The Paradoxical Oblivion of a Psychoanalyst

Curt B. Hacker
Carolina Hermo

"The traditional psychoanalysis has placed Sabina Spielrein in the scientific rank and given her the relevance of a careful foot note, marginalia. The message in her thinking was understood and eventually Sabina Spielrein was forgotten", says Traute Hensch, editor of the Sabina Spielrein's Samtliche Schriften, published by the Psychosozial Verlag, 2002 (Edicion Kore), Giessen.
In 1977 the Jungian psychoanalyst, Aldo Carotenuto was given a box with some documents which had been hidden and were surprisingly found in the cellar of what used to be the site of the Geneva Institute of Psychology. These documents had belonged to Dr. Sabina Spielrein. Ever since, her life and work have been the object of deep analysis, specially by the researchers of the history of psychoanalysis, and have also aroused the interest of writers and movie directors.
Being practically unknown, she has been stimulating increasing curiosity for diverse reasons.
In a review about the discoveries that bring to light the most relevant aspects of her biography, psychoanalyst Zvi Lothane says: "Until 1980 Spielrein was not more than a footnote in Freud's work (1900, p. 136; 1911, p. 317; 1920, p. 59 of the Gesammelte Werke) and a matter of discussion in the letters exchanged by Freud and Jung and published in 1974 (translation in Spanish available). In 1977 -according to Lothane- Carlo Trombetta, in his biography of Edouard Claparede, Freud's follower in Geneva, tells Jungian Aldo Carotenuto about a box containing Spielrein's intimate diaries in German and some letters he had found in Geneva. They were published by Carotenuto in 1980, in Italian, in his book "Diario di una Segreta Simmetria - Sabina Spielrein tra Jung e Freud", translated into English in 1982, which was later followed by a German version enlarged and re-edited in 1986, including some unknown letters from Jung to Spielrein. Carotenuto's work thus originated a generous secondary literature until John Kerr (1993).
This thrilling literature shows several interesting points including -far beyond a womans intimate soul- being the first woman analyst and author of a rich and peculiar work between the founding "fathers" Freud and Jung. She unravels finer aspects of the thought and theoretical as well as socio-cultural oppositions.
Born in Rostov, Russia, in 1885, she was the daughter of a well-off Jew merchant, Nicolay Spielrein and Eva Luyblinskaya and sister of Jean, Emile and Isaac Spielrein. She studied several languages and finished her secondary studies at the citys women Gymnasium in 1904.
In her childhood, Sabina already showed some signs of emotional distress -Kerr says- and developed perverse fantasies, obsessive thoughts on defecation during the act of eating, sexual arousal at looking at her father's hand, which drove her to an obsessive masturbation. In 1904 her parents took her to Zurich were she began a medical treatment at the Burghlolzli, under the supervision of Eugen Bleuler.
The patient was placed under the charge of the young doctor at the Burgholzli, Dr. Carl Gustav Jung. Hospitalized for ten months, she then continued her analysis with him in private.
Spielrein's arrival to this prestigious Swiss clinic was not unnoticed. In his book "Secret Histories of Psychoanalysis", 1993, John Kerr makes a detailed description of the circumstances that surrounded Sabina and the canton clinic during her time at the clinic. Firstly, her condition as hysterical patient coming from a wealthy family turned her into an exception as most hysterical patients belonged to low income families. Then, her diagnosis, psychotic hysteria, was not among the most common conditions while most of the interned population suffered from tertiary syphilis, schizophrenia and dementia.
It was neither common to treat a young Russian - Kerr adds- since out of the 276 patients received that year only four of them had come from Russia. Thanks to the fact she was Russian, Spielrein to get her secondary degree unlike Swiss women who could only have access to an education by private professors.
The scientific and historical time when the young Russian arrived at Burghlolzli also contributed to the peculiar characteristics of her presence.
