Sabina Spielrein (1885–1942) was a first-generation psychoanalytic pioneer whose collected works, available in German since 1987, have only recently been rediscovered by English-speaking scholars. Spielrein’s original contributions at the dawn of psychoanalytic thinking, as typified by her papers “Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being” (1912/1987) and “The Origins of the Words Mama and Papa” (1922/1987), deserve to reemerge from the heavy shadows of the Freud/Jung legacy to be studied and appreciated in their own right. Spielrein published over 30 papers during her lifetime, served as Piaget’s analyst, and helped to establish psychoanalysis in her native Russia. The origins of Freud’s “death instinct,” Jung’s “anima,” and Klein’s theories about the infant’s experience of the breast have all been linked to Spielrein’s prior contributions. The correlations Spielrein identified between evolutionary biology and psychoanalytic thinking, resisted by her contemporaries, prefigure the work of Bowlby and Bateson (Launer 2011). Her contributions to psycholinguistics and psychoanalytic theories of human development as applied to early childhood clearly precede those of Melanie Klein (1882–1960) and Anna Freud (1895–1982).

Spielrein was also influential as an early psychoanalytic patient. What Anna O (Bertha Pappenheim) and Dora were for Freud, foundational cases for the practice of psychoanalysis, Spielrein was for analytical (Jungian) psychology. Arriving as an inpatient at the Burghölzli in 1904, where Jung had been working since 1900 under the direction of Bleuler, hers was the first case Jung attempted to treat using Freud’s psychoanalytic method. The treatment was both a success and a disaster: a success because Spielrein went on to train as a psychiatrist, publishing articles in German, French, and Russian, and a disaster because she was in some respects betrayed by both Jung and Freud. What Jung and Freud learned, and what subsequent analysts can glean from her treatment, informs understandings of therapeutic transformation, individuation, boundaries, and frame identified as best practices today.

Spielrein was the firstborn daughter of a well-to-do Jewish couple living in Rostov-on-Don, near the eastern shores of the Black Sea. Her parents’ arranged marriage was apparently never happy. Her mother, Eva Lublinsky, trained as a dentist and was the daughter and granddaughter of respected rabbis. Both Sabina’s mother and her maternal grandfather had first loves who were Christians before marrying within their faith. Sabina’s father, Nikolai, originally from Warsaw, prospered as an animal feeds dealer, but Sabina’s mother repeatedly provoked him to rage and threats of suicide with lavish spending and affairs. When Sabina was admitted to the Burghölzli hospital at the age of 19, marital strife and humiliating corporal punishment inflicted by both father and mother were cited as causes for what we would now consider posttraumatic stress.

Sabina was sent away from her family to live with relatives in Warsaw at age 5, perhaps because her parents already recognized her signs of disturbance. Sabina later returned to live with her parents and three brothers and was educated at home until she entered the gymnasium. A second daughter, Emilia, was born when Sabina was 10. Fluent in German and French as well as Russian, Sabina studied biblical Hebrew to read the Bible in the original. She studied piano and voice as a child and composition as an adult. In keeping with the Hassidic rabbis on her mother’s side of the family, she had a mystical bent, believing that an angel spoke to her in German, telling her that she was destined for great things.

With encouragement from her father, she aspired to be a doctor, while her mother wished her to remain ignorant in sexual matters. Despite academic success, she developed symptoms including depression, nervous tics, and psychosomatic ailments. Her mental health worsened at the age of 16 when Emilia, age 6, suddenly died from typhoid fever. Sabina then withdrew from friends and family, becoming increasingly agitated. When her mood failed to improve, her mother and physician uncle took her to Switzerland for treatment. At 10:30 p.m. on the night of August 17, 1904, she arrived at the mental hospital made famous by August Forel and Eugene Bleuler, respected throughout Europe, the Burghölzli.

Spielrein’s case, diagnosed as hysteria, was assigned to the 29-year-old Carl Jung who, having been encouraged by Bleuler to read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, attempted to treat Spielrein using Freud’s then-novel psychoanalytic method, despite his personal reservations about the sexual etiology of mental illness. Jung had been conducting association experiments since 1901 and proceeded to “analyze” Spielrein during episodic sessions, sometimes lasting 3 hours at a time, during which he attempted to understand her “complexes.” Spielrein’s initial disruptive behavior, eliciting negative attention by provoking staff, responded positively to treatment despite, with occasional setbacks when Dr. Jung was not available.

