Ludwig Binswnger, Aby Warburg
Die unendliche Heilung: Aby Warburgs Krankengeschichte.
Zurich: Diaphanes, 2007. First edition. 9783037340080 287 pages.
Hardcover volume, measuring approximately 6.25" x 9.25", shows light shelfwear. Binding is firm. Interior is clean and bright.
"Between April 1921 and August 1924, Aby Warburg, the brilliant art historian and cultural scientist, was an inmate in the Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, where he had been admitted after a severe psychotic breakdown - he had threatened to kill himself and his family. The head of the psychiatric hospital was Ludwig Binswanger, an important psychiatrist whose findings were to profoundly change the approach to mental illness. Until now, not much else was generally known from this time other than that Warburg gave the famous lecture to his fellow patients about the snake ritual of the Hopi Indians. In fact, he repeatedly had periods of mental clarity and creative productivity during his illness. Binswanger's medical reports document delusions, aggressiveness towards staff, phobias and compulsive hygiene rituals. Warburg, who considered himself “incurably schizoid,” was not “given leave to normalize” until 1924. The highly praised edition of Aby Warburg's medical history, kept in the Tübingen University Archives, fulfills a long-held desideratum in Warburg research. With the edition, which is now also available in German and includes important documents compared to the Italian one, we can finally begin to close the "gap" between Warburg's work and psyche, which his biographers such as Ernst Gombrich deliberately kept secret. In addition to the medical files from Ludwig Binswanger, the volume also includes Warburg's autobiographical notes from that time, the correspondence between the two personalities, guard protocols as well as notes and letters from Warburg's assistant Fritz Saxl. “The Infinite Healing” becomes a unique testimony to the encounter between two important intellectual protagonists of the 20th century."