In 1895, Sigmund Freud had gained scientific notoriousness with the publication of his Studies on Hysteria, with Viennese doctor Josef Breuer. In their opinion, hysteria was caused by emotional experiences which were later expressed in the symptoms. An year later, Freud advanced on this theory and attributed the cause of hysteria to a sexual trauma suffered during childhood. This discovery was the result of a new method he had developed, called "psychoanalysis".
Later, Freud would work on "The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and four years later Leopold Lowenfeld's book "Psychiatric Obsessions" appeared offering a description of Freud's psychoanalytical method (Kerr).
Lowenfeld's book reached the doctors at Burghlolzli in 1904, when the Russian patient Sabina Spielrein arrived.
Thus, young Carl G. Jung found in his new patient an ideal subject to put into practice the new ideas in the recent field of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Under Eugen Bleuler's supervision, the clinic of Burghlolzli had turned into a model university hospital where the patient was the main element of the scene. Doctors were fully devoted to their patients and most of them used to live at the hospital premises, as in the case of Carl Jung.
By late 1900's, shortly after he joined the clinic, Jung showed he was an earnest worker and reader -says Kerr. His first work consisted of a report on Freud's recent monography "Dreams". Under Bleuler's supervision, he worked on his medical thesis on spiritism sessions, which he had joined some years before. His publication was a worthy contribution to the psycopathological literature on occultism.
In 1902 he received his degree as a medical doctor and an year later he got married to Emma Rauschenbach, daughter of a wealthy industrial, and they moved to an apartment at the clinic. That year he published an interesting article "On fake dementia" where he described the results of his work at the hospital with the word association technique.
1904, the year when Spielrein arrived at the hospital, was crucial to the practice of the new treatment.
Jung worked with Spielrein trying to encourage her concentration and self control. At the same time, Spielrein had to receive some kind of occupational therapy. Considering her desire to study medicine, she was assigned to help at the psychological lab. Thus, the young Russian contributed to the experiments carried out by her doctor. This was how Spielrein and Jung started their friendship.
Apparently, the treatment was successful and Spielrein could enter the university of Zurich in 1905.
At the beginning of the analysis, the patient showed the determination -which she already had - to follow the medical career. She had completed her secondary studies (at the Gymnasium) of Rostov with the highest degrees and an excellent private education (at the age of 5 she was sent to a school in Warsaw where she learnt German and French and, back in Rostov when she was 8 years old, she attended a girls school where, apart from receiving Russian, piano and singing classes, she learnt Latin, Greek and Ancient Hebrew).
It is then clear why Spielrein had a special significance to Jung: she was the first patient whom the doctor implemented the psychoanalytical model introduced by Sigmund Freud. In 1905, Jung informed Freud in writing on the young Russian's treatment, giving no specific references about her. Starting as Jung's private patient at a quarterly cost of 1250 francs, which was continued with an ambulatory treatment, Spielrein soon began to attend the clinic seminars and to study in Zurich.
In the investigations carried out after the material was found, the first theoretical discussion related to the diagnosis. This issue is quite relevant: psychiatric diagnosis has always been under discussion, as in the case of Schreber, even today.
The detailed minutes and descriptions of the symptomatology of this girl, who belonged to a wealthy and well educated Jew-Russian family, with hysterical antecedents in both parents, as one of her biographers states, corresponded to what could now be called a severe adolescent evolutionary acute crisis, not a hysterical psychosis or schizophrenia, presumptive diagnosis of the time and of the historiographical debate.
It is important to place the clinical and theoretical problem under the light of the psychoanalytical and psychopathological research which in this case was previous to the publication of Freud's technical work. It should be considered that the counter-transference theory had not been formulated yet and that, in our opinion, this is another of the pioneering contributions, as shown in the letters from Spielrein to Jung and Freud, her mother and in her private diary (the black book found in the cellar of the Palais Wilson in Geneva) that led to the formulation by psychoanalysis of the technical and the counter-transference theory.
