Reflections on Sabina Spielrein’s Life and Intellectual Legacy Reexamined

Inspired by Inna Rozentsvit’s essay, I returned to the life and work of the Russian-Jewish pioneer of psychoanalysis, Sabina Spielrein (originally Shpilrain, 1885–1942). I added some reflections on her biography and intellectual history. Spielrein has been the subject of two fictional films, a documentary, novels, and plays. However, it was not until 2014 that the first English-language biography appeared, attempting to reassess Spielrein’s place in the history of psychoanalysis and to correct the myths surrounding her. John Launer, a London-based family therapist, educator, honorary lifetime consultant physician at the Tavistock Clinic, and prolific medical columnist has written a multifaceted biography of Spielrein, Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein (2014), as well as the article “Sabina Spielrein: Her life, erasure, rediscovery and recognition as a key psychoanalytic thinker” (in

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European Judaism, 2022, 55[1], pp. 98-111).

There is, of course, an earlier accumulation of material and scholarly research, including the selection of Spielrein’s German diaries and letters published by Aldo Carotenuto in the 1980s, correspondence between Jung and Freud, excerpts from diaries published by others, Sabine Richebächer’s German Spielrein biography, articles by Henry Zvi Lothane, and discussions in academic journals. More recently, Lothane has published and annotated Spielrein’s Russian diary and unpublished correspondence with Carl Jung and Spielrein’s mother. In The Untold Story of Sabina Spielrein: Healed and Haunted by Love (2023, published by The Unconscious in Translation), Lothane presents these materials in English for the first time. The Russian diary runs from 1896 to 1925, and the letters from 1905 to 1923. Lothane also refutes Carotenuto’s claims that Spielrein was schizophrenic and had a psychotic transference toward Jung.

Nevertheless, many gaps remain in Sabina Spielrein’s life. Launer did not have the opportunity to go through all the material. Not all diaries, letters, and notes are available to researchers. For example, the private archive probably contains about 2,000 family letters in Russian written by the Spielrein family between 1912 and 1923. Sabina was physically abused by both parents and probably sexually abused by her father and even her brother. She also suffered severe bereavement when her younger sister died at the age of six. Launer provides valuable additional pages that open new perspectives on some controversial issues. He has gone through the previous research in depth and comes to his own conclusions, some of which differ from previous understandings.

The History of Spielrein and Jung’s “Relationship”

Launer believes that Spielrein’s recovery at the Burghölzli asylum in 1904–1905 was more favorably influenced by the head physician Eugen Bleuler than by Jung, whose treatment was not particularly structured, let alone psychoanalytic, and who, after Spielrein’s release, was no longer Spielrein’s therapist––contrary to what John Kerr in his book and David Cronenberg in his Spielrein film have suggested. According to Launer, the most intense erotic relationship between Spielrein and Jung took place in 1908 and continued sporadically for a few years until Spielrein married Pavel Sheftel in 1912. The following year, in an unhappy marriage, she had her first daughter, whom she largely raised on her own. Spielrein sent a few letters to Jung at the end of World War I, but by the

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time she moved to Geneva after the war in 1920, Spielrein had broken up with Jung and turned her attention to combining psychoanalysis with biology and developmental psychology.

The nature of the relationship between Spielrein and Jung is open to speculation, as the source material is ambiguous and scarce. Launer speculates that the relationship was sexual, albeit brief, while Henry Zvi Lothane disputes this. In his article “Sabina Spielrein’s Siegfried and other myths: Facts vs. fictions” (in International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2016, 25[1], pp. 40-49), Lothane concludes that there had been no patient-doctor love affair and that after Spielrein was discharged from the hospital, there was a professor-student love relationship that was subject to a different code of ethics. In any case, Spielrein described the relationship as “poetry,” first with the doctor she admired and later with her teacher, colleague, and friend. She also decided independently to end her relationship with Jung, who seems to have been mostly disinterested (only four love letters from Jung have survived) and later even misogynistic and antisemitic in his attitude toward Spielrein.

