insel, Leipzig 1931.
- The healing through the spirit. Mesmer, Mary Baker-Eddy, Freud. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-10-097052-7 . (= Collected works in individual volumes, 12). Permanent reprints in many publishers (public domain)
Web links
supporting documents
- ^ A b D. A. Prater: European of Yesterday - A Biography of Stefan Zweig. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1972, pp. 187 f.
- ^ Arnold Bauer: Stefan Zweig. Morgenbuch, Berlin 1996, p. 55 f.
- ↑ a b Joseph Strelka: Stefan Zweig - Free Spirit of Humanity. Österreichischer Bundesverlag, Vienna 1981, p. 73 f.
- ^ Letter from Sigmund Freud to Stefan Zweig, February 7, 1931. Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (Engl.)
- ↑ Thomas Anz: Confusion of feelings. Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud. literaturkritik.de