The Burghölzli at that time was a true “asylum,” in the sense that patients whose mental illnesses were either hereditary or induced by abuse were to be treated with kindness and respect. Every patient capable of contributing through work was given a task. Both patients and staff were expected to attend psychoeducational sessions designed to help them understand the nature of mental illness. As Spielrein recovered, she assisted Jung in his ongoing association experiment research. By April 1905, only 8 months after being admitted as an inpatient, she began to attend medical lectures at the University while still living at the hospital. On June 1, 1905, she was discharged and lived independently in Zurich while continuing her medical studies. In May 1908, she passed her preliminary medical examination, and in 1911, her qualifying psychiatric medical dissertation, Über den psychologischen Inhalt eines Falles von Schizophrenie (On the Psychological Content of a Case of Schizophrenia) was accepted, using the term “schizophrenia” recently minted by Bleuler.

Spielrein’s successful recovery demonstrated the value of the psychoanalytic method. But the disaster that followed was to have a profound effect on both Spielrein and Jung, altering the course of psychoanalytic history. As early as September 25, 1905, after Spielrein had been discharged but was still seeing Jung on an outpatient basis, Jung prepared a “Report on Miss Spielrein to Professor Freud in Vienna, delivered to Mrs. Spielrein for use if the occasion arises.” The report begins as a standard case summary but concludes: “During treatment the patient had the misfortune to fall in love with me. She raves on to her mother about her love in an ostentatious manner, and a secret perverse enjoyment of her mother’s dismay seems to play a not inconsiderable part. Now in this distressing situation the mother wants to place her elsewhere for treatment, with which I am naturally in agreement” (Covington and Wharton 2003, p. 106). Jung’s 1905 report was apparently never sent to Freud (though Spielrein would eventually meet Freud in Vienna).

Sabina remained in Zurich through 1911 to pursue her medical studies and continued to see Jung, first as patient, then as research assistant, becoming, in the course of completing her psychiatric dissertation under his supervision, the first of his many “muses,” later to be succeeded by Maria Molzer and Toni Wolfe. Through the intensity of their work and his own emotional vulnerability, it seems possible that the “poetry” Spielrein wrote of in her journal included an affair (Carotenuto 1982). Clearly Jung, a fully qualified psychiatrist 10 years her senior, had a moral obligation to Spielrein to maintain appropriate professional boundaries with his former patient. But it is significant that Jung did not truly embark on his own self-analysis until after Spielrein left Zurich for Vienna (via Munich) in 1911. Jung’s own woundedness included the hospitalization of his mother when he was three. During her absence Jung the toddler depended on a dark-haired caregiver and developed what he called a distrust of women (Jung 1961, p. 8). Today this would be considered an insecure attachment style compromising trust and monogamy in adulthood. Moreover, as Jung confessed to Freud “… my veneration for you has something of the character of a ‘religious’ crush … I still feel it is disgusting and ridiculous because of its undeniable erotic overtones. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped” (49 J, 10/28/1907). Like Spielrein, Jung’s childhood was overshadowed by parental conflict, attachment injuries, and sexual abuse. As yet unanalyzed regarding his own woundedness, the intensity of his analytic work with Spielrein, coupled with grueling demands at the Burghölzli, meant that Jung was increasingly unable to contain the flights of nondirected thinking that were to become Symbols of Transformation (Jung 1956).