In his interesting book Das Ich als Experiment, subtitled An Essay on Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis in the XX Century, Bernd Nitzschke includes Sabina Spielrein among the pioneers of the young discipline under the title Sabina Spielrein: the love of a psychoanalyst together with other three papers: Herbert Silberer: the suicide of a psychoanalyst; Otto Gross: a psychoanalyst as a revolutionary; and Otto Fenichel and Wilhelm Reich: the fate of two leftist Freudians.
In 1911, Sabina Spielrein finishes her medical career with the doctoral thesis "On the psychological content in a case of schizophrenia (Dementia Praecox)".
On January 20, she gets her medical degree and on February 9 she defends her inaugural presentation at the Wednesday's Society. Her paper was published that year by her mentor Jung at the Jahrbuch in the same volume Freud published his work on Schreber. On October 11, 1911, Dr. Sabina Spielrein started to participate in the meetings of the Psychoanalytical Society in Vienna and in a letter dated October 17, Freud welcomed her:
"Dear Doctor,
As a woman you are preeminently entitled to observe and understand affections with more intensity. Our meeting of October 25 (Nunberg and Federn 1979, p. 293-298) was not quite honorable I am in the condition to agree with you about your concept and to look at the future with confidence. I have done this for some years under hard conditions (I) hope you will be comfortable at our society
.
Yours faithfully, Freud (quotation by Lothane according to Carotenuto, 1986).
In October she was made member of the psychoanalytical society in Vienna and in November she gave her first conference on transformations. In other two opportunities, the analyst -as Lothane describes- showed herself as a sagacious observer. In a discussion held at the Viennese Society on November 8, 1911 on the atemporality of the unconscious, she talked about how "a recent experience is substituted by another from ones childhood and highlighted the relationship with perversions (inversion-bisexuality), childhood sexual theories and the regression to representations similar to those observed in dementia praecox -ideas which agreed with Tausks (Nunberg and Federn, 1979, volume III, p. 290). At the following meeting, after an exposition by Reik On Death and Sexuality, Spielrein expressed that most of the problems mentioned are dealt with in a paper already finished (Destruction as the Cause of Events) while Steckel only talked about the destruction pulsion. These ideas about the mixture of anaclitical needs, sexual pulsions and aggressive pulsions made up Freuds dual pulsion theory, where sexual pulsions and the ID are measured against the death pulsion, Freuds synonym to aggressive pulsions in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920) where he expresses his acknowledgment to this pioneering psychoanalyst.
Since his trip to Vienna, Freud asked that Spielreins work be published exclusively by the journals of the Psychoanalytical Association.
In 1912 Sabina got married in Zurich to the Russian doctor Rawel Scheftel and traveled to Berlin, Munich, Laussane, Chateaux DOex and Geneva. In 1919 she founded the group of psychoanalytical studies "Cercle Interne" in Laussane and practiced psychoanalysis. In Geneva, she was Jean Piagets analyst and joined the psychoanalysts group of the city and gave some lectures at the JJ Rousseau Institute on "Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy". In 1920, during the 6th Psychoanalysis Conference in The Haye she delivered the paper "Considerations on diverse stages of the Linguistic Development". The origin of the infantile words "Daddy" and "Mommy", published in Imago in 1922, which showed the thoughts that were later developed by Melanie Klein. From this essay, Carotenuto takes the following fragment, included his book: "The act of sucking is more important than any other one in the childs life: he learns to enjoy the beatitude of the satisfied hunger but he also learns that this beatitude is limited and has to be conquered again and again". According to Carotenuto, here lies the basic proposal of the Kleinian work.
In 1922 Sabina Spielrein spoke at the 7th International Conference in Berlin and later became member of the Psychoanalytical Society of Switzerland.
During these years, Jung had gathered enough material to reformulate and contest Freuds scientific opinions. To Jung, symbols were the carriers of the affective burden. He accepted Freuds psychology but made some reservations as to his sexual theory.
