Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942)

 

was a Russian Jewish vital pioneer of the psychoanalytic movement active in Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, Geneva, Moscow, and Rostov-on-Don. She was a psychoanalyst, child analyst, pediatrician, academic professor, and a scholar of international repute. At least thirty-seven of her articles penned in German, French, and Russian were published in major international journals between 1911 and 1931. After her death at the hands of the Nazis on August 11, 1942, Spielrein largely disappeared from the historical narrative. With the violent erasure of her body, tossed into a mass grave, a shadow of silence fell on the impressive body of her work, and her wide-ranging, theoretically sophisticated, and groundbreaking contributions to the nascent field of psychoanalysis and beyond were diminished to a handful of marginal notes, remaining that way for more than three decades. What ensued was a seemingly consistent effort by her contemporaries and followers to erase, or at best, reduce the impact of her work on the development of their theories.

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Spielrein was a forerunner who foresaw many concepts we now recognize as fundamental to psychoanalysis. As Carl Jung’s research assistant at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic and his close friend, she decisively contributed to the formation of his basic concepts of anima, persona, individuation and shadow, and deepened his understanding of transference and countertransference, the nature of Eros and the unconscious, as well as mythology. She obtained her medical doctorate from the University of Zürich in 1911 on the basis of her dissertation devoted to schizophrenia. She made history with the publication of the thesis, “On the Psychological Content of a Case of Schizophrenia” in 1911, which was only translated into English in 2018. It was one of the first psychoanalytically oriented doctoral dissertations— certainly the first written by a woman—that explored schizophrenia, a newly coined term by Eugen Bleuler in 1908. 

 

Shortly after, Spielrein became the second (after Margarethe Hilferding) and – at the time the only – female member of the prestigious Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In November 1911, during one of her first meetings, she presented fragments of her seminal work on destruction and the death drive, which was published in full the following year as “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming.” She is considered to be one of the first theorists to address this concept. The hermetic all-male Vienna group generally did not approve of her cross-disciplinary references to biology, psychology, mythology, religion, Nietzsche’s philosophy, Wagner’s music, experiences of women, and Jungian concepts. Still, with the “Destruction” paper, she laid the groundwork for Freud’s most fundamental theory on the interplay between the life/sex drive and the death drive, first expounded in his seminal work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle from 1920. He recognized in a rather paternalizing footnote inserted toward the very end of his book that Spielrein had “anticipated ... a considerable part of [his] speculation,” describing her text as “full of valuable matter and ideas but . . . unfortunately not entirely clear” to him. The earlier presentation to the Vienna Society and the debate over it, recorded by Otto Rank in the Society’s Minutes, were left out of the historical narrative. Subsequently, Spielrein became a part of the Psychoanalytic Society in Geneva and in Russia.

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With her 1913 publication of “Contributions to Understanding a Child’s Mind,” Spielrein shifted her focus to child analysis and became, with Hermine von Hug-Helmuth, one of the forerunners of the field. When her first daughter, Renata, was born in December 1913, Spielrein started using her own parenting experiences and observations as part of her research—a pioneering practice in the 1910s. Spielrein was also one of the first psychoanalysts to observe child play without interruptions and to formalize the process of play therapy. In 1920, she presented her model of the development of language and thought in a speech titled “On the Question of the Origin and Development of Speech” given at the International Psycho-Analytical Congress in the Hague. The audience included two future pioneers of child analysis: Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. 

 

Two years later, Spielrein published the fully developed concept in her groundbreaking “The Origin of the Child’s Words Papa and Mama. Some Observations on the Different Stages in Language Development”. The paper combined linguistics, child psychology, psychoanalysis, foreshadowed attachment theory, developmental psychology, and evolutionary psychology. It anticipated studies on the importance of breast sucking, and Melanie Klein’s famous theory of the “good breast” and the “bad breast.” Spielrein continued working and publishing profusely in the field of child analysis until her final known contribution, a 1931 paper titled “Children’s Drawings with Eyes Open and Closed”. Still, until recently, Anna Freud was mistakenly identified as the founder of the field, although she published her first article on child psychology in 1922, while Spielrein published eleven papers on the subject – the first one in 1913.