Launer emphasizes Jung’s Don Juan character, while Spielrein’s personality, according to Launer, seems to lack the psychopolitical speculative skills and ambition that could have paved the way for her status in male-dominated psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Although Spielrein’s publications and lectures attracted the attention of Freud and the Freudians, making her one of the earliest female analysts, she had been forgotten by psychoanalysts by the time she moved permanently to the Soviet Union in 1923, first to Moscow and then to her hometown of Rostov-on-Don.

The “Spielrein Girl” as a Developer of Psychoanalysis

Launer’s observations on relationships and personal history are interesting in themselves, but more important is his attempt to highlight the merits of Spielrein’s work and literary output. Indeed, on the one hand, it is curious to note that Spielrein introduces certain ideas for the first time in psychoanalysis, such as studying communicative aspects of language in schizophrenia, reporting on the use of child and play therapy, and relating biology, evolution, and psychoanalysis. On the other hand, her work is plagued by fragmentation and a lack of development of initial ideas.

Already in her 1911 article, Spielrein presented the first psychoanalytic case description of schizophrenia. During her stay in Vienna from 1911 to 1912, Spielrein lectured at the Vienna Psy-

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choanalytic Society and provoked discussion, especially with her 1911 lecture and subsequent 1912 article in which she hypothesized two drives: the survival drive and the reproduction drive. The first is static and the second dynamic, both creative and destructive, with destruction preceding creative transformation.

Psychology, biology, literature, and mythology were intertwined in Spielrein’s analysis in ways that were unacceptable to both Freud and Jung. The “Spielrein girl,” according to Freud and his followers, had based her theorizing on fantasy products of her own psychic contradictions, to which no special value could be ascribed. The fact that since Freud, many psychoanalysts had relied on self-analysis as the source of their theoretical insights was set aside.

At the 1920 Hague Psychoanalytic Congress, Spielrein gave a paper (published in 1922) on the origin of the words “papa” and “mama” in children, linking the child’s language development to early emotional interactions with a close caregiver. Spielrein’s lecture was attended by Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, Melanie Klein, and Anna Freud, of whom only Hug-Hellmuth had worked analytically with children at the time. Spielrein was also the first to present play therapy in her communication on the brief analysis of a seven-year-old boy’s phobia in 1921.

Obviously, Spielrein, unlike Klein and Anna Freud, was trying to combine other fields of research and evolutionary thinking with psychoanalysis. However, Launer goes quite far in comparing Spielrein with contemporary writers such as Peter Fonagy and Mark Solms and with evolutionary psychology. He sees her as presenting similar extensions of psychoanalysis. Spielrein’s attitude is undoubtedly open to interdisciplinary dialogue, but her research approach and conceptual framework are strongly tied to her own time.

Spielrein’s time in Geneva proved to be particularly productive. There, she was closely associated with the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, founded by the psychologist Édouard Claparède, and led its researchers into psychoanalysis. In Geneva, she also worked as an analyst for Jean Piaget. Piaget called his eight-month daily analysis “training analysis” and sometimes denied that it was didactic. In the 1920s, Piaget attempted some analysis, even of his own mother. When she refused to accept his interpretations, he turned to studying “normal” cognitive development, not the “tricks

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of the unconscious,” as Piaget later recalled in the 1950s.

Spielrein and Piaget shared an interest in observing child development, the functionalist approach, and the collaboration between psychoanalysis and child psychology. Spielrein began observing her daughter Renate as soon as she was born in 1913, while Piaget began observing his own daughter much later in 1925. Although they recognized each other’s merits in the study of child development and attended the 1922 Psychoanalytic Congress in Berlin together, Spielrein found Piaget’s ideas about the development of children’s thinking too logical and rational. For Spielrein, the role of pre-logical, intuitive, and unconscious thinking in child development was significant. In her 1920 article on language development in children, Spielrein summarized language originating in music before words. She believed that the melodies, rhythms, pitches, and cries of early interaction between child and caregiver preceded speech. In this way, Spielrein herself anticipated decades of later observational research on early infant-caregiver interactions.

