Spielrein Research Articles

On the problem of interpreting Krotkaya’s suicide in F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel Krotkaya/A gentle creature

The article examines Fyodor Dostoevsky’s story Krotkaya (also titled A Gentle Creature) in the context of the interpretation of the main character’s suicide and provides a brief overview of opposing interpretations of the work. Despite the abundance of different interpretations, from biographical to religious connotations of the story, little attention has been paid to interpretations using a psychological approach. In connection with these, the author of the article proposes to expand the interpretation of the main character’s suicide from moral and ethical to psychological motives, by relying on the theory of destructive attraction developed by Sabina Spielrein. The article characterizes the concept of destructive drive and pays special attention to the issue of illustrations of the manifestation of the destructive drive directly from the main character of the story.

Freud’s Aphasia Book and Spielrein’s Destruction Paper: A Shared Fate, To Be Ignored and Restored

Abstract: This article discusses the early fate and subsequent revival of interest in Freud’s 1891 book, On Aphasia , and Sabina Spielrein’s 1912 Destruction paper. Early on, these authors shared a similar fate: a failure of recognition of the aforementioned works at the time of their initial publication. In Freud’s case, the number of books sold was minimal and the rest were shredded; it remained mostly unread and overlooked in discussions of neurological problems, although regarded as a classical contribution to the field of neurology. As for Spielrein, her paper, following its initial appearance in German, was not published until 80 years later in English! Although Spielrein had a profound impact throughout her mature career as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and developmental child psychologist, she remained unacknowledged during her lifetime and was virtually forgotten after her death. This article demonstrates that, although the importance of their seminal works was overlooked, recent developments in neuroscience have revived interest in On Aphasia and, in Spielrein’s case, her contributions to psychoanalysis and developmental psychology have become classics in these fields.

Sabina and Me: How Thinking About Sabina Spielrein Accompanied Me Through The Early Pandemic

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic ushered in novel life circumstances of destruction and chaos. Couples and families struggled with isolation, fear, lack of human contact, and absence of resources, such as school and church. In 1911, Sabina Spielrein, an early psychoanalyst, wrote the paper "Death as the cause of becoming" in which she argued that creativity arises from the destruction of previously viable entities coming together in a newly formed creation. During this period of pandemic quarantine, the author, a couple and family therapist, turned to Sabina Spielrein, colleagues, nature, and writing to think about the isolation, fear, and destruction confronting her, her patients, and the world at large. In this process, the author found theory, memory, and fellow travellers to join her in the use of these ideas to confront the challenges of life during the pandemic.

‘Dream of “Father Freudenreich”’ Reported by Dr. S. Spielrein

The text "Sabina Spielrein: to Love, to Die, to be Reborn” discussed the life and work of Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942), a Russian–Jewish early pioneer of psychoanalysis and pediatrician, an original clinician and scholar, who is still mostly remembered for her connection to Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and not for her groundbreaking contributions to the development of Freudian theory and practice. It also provides a context to the 1913 publication of Spielrein’s “Traum von ‘Pater Freudenreich’” in the IPA journal Internationale Zeitschrift für ärtzliche Psychoanalyse.

Barbara Low and Sabina Spielrein: Misrepresentations of Their Works in the History of Psychoanalysis

Freud’s references to Barbara Low’s Nirvana principle and Sabina Spielrein’s destructive instinct in Beyond the pleasure principle shaped how their works were later perceived in psychoanalytic historiography. This article examines this circumstance as exemplary of a predominant Freud-centred viewpoint that can give rise to considerable distortions concerning what one omits and what one emphasizes in the history of psychoanalysis. The objective here is to analyse these distortions and appraise their implications for historical research in this field. For this purpose, we first review the context in which Freud refers to Low and Spielrein in 1920. Next, we re-examine their respective careers and seek to delineate a broader appraisal, considering their writings and other available sources and scholarship. In conclusion, the methodological issues highlighted by this reassessment are briefly discussed.

Childhood and cultural evolution.

Already in 1912, Sabina Spielrein addressed the transforming and antagonistic movements of life that appear from conception in her work 'Destruction as the cause of coming into being'. Her writings form a bridge between Freud and Jung, as they establish the relationship between biological experiences and archetypes. In 1974 Lloyd deMause examined the intrinsic link between primary relational experiences, brain development and the system of beliefs and values of the Sapiens species. He outlined the parallel between the transformation of child education and cultural evolution. Reflecting this theoretical approach, in child psychotherapy we have the peculiar opportunity of resorting to experiences during pregnancy and birth, to gain a deeper understanding of self-expressions in spontaneous drawings, dreams and sand scenes.

