Soul Magic: A Century of Psychotherapy Author: Steve Ayan. Translated by Marshall Yarbrough ISBN-13: 9781805332374Publisher: Pushkin Press Guideline Price: £25; 352ppThere is a moment in Soul Magic when one realises this is not simply a history of psychotherapy. It is also something larger: a history of Europe’s search for meaning after the collapse of old certainties.In an age saturated with therapy, it is easy to forget that a century ago the notion that the mind might be healed through conversation was startling. Beginning with Sigmund Freud and ending in the therapeutic age, psychologist and writer Steve Ayan traces psychology through a cast of figures so vivid the book often reads less like scholarship than a great European novel. Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Rank, Carl Rogers, Frederick Perls and others move through its pages not merely as theorists, but as flawed, ambitious and contradictory human beings. Their intellectual disagreements become dramas; friendships fracture, rivalries intensify, affairs abound and personal relationships shape entire schools of thought.The rise of psychoanalysis unfolds against the backdrop of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the first World War, the decline of religious authority, the rise of fascism, nazism and the ideological battles of the 20th century.Particularly compelling is the treatment of Jung and Rudolf Steiner, figures who remind us that the boundary between psychology, spirituality and mysticism was once more porous than many accounts suggest.Ayan shows how psychotherapy oscillated between science and philosophy, medicine and myth, evidence and belief. Its founders were brilliant observers of human nature but also visionaries, ideologues and, sometimes, builders of intellectual sects. From Freud’s Vienna to California’s Esalen Institute, psychotherapy mingled with yoga, LSD-fuelled explorations of consciousness and the human potential movement, becoming part of a wider search for transcendence.Ayan restores to the narrative women too often relegated to the margins of psychology’s history. Figures such as Sabina Spielrein and Karen Horney emerge as pioneering thinkers whose contributions were frequently obscured by the cults of personality surrounding psychology’s founding fathers.The prose remains elegant, accessible and fluid throughout. Marshall Yarbrough’s translation from German reads effortlessly, carrying the book’s narrative energy and scope.Engrossing, humane and intellectually ambitious, Soul Magic illuminates not only psychotherapy’s evolution, but the wider cultural and spiritual crises of the modern world. Ayan reminds us that the history of psychotherapy is, at heart, humanity’s continuing effort to understand itself. That search remains unfinished.Adam Wyeth is a poet, playwright and critic. He is the author of five books.