The Last Years in the Soviet Union

Spielrein originally intended to return to Switzerland and Germany from the Soviet Union. However, her fragile alliance with Pavel, a senior physician at a children’s hospital, continued in the Soviet Union. They had a second daughter, Eva, in 1926. Spielrein’s belief in the Soviet Union’s potential for development may also have influenced her ultimate decision to emigrate.

Little has been said about Spielrein’s life in the Soviet Union, and Launer could not shed new light on the subject due to a lack of historical sources. However, he rejects the notion that Spielrein’s life in the Soviet Union was a sad anticlimax to her career. Spielrein joined the Russian Psychoanalytical Society in 1923 and had several assignments in Moscow (1923–1925), the most important of which were teaching child psychology at Moscow University, doing “paedological” practical work, and supervising in the kindergarten (the Detski Dom, Children’s Home, which means “orphanage” in Russian) run by Vera Schmidt and associated with the State Institute of Psychoanalysis. The kindergarten was the first one to apply psychoanalysis. It was originally intended to be a home for orphans as well as a place for research in child psychology. However, it became a foster home for the children of elite Communist leaders (including Stalin’s son Vasily) and the subject of various controversies. The staff was not adequately trained or

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supported, and the Children’s Home was closed in 1925.

Psychoanalysis first took root in pre-revolutionary Russia and even in the early stages of the Soviet Union. Soon, the regime began to push psychoanalysis in a Freudian-Marxian direction until it was considered a reactionary doctrine that was replaced by the official dialectical-materialist Soviet psychology in the late 1920s. Finally, in 1930, the Russian Psychoanalytical Society was dissolved.

The young talents of Soviet psychology, Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky, were obviously influenced by Spielrein, but they did not acknowledge Spielrein’s contribution. When they jointly published the introduction to the Russian translation of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1925, they made no mention of Spielrein, to whom Freud pays tribute in that work. Luria and Vygotsky were already hounding the change of direction, extolling the “new, original psychoanalytic trend” that sought to synthesize Freudianism and Marxism through Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflexes.

In her hometown of Rostov-on-Don, Spielrein continued to combine medical, psychological, and educational perspectives in her pedagogical and psychiatric work. In the Soviet Union, as late as 1929, she publicly defended Freud’s merits, arguing that Freud had moved from individual psychology to the consideration of social environmental factors in preventing neuroses. The last meeting of the Russian Psychoanalytical Society was held in 1930. Spielrein’s last article, “Children’s Drawings with Eyes Open and Closed,” was published in German in 1931, and it was not made available in English until 2019.

Of Sabina Spielrein’s relatives, three brothers were academically distinguished professors and deans from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, most famously brother Isaac, a leading figure in Russian industrial psychology or psychotechnics. They were all liquidated in the Stalinist purges of 1937–1938. Sabina’s father died shortly thereafter. Sabina’s husband, Pavel, also died of a heart attack in 1937. The family’s financial situation had deteriorated because Sabina was no longer allowed to work as a paedologist or in psychiatry. She had to make do with a part-time job as a school doctor.

Amid all this growing misery, Sabina Spielrein found it almost impossible to believe that the German culture that produced

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Goethe, Heine, and Schiller could be guilty of brutal atrocities. When the Germans occupied Rostov-on-Don in the summer of 1942, they immediately began massacring Communists, psychiatric patients, and eventually Jews. Spielrein was seen, at the time, heartbroken, galloping toward her family’s destruction. When they were murdered, Sabina was 56, her daughter Renata 28, and her daughter Eva 16. Launer (2014) concludes his book with the words, “Blessed be their memory,” which is a common Jewish mourning phrase translated from Hebrew.

Launer describes the Spielrein material as a “collection of flickering fragments” from which one can only guess at the whole mosaic. Launer proposes a critical edition of all of Spielrein’s writings, diaries, and correspondence, which he believes would make for more fascinating reading than a biographer could ever hope to provide. While Launer’s own work is a fascinating read, his proposal deserves support.

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