Sabina Spielrein

Sabina Spielrein was a Russian psychoanalyst who worked in Zurich, Berlin, Geneva, Moscow and Rostov-on-Don. She influenced many well-known thinkers in psychoanalysis and psychology, including Jung, Freud, Piaget, Claparède, Vygotsky and Luria. After her death in the Shoah, her life and works were largely forgotten until the discovery of correspondence revealing her erotic relationship with Jung. She was then reinvented as a ‘femme fatale’ in popular culture. It is only in the twenty-first century that the details of her life have been properly reconstructed and that psychoanalysts have recognised her stature as an original thinker in many areas, including the death instinct, child development, attachment and evolution. This article gives an account of her life, explores the reasons for her erasure, and examines her two most significant papers.

Sabina Spielrein’s Death Drive, Queer Experience, and Psychoanalytic Twogetherness

ABSTRACT In “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” (1912), Sabina Spielrein theorized the death drive as the relational drive toward the death of the I, with the possibility of a future rebirth as part of a We. Spielrein’s conceptualizations, when reinterpreted through the lens of contemporary social theory, can provide a theoretical framework for understanding the possibilities of psychic and social transformation available to marginalized subjects and groups. Queer practices of psychic death and rebirth are analyzed in the light of Spielrein’s theory. Psychoanalytic practice with intersectionally disadvantaged trans* and queer patients is discussed, with an emphasis on the struggles with violence, suicidality, and becoming. In addition, Spielrein’s social positioning at the time of writing “Destruction” is analyzed, both in contemporary terms and from within her own cultural and generational context. Implications for socially responsible psychoanalytic practice are considered.

Rediscovering Sabina

Terror arises on the one hand from the fear of death and on the other the passion for life. In working with terror as it manifests in the transference, a challenge for the practitioner is to maintain homeostasis in its physical, intellectual, emotional and relational aspects, as terror is a strong force for tipping the balance of emotional regulation with consequences mentally and physically. This paper will explore this challenge, starting by going back to the roots of psychoanalysis and a paper written by Sabina Spielrein in 1912: “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being.” Building on Spielrein’s work, it will attempt to deepen understanding of her theory linking terror to the primitive sexual transference. Of particular interest is the recognition of dissociation in both patient and practitioner and working with it in the therapeutic relationship. The presence of terror and dissociation in the wider community, both currently and historically, is touched on.

The Unquiet Ghosts of Jung’s Abandoned Women: What Do We Owe Helene, Sabina, and Toni?

Running parallel to the story of Jung’s life is a shadow narrative involving a string of women who played crucial roles in the birth of analytical psychology. The most important of these were Helene Preiswerk, Sabina Spielrein, and Toni Wolff, each of whom served as a guide for Jung as he explored the strange new territory of the unconscious. Each lived outside the norms of conventional society, was abandoned by Jung, and ultimately came to a tragic end. The dark feminine or creative animus within these women was at first deeply alluring to Jung, but when it no longer served his purposes, he ultimately rejected it—and them. In doing so, he committed a crime against the laws of love as well as against the Divine Feminine. As our understanding of the intergenerational transmission of trauma grows, we see that elements repressed in the unconscious often return via the agency of unquiet ghosts or unresolved family and ancestral complexes. Like the wrathful furies of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the unquiet spirits of our female ancestors seek revenge in order to balance the scales of justice. If the person who committed the crime is no longer living, the revenge will fall upon his or her descendants. Thus, for many of us contemporary women who inherit the mantle of Jungian psychology, the unquiet ghosts haunting our psyches may include not just our own personal grandmothers, but the women Jung himself rejected, our spiritual grandmothers, as it were.

Jung’s Personal Confession

ABSTRACT C. G. Jung’s “Psychology of the Transference” (1946/1954, CW 16) describes his template for healing in psychoanalysis. He selected a series of ten erotic alchemical woodcuts from the Rosarium Philosophorum. The author contends these drawings were chosen because of Jung’s emotional, deep, and healing relationships with three women who had previously been his patients: Sabina Spielrein, Maria Moltzer, and Toni Wolff. The author describes how she uses these drawings in her work. She then explores Jung’s relationships with these women and examines how his 1925 essay “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship” (1925/1954, CW 17) depicts Jung’s marriage to his wife, Emma.

Sabina Spielrein: From Being a Psychiatric Patient to Becoming an Analyst Herself.

In this paper, I evaluate Sabina Spielrein's life and ideas from a contemporary understanding. I do this by considering the context and situation in which she lived: a journey from being a hospitalized psychiatric patient to becoming a psychoanalyst herself. From her crucial life experiences she learned that the main psychic conflicts stem from the struggle between life and death, and not from opposing ego drives and sexual desires. Spielrein's considerable creative potentials were nurtured, as well as blocked by her inner conflicts, but also by the enormous historical conflicts of her time.

Sabina Spielrein’s theory of the origin and development of language

ABSTRACT In recent years, a growing acknowledgement of the importance and originality of Sabina Spielrein’s theoretical and clinical work has taken place. However, few studies have been specifically devoted to a thorough analysis of her theory, so a satisfactory understanding of her thinking has not yet been fully achieved. The objective of this article is to contribute to the understanding of Spielrein’s theory of language, based on the analysis of her two main papers on the subject, “The Origin of the Child’s Words ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’” (1922) and “Some Analogies between the Thought of Children, Aphasia, and the Subconscious Thought” (1923). Reference is also made to some hypotheses formulated in her first works in order to clarify the assumptions of the theory of language she advances in the early 1920s. It is argued that Spielrein developed an original psychoanalytic perspective on language. She brought about an innovative contribution to the understanding of the origins and functioning of both language and thought, articulating linguistic and neurological knowledge with psychoanalytic hypotheses and her own observations.

