This Plunkett Lake Press eBook is produced by arrangement with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. “Health is natural; sickness is unnatural: at least so it seems to man,” is how Stefan Zweig begins his fascinating, often entertaining examinations of Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, and Sigmund Freud. “Bodily suffering is not assuaged by technical manipulation but through an act of faith.” Mental Healers is dedicated to Albert Einstein, the scientist who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. It first appeared in 1931 as Die Heilung durch den Geist, orHealing Through the Spirit, a title that anticipates our current interest in alternative medicine and the placebo effect. Zweig’s first healer, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), was a German physician who introduced “animal magnetism” to the world. Viewed by many as a charlatan, he died an outcast before he could properly understand and explain his discovery. Zweig’s second healer, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), was a New England matron who found her vocation only in middle age. She established Christian Science, an American Protestant system of religious practice that rejects medical intervention, when she was almost 60. Zweig’s third healer, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), was the Viennese Jewish physician who founded psychoanalysis. Zweig, who knew Freud and delivered a eulogy at his funeral, describes Freud’s then-new ideas with the insight of an artist who lived in the same time and place. Fluently written and psychologically astute, Mental Healers is compelling cultural history and a valuable window onto the genesis of new ideas in healing. “Mesmer, Eddy and Freud were critical figures alerting the modern world to the influences of the mental and emotional on health and illness. Their impact was tremendous and Zweig's classic study provides a wonderful opportunity to engage with these significant innovators.” — Ted Kaptchuk, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Director, Program in Placebo Studies & Therapeutic Encounter

Franz Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy and Sigmund Freud—three influential thinkers who travelled very different paths in their search for the crucial link between mind and body. Zweig's brilliant study explores the lives and work of these important figures, raising provocative questions regarding the efficacy and even the morality of their methods. An insight into the minds of three key thinkers who shaped the philosophy of our age, Mental Healers is a wonderfully intriguing and thought-provoking biographical work from a renowned master of the genre.

Stefan Zweig collected stories from three other authors to dwell on the topic of health and disease.The content is poignant, and quite diverse at time.

This third and final volume of the correspondence between the founder of psychoanalysis and one of his most colorful disciples brings to a close Sandor Ferenczi's life and the story of one of the most important friendships in the history of psychoanalysis. This volume spans a turbulent period, beginning with the unification of the psychoanalytic branch societies under the umbrella of the International Psychoanalytic Association. In 1923 the controversy over Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth erupted. Ferenczi had worked closely with Rank, and the exchange of letters in which Freud and Ferenczi come to grips with their understanding of Rank is emotionally intense. In 1926 Ferenczi gave a series of lectures on psychoanalysis in New York and became embroiled in a bitter controversy with American analysts over the practice of lay analysis, which eventually threatened to disrupt the unity of the International Association. Like Freud, Ferenczi supported lay analysis, but on his return from America his relationship with Freud deteriorated as Freud became increasingly critical of his theoretical and clinical innovations. Their troubled friendship was complicated still further by ill health -- Freud's cancer of the jaw and the pernicious anemia that finally killed Ferenczi in 1933. The controversies between Freud and Ferenczi continue to this day, as psychoanalysts reassess Ferenczi's innovations and increasingly challenge the allegations of mental illness leveled against him after his death by Freud and Ernest Jones. The correspondence, now published in its entirety, will deepen understanding of these issues and of the history of psychoanalysis as a whole.