Scholar-turned-author Jed Rubenfeld wanted to analyse Sigmund Freud, but his psychosexual whodunit ended up on Richard and Judy�s couch

Picture my delight. A sex murder mystery in which Carl Gustav Jung, betrayer of psychoanalysis and a man who got away withmurder(figurativelyspeaking)for most of his career, is one of the possible suspects. But almost all the historical background to Jed Rubenfeld's award-winning novelTheInterpretationOfMurderis grounded in historical fact, so it's not giving away too much to say that Jung didn't do it.

For Sigmund Freud did visit the US in 1909, in the company of Jung and Sandor Ferenczi. It was the only time he crossed the Atlantic and the lectures he gave at Clark University were instrumental in establishing psychoanalysis in America. It is also known that something traumatic happened to Freud during his visit. Ever afterwards, he referred to Americans as savages and blamed them for manyofthepsychosomatic ailments that plagued him for the rest of his life - even those whose onsetcouldbedatedmuch earlier. In the same way, anyone who knows even a little basic Freud will guess that the female leadandsurvivingvictimin Rubenfeld's novel, Nora Acton, is a version of the famous "Dora", whose case history has an iconic place in the Freudian canon.

Knowing that makes the outcome of the case a little more predictable. It doesn't, however, tarnish enjoyment of this clever book. His real game is elsewhere.

TheInterpretationOfMurderwasa modest seller in America but it gained an unexpected pair of champions in the UK. It's perhaps hard to imagine Richard and JudydiscussingtheOedipuscomplex, counter-transference and the aetiology of sexual neuroses - and yet it was their imprimatur which broke the book in Britain - but it's fair to say the chat-show couch isn't so different from the psychoanalytic couch.

IputittoJedRubenfeldthat Oprah-whosemassively influential book club was the model for R&J's - was perhaps the tail-end of a vast therapeutic culture in America that began with Freud's visit. "Yes, exactly," he says. "In America,youhave this pervasiveness of the therapeutic. Every problem is reduced to low self-esteem.

"Whatyouseeon Oprah and similar shows is a corruption of the kind of encounter with the therapist which Freud wrote about so brilliantly. That's one of the things that drew me to the subject. Those classic case histories are so beautifully written, they're almost novels."

Abrilliantlegalwriterhimself,and currently the Robert R Slaughter professor of law at Yale University, Rubenfeld wrote his Princeton senior thesis on Freud, and is well aware of the role "the law" played in Freud's post-Judaic thinking, as well as the obvious parallels between legal investigation and psychoanalysis. It's also not the first time that the two have been imagined as working in tandem: Hitchcock's Spellbound is a key text, and Rubenfeld himself points to the larky collaboration of Freud and Sherlock Holmes (cocaine users both) in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.

But what he does in The Interpretation Of Murder is to restore some of the danger to the psychoanalytic process. In an age of absolute and unedited revelation, it is hard to recover just how shocking and subversive Freud's agenda was. Why, despite so muchresistancefromthepsychiatric establishment in America - some of which forms a subplot in the novel - did Freud's ideasachievesuchasuccess,and subsequently dominance, in the US?

"I think that's a very interesting question. The simplest answer is that psychoanalysis allowed people to talk about sex, and to talk about it seriously and scientifically. This, remember, was largely a Puritan culture, with all the taboos and strictures that implies.Psychoanalysisofferedan acceptablewayoftalkingaboutthe completely unacceptable."

There are signs, even in 1909, that a rigorous discipline was always in danger of being seen as a kind of intellectual parlour game for America's leisured class. At a set-piece dinner party, Freud offers off-the-cuff analyses of fellow guests. Again, much of what he says echoes strongly with the written record. "Well, people very kindly wroteandaskedhowI'dmanagedto capture his voice, and Jung's, so well," says Rubenfeld. "The truth is that about nine-tenths of what they say in the book is taken straight from letters and diaries. My central character a budding psychoanalyst called Stratham Younger is completely invented, but it was very important to me that everything else was built on solid ground."

Given that The Interpretation Of Murder is not just a mystery yarn, but also a celebration of New York at the peak of high modernism, with skyscrapers replacing the brownstones and horse-drawn traffic being replaced by the automobile, I wondered to what extent it was also a "post-9/11 novel", a nostalgic yearning for a time when great buildings went up rather than came down.

"I certainly didn't see it that way, though maybe that was the case unconsciously. I guess I was thinking more about the anarchist attacks and the climate of fear they induced just a few years after Freud's visit. When I started the book, I was quite happy to invent details, but as time went on and I started the check, it became just as important to be accurate about this extraordinary city as I was about Freud and Jung." Followers of the latter were presumably not best pleased with his unsympathetic portrayal? Rubenfeld laughs - "I get emails every week from Jungians saying How dare you?'" - but he sounds unrepentant.

Given that the events of the case are fictional - where they're not borrowed from the "Dora" case - what does Rubenfeld think really happened to Freud in the US? "Nothing as dramatic as the book. I think it's quite simple. It was in America that Jung broke with Freud and set off on his own course" - another of the book's great set-pieces - "and Freud made an unconscious connection between the event and the place. Quite simply, he never forgave America for taking Jung, his most loyal disciple, away from him, even if that would have happened anyway." Freud's physical frailties, including an embarrassing tendency to wet himself, are also noted, forming part of a larger picture.

I put it to Rubenfeld that The Interpretation Of Murder, far from following Spellbound and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, was much more influenced by Henry James (whose brother William, incidentally, was one of America's leading psychologists). Surely the plot was an example of the great Jamesian theme: the fraught encounter of the Old World and the New; the former wily, wise, deeply cultured but also psychically wounded and perhaps decadent, the latter young, raw, thrusting and innocent, but with an energy that was lost in Europe. If the broad themes weren't enough, then surely the name Stratham Younger was a clue? "I'm really surprised no-one else has spotted that. I wanted a character name that would sound like Lambert Strether in James's The Ambassadors. So, yes, that is what the book is about."

It's a strange position Rubenfeld finds himself in. His book tackles heavy game, and does so with wit and style, but it's been made a bestselling British success because of the very same therapeutic prurience he finds dismaying back home. Which brings us back to Richard and Judy, big players in the book trade, and a fascinating pair in their own right. Enough material there for a whole conference, you have to think.

The Interpretation Of Murder (Headline Review, £7.99) is out now