Investigación en psicoanálisis y pulsión de muerte

In this paper some research issues are presented in psychoanalysis, particularly in what corresponds to death drive by Sabina Spielrein and conceptualized by Freud. Today, we live a hypermodern era of scientific breakthroughs, technological contributions, complex ecological challenges, instant communication and unlimited access to information and simultaneously live multiple forms of violence directed against human beings. Psychoanalytic clinic based in Sabina Spielrein, Freud and Lacan Eros and the death drive is present, it is imperative to accommodate them in the analytic session, by virtue that few places nowadays, such as psychoanalysis, allow plausible listening, slow, at your own pace, and not with the rush of our 21st century. This presumes both the desire to support allows you to address the subjective suffering of those who seek us analysis and see what can be produced with this.

The Essential Writings of Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of Psychoanalysis, edited and translated by Ruth Cape and Raymond Burt, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2019, 178 pp.

The Essential Writings of Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of Psychoanalysis, edited and translated by Ruth Cape and Raymond Burt, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2019, 178 pp.

The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class Consciousness

For the purpose of the investigations, we propose in the present paper that we have been carrying out for some years into new perspectives for a Marxist Psychoanalysis; we try the consistence of Marxist psychoanalysis with the pre-Leninist idea of Class consciousness as developed in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and in the unpublished books of Das Kapital (notably the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). The roots of Freudian Marxists (Reich and Fenichel above all, but Sabina Spielrein too) are put into a comparative analysis with Marxian psychiatry arising from the de-colonization process (Fanon) and with the teaching of Jacques Lacan about Marxist concepts such as plus value and reification, and eventually with the proposal on the political Unconscious developed by Fredric Jameson. Finally, it comes the hypothesis that Psychoanalysis could correspond to Class consciousness.

Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis, 2nd Edition, edited by Coline Covington and Barbara Wharton, Routledge, London and New York, 2015, 257pp.

Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis, 2nd Edition, edited by Coline Covington and Barbara Wharton, Routledge, London and New York, 2015, 257pp.

Sabina Spielrein's Siegfried and other myths: facts versus fictions

Sabina Spielrein's life events became known to posterity through a private correspondence with Freud and Jung, and through her diaries. Based on a misinterpretation of the documents, a myth, a fiction, was created about an alleged sexual affair with Jung and a case of misconduct during treatment. Another myth was that her relationship with Jung was a cause of the historic break-up between Freud and Jung. The biographical facts described by the author in a number of publications show that her treatment ended when she left the hospital to become Jung's student in the medical school, a situation with its own ethical rules. Furthermore, the alleged “scandal” was no public matter: it turned out to be no more than a personal quarrel. Before, during, and after that turbulent episode, Spielrein and Jung maintained a long and tender friendship and correspondence that included sharing creative ideas that enriched psychoanalysis. In these exchanges, a special role was played by the myth of Siegfried and other themes in Wagner's operas.

‘I long to get together with all of you …’: A Letter from Sabina Spielrein-Scheftel (Rostov-on-Don) to Max Eitingon, 24 AUGUST 1927

Sabina Spielrein (1885–1942), Russian-Jewish pioneer of psychoanalysis, was highly esteemed by Sigmund Freud, and later by young left-wing analysts like Otto Fenichel, for being a creative thinker with a talent for stimulating new questions and original research (notably in ego psychology, child analysis, linguistics and neuropsychology). When she returned to her home country in 1923, however, her traces largely disappear. For this reason, the thirteen-page handwritten letter, which Spielrein wrote to Max Eitingon on 24 August 1927, in the run up to the tenth International Psychoanalytic Congress, is a particularly welcome discovery. She reports on professional and private matters, and above all we learn for the first time something about Spielrein's position in the disputes over the relation between psychoanalysis and Marxism in the Soviet Union. Spielrein's spirited engagement in the increasingly acrimonious debate over ‘Freudism’ and Marx-influenced behavioural science is sketched in the context of the development of Russian psychoanalysis, from its brief flowering under Trotsky's protection to its crushing under Stalin.

Carl Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein: a reassessment

The aim of this article is to give an accurate account of the relationship between Sabina Spielrein and Carl Gustav Jung, based on a close reading of the available documentary evidence. I challenge many of the commonly held assumptions about their relationship. These include the belief that Spielrein was Jung’s first analytic patient, that they had a long and mutually passionate affair, and that Spielrein was the inspiration behind Jung’s conception of the ‘anima’. I argue that there is little evidence for these and a number of other beliefs that have been passed down through successive cultural iterations without careful documentary analysis.