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She gave courses and lectures at European and Russian universities, worked as an analyst, a medical consultant, and joined the staff of the psychoanalytically oriented nursery founded by Vera Schmidt. She co-created an international intellectual elite that included the most prominent thinkers of the 20th century such as: Eugen Bleuler, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Carl Abraham, Eduard Claparède, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky. Finally, she decisively shaped Piaget’s views on childhood language development, and contributed to the formation of the views of Vygotsky and Luria, both of whom failed to acknowledge her explicit influence on their work.

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Psychoanalysis, unfortunately, is a field shaped by a long history of gender and racial discrimination. As a pioneer of psychoanalysis, Spielrein had entered male-dominated spaces and, I would argue, dominated them with her intellectual brilliance and sophisticated thinking. Undoubtedly, the ideas and techniques she had proposed were exceptionally ahead of their time, as with the theory of drives, which were met with criticism and rejection by traditionally all-male groups of analysts, doctors, and thinkers. Admitting her primacy and recognizing the weight of her contributions could be experienced as undermining the power structures by her male peers.

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​After her murder in Russia in the Holocaust, Spielrein’s pioneering insight to psychoanalysis and her research papers fell into almost absolute oblivion for a period of over thirty-five years. She was not mentioned, or just briefly referred to, in the classic works on Freud or the history of psychoanalysis (Ernest Jones, Peter Gay, Nancy Chodorov). Her contributions were first brought into focus when the first cache of documents pertaining to her was recovered in the Psychological Institute in Geneva in 1977. She had left her personal papers with her colleague Edouard Claparède for safekeeping during her time in Russia (she never came back). A Jungian analyst, Aldo Carotenuto, published some of the recovered collection in Diario di una segreta simmetria: Sabina Spielrein tra Jung e Freud (1980), published in English as A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud (1982). It comprised some of the Spielrein-Jung correspondence dated 1911-1918, the Spielrein- Freud correspondence dated 1909-1923, selections from Spielrein’s diary in the years 1909 to 1912, and other letters from her colleagues. Carotenuto supplemented the recovered papers with “The Story” that placed Spielrein within an unfavourable framework. He laid emphasis on her personal life – most especially, on her relationship with Jung and her adolescent illness – and minimized the importance of her scientific achievements. Carotenuto situated Spielrein exclusively in a triangulated relationship with Jung and Freud, and furthermore, objectified her by reducing her to the details contained in anonymous case studies discussed by the two men in correspondence. Carotenuto’s view of Spielrein has been repeated and consolidated by many scholars, writers and creators of culture, most importantly by John Kerr, Christopher Hampton, and David Cronenberg.

 

The 1980s and 1990s saw an intense inquiry that resulted in unearthing a large number of forgotten papers pertaining to Spielrein: these included diary extracts from 1906/1907 (Jeanne Moll), hospital records and correspondence between Jung or Bleuler and Spielrein’s family (Bernard Minder), childhood Russian diaries, German student diaries, and family letters (Irene Wackenhut and Anke Willke), Russian letters to Spielrein’s mother and excerpts from the Russian diary (Henry Lothane). The Jung Estate gave permission to release Jung’s letters to Spielrein – they appeared in a corrected German version of A Secret Symmetry (1986). German Complete Works (1987) included her doctoral dissertation, “Destruction” and thirty-two other papers dating 1912-1931. Magnus Ljunggren and Sabine Richebächer managed to contact survivors who were able to provide testimonies about Spielrein. Spielrein's texts are being systematically translated into other languages, especially English (Covington Coline & Barbara Wharton, 2003, 2015; Ruth Cape & Raymond Burt, 2018; Pamela Cooper-White & Felicity Kelcourse, 2019). Much of her rediscovered archive, however, remains in a private collection in Switzerland and has not been published or systematically studied.

 

Turn of the 20th century and, most importantly, 21st century saw a number of publications offering a reassessment of Spielrein's biography and scholarly achievements. The most significant included: Alexander Etkind (1997), Henry Lothane (1999, 2007, 2012, 2016), Coline Covington & Barbara Wharton (2003, 2015), Sabine Richebächer’s German biography (2008), John Launer’s English biography (2014), Adrienne Harris (2015), Pamela Cooper-White (2015, 2017), Michael Plastow (2018), Cooper-White & Felicity Kelcourse (2019), Klara Naszkowska (2025). Almost all of Spielrein's works have now been translated into English, and many other languages (see: Key Publications, Recent & Forthcoming Publications). 

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Klara Naszkowska

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