Saturday at Zenda. Saturday of contemporary classics. Saturday, in this case, devoted to Healing by the Spirit, a fascinating historical-biographical device that the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (Vienna, 1881 – Rio de Janeiro, 1942) crafted and published in 1931 and that has recently been reintroduced into its catalog by the publishing house DeBolsillo. Perhaps the greatest master of twentieth‑century European literary biography, Zweig brought together three disparate figures—the physician Franz Anton Mesmer, the writer Mary Baker Eddy, and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud—in an effort to trace the historical thread of what could be described as the modern bid to attain healing through the control of the mind.
The publisher itself notes about the book: “Healing by the Spirit is one of Stefan Zweig’s most singular biographical essays. From the eighteenth‑century “animal magnetism” to the birth of psychoanalysis, the author traverses the history of an idea as powerful as it is controversial: the possibility that the soul, faith, will, or self‑knowledge intervene in the healing of the body. Zweig portrays, with vibrant prose and a masterful psychological gaze, three decisive and opposing figures: Franz Anton Mesmer, precursor of suggestion and hypnosis; Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, who turned faith into a mass therapeutic force; and Sigmund Freud, who carried spiritual healing into the realm of exploring the unconscious. A fascinating work. Three ways of confronting the mystery of pain, illness, and the hidden forces of the human psyche.”
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Author: Stefan Zweig. Title: Healing by the Spirit. Publisher: DeBolsillo. Sale: Todos tus libros.