Jed Rubenfeld The Interpretation of Murder

Freud only visited the States once and that was quite enough; though why it was enough remained a mystery until today, when Rubenfeld's best selling novel, The Interpretation of Murder explores a possible explanation. Rubenfeld recreates early Twentieth Century New York with great energy and allows us to meet not only Freud himself but also Jung, Ernest Young and the Brooklyn Bridge!

It's a cracking read and has a fabulous climatic scene set in a submerged caisson beneath the river, where the two heroes are looking for a body in a trunk.

How about this for exit velocity?!

' One, two - three.' Younger pulled the red handle. The ceiling panels opened at once, and two men, yelling for their lives, with a black trunk in tow, shot up through an elevator shaft full of water as if fired from a cannon.'

If you know of Freud's famous Dora case, then this book with its beautiful, 'mixed up' protagonist Nora provides a provocative critique- and like the Dora case the reader may cry out 'No no no!' at some of the very contentious assumptions and blind spots of 'science'.

Reading The Interpretation of Murder is a great way to spend a day!

The Interpretation of Murder

Jed Rubenfeld

Holt, Sep 2006, $26.00

ISBN: 0805080988

In 1909, Dr. Sigmund Freud and his retinue leave Vienna for New York before journeying on to lecture at Clark University in Massachusetts. At about the same time that the Austrian left the steamship George Washington for the Balmoral, someone brutally kills Elizabeth Riverford, whose battered corpse was left hanging from a chandelier in an upscale apartment. The next day wealthy seventeen years old Nora Acton barely escapes with her life, but suffers selective amnesia, unable to remember anything about the violent encounter.

Local Freudian analyst Dr. Stratham Younger asks Dr. Freud to mentor him as he works with Nora. Freud agrees to help the young woman regain her memory, which would identify the killer. As Freud also investigates the crimes committed by a sexual predator on wealthy upper class females, he finds a horde of suspects capable of using whips, knives, chains, and other ilk on women; especially an immoral entrepreneur, the killer of architect Stanford White, and Freud's prot g Carl Jung.

This is an interesting historical mystery that at times can be difficult to read as the subject of psychoanalytical theory of the period supersedes the cast and the investigation. Readers will appreciate the hero adulation Younger (and the author) have for Freud though it turns the Father of Modern Psychology more into a perfect legend than a full blooded individual with flaws. Many readers will find the portrayal of Jung as an insane violent lunatic a shocker (don't know how true this is though Jung did suffer a breakdown after his split from Freud). Though the whodunit takes a back seat to the beginning of psychiatry in America as the fascinating plot builds from Freud's only visit here; THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER showcases the early history of psychoanalysis.

Harriet Klausner