From the beginnings of the Freud/Jung correspondence in April 1906, until Spielrein left Zurich in 1911, Jung’s attempts to cope with the intense countertransference he developed using Freud’s psychoanalytic method resulted in requests for supervision. Jung mentioned her case to Freud in his fourth letter, “disguising” the case by stating that the unnamed patient had an older brother: “First trauma between third and fourth year. Saw her father spanking her older brother on the bare bottom…couldn’t help thinking afterwards that she had defecated on her father’s hand” (Freud and Jung 1974, 4 J 10/23/1906). From this report and Jung’s history, we can infer the interlocking nature of his countertransference to Spielrein, who had also experienced preoedipal trauma and abuse of a sexually invasive nature. Jung’s therapeutic work and subsequent boundary transgressions with Spielrein served to precipitate his own period of “creative illness” from 1913 to 1919, following his break with Freud. In moral terms, Jung’s psychological vulnerability at this stage in his career does not excuse his “use” of Spielrein, or Toni Wolfe and others, in transgressing therapeutic boundaries. These are the potential perils of intense countertransference that have served to establish the emphasis on the “temenos,” the inviolate container required for therapeutic transformation that is the norm for Jungian analysts today.

In recent years Spielrein has gained notoriety, if inadequate recognition, through the publication of Kerr’s A Most Dangerous Method and a 2011 film directed by David Cronenberg that relies heavily on his text. Kerr recognized the pivotal role Spielrein played in the Freud/Jung correspondence and subsequent falling out. What is only now being acknowledged is the significance of Spielrein’s own original work. She is justly credited with contributing to Jung’s understanding of Jung’s anima/animus “syzygy” as the bridge between the individual ego and the transpersonal self (Bettelheim 1983). Clearly the paper she delivered to Freud’s Wednesday Psychoanalytic group first named the “death instinct” theme was later taken up by Freud (1920) and others. But these facts do not exhaust the originality of her work. John Launer, a British psychiatrist, asserts in Sex Versus Survival: The Story of Sabina Spielrein: Her Life, Her Ideas, Her Genius (2011) that her work is the most significant for the way it anticipated contemporary efforts to link psychoanalytic theory with evolutionary biology, as represented in the work of Bowlby on attachment theory and Bateson’s Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind.

Despite the condescending tone of the letters that Freud and Jung exchanged about her, Freud cited her work 4 times and Jung 16 times in Symbols of Transformation alone. Spielrein continued to correspond with Jung until 1918, referencing the mystical and ambiguous Siegfried symbol they shared, and she corresponded with Freud until 1923. She not only attempted to bridge the differences between the two through her own understanding of symbols, but according to Launer, she was ahead of her time through attempting to provide a biological basis for psychoanalytic thinking. This was a theoretical vein that both Freud and Jung resisted, thereby foreshadowing the efforts of subsequent theorists.

Like Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958), another Jewish female intellectual who had her understanding of the DNA double helix formation pirated by Watson and Crick (Sayre 1975), Jung is credited with the anima/animus concept that developed in the context of his relationship with Spielrein, and Freud claimed the “death instinct” that first appeared in Spielrein’s Destruction paper. Similarly, Melanie Klein is known for her psychoanalytic work on representations of the breast in infancy, which may well have been influenced by Spielrein’s paper “The Origin and Development of Spoken Speech” delivered at the 6th International Psychoanalytic Conference in Spielrein (1920) that Klein attended. Kerr notes that “the talk was striking in its attempt to integrate Freud’s notion of a primary autistic stage in infancy ruled by the pleasure principle with the findings of developmental psychology.” Anticipating Winnicott’s understanding of transitional phenomena (1953), Spielrein noted that “spoken speech arises in an intermediate zone between the pleasure and reality principles” (Kerr 1993, p. 493).

Following the 1920 conference, Spielrein moved to Geneva, delegated to the Institute Rousseau as an evangelist for psychoanalysis. She conducted a “didactic” analysis with Piaget, which, according to him, did not take. In 1924 she moved to Moscow, establishing early childhood care based on psychodynamic principles, and then returned to her birth place where, following the rise of Stalin banishing psychoanalysis, she was killed with her two daughters when the Nazis invaded Rostov-on-Don for the second time. Too idealistic to believe that Germans who spoke the language of her angel could be butchers, she resisted those who urged her to flee, and so her life was cut short at the age of 57. Had not Aldo Carotenuto discovered her diaries stored in the building that was formerly the Rousseau Institute in Geneva and published A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein Between Jung and Freud, Spielrein’s work might well have remained forgotten. But it is now high time to appreciate Spielrein’s pioneering efforts in their own right, not Spielrein between Freud and Jung, but Spielrein beyond Freud and Jung (Launer 2011; Kelcourse et al. 2012).

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