After an intense mailing exchange and personal meetings in Vienna and Switzerland, Jung turned into the future heir of the father of psychology. Both were persons of enormous capacity and Freud also pointed out the Aryan support to the cause he presided through the Swiss doctor whose acknowledgment showed a vertiginous growth.
Meanwhile, the relationship between the Swiss doctor and his patient and later collaborator, had taken a different course.
They started a affection relationship which Sabina called "The souls parenthood". It is certainly true that, to this date, researchers have not agreed on the existence of a carnal relationship between the doctor and his patient, since she was still taking psychoanalytical sessions with Jung.
Yet, the documentation found together with the letters and Sabina's diary, does show that she longed to have a son with Jung who she would call Sigfrid and would express -as Spielrein herself said- the union of both Freud and Jung and two peoples: the Aryan and the Jew.
In his prologue to Carotenuto's book, Diario di una segreta simmetria, Bruno Bettelheim says: "In her diary, Spielrein writes about her intimate desire to have a son with Jung, to be called Sigfrid, and that this child would cover the gap between Jung and her due to the fact that she was a Jew and he was an Aryan". In other words, the boy would be a symbol of the union of Jung's and Freud's thinking.
The name Sigfrid came from Sabina's love for music, for Wagner's operas preferably. In Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner adapted a legend about Sigfrid, a remarkable figure of the Teutonic mythology, child of Segismund and his sister, Siglinda, children of Wotan.
By early 1909, Sabina's parents received an anonymous letter -probably sent by Emma Rauschenbach, Jung's wife- informing them about the personal relationship their daughter and the doctor had. This letter obviously generated scandalous consequences.
The Spielrein sent a letter to the doctor and traveled to Switzerland to meet their daughter.
In this state of affairs, Sabina Spielrein sent a letter to Freud in May 1909 requesting him a personal interview.
Jung's first communication with Freud -according to Carotenuto- on Sabina's case took place on October 23, 1906. Since then and until 1909, Jung continued providing Freud with information on his patient, though he never mentioned her name.
In 1911 Freud and Sabina met and she began a professional relationship with the Viennese doctor. She was even invited to join the Wednesday meetings.
On November 29, 1911, at Bergasse 19, she presented before the Wednesday selected group her work on "Destruction as a cause of events". After receiving the audience's criticism, Freud made the last comment -he would always end the debates. Freud considered Spielrein had based her concept too strongly on biology, leaving psychological aspects aside.
At this meeting, Spielrein developed her theory on the destruction pulsion.
In the biography "Freud: A Life of Our Time", Peter Gray refers to the development of Freud's death pulsion theory: "Freud was intrigued and confused -as many others-, he would have hesitated to call aggressiveness as libido's rival. Later on, remembering the facts, he wondered why we need so much time to acknowledge an aggressive pulsion. Regretting this, he remembered how he had rejected the idea when it first appeared in the psychoanalytical literature and "how much time had to go by before I could accept it". He thought about the work of a brilliant Russian analyst, Sabina Spielrein, in 1911, presented at the Wednesday meetings at Bergasse 19, and in the article published an year later "Destruction as the cause of evolution". In those years -Gay adds- Freud was not mature enough yet.
In Freud's complete works, and in reference to the death pulsion theory, there appears a foot note on the thesis Spielrein presented during the meeting.
However, Jung was also inspired by the young Russian's theory. In his book, Aldo Carotenuto says: "In 1918 Jung had just finished a deep self-analysis which had taken him close to the limits of a tragedy. He was renewed after discovering -all by himself this time- his inspiring demon. Sabina's letters probably showed him the relavence of the work he had done with her when she was a simple patient at the psychiatric hospital" and he continues to say "Aloof of time, she could represent the materialization of some of his deepest instances, which would have remained unknown without a dramatic situation. During his isolation, Jung created his metapsychology. I do not find it difficult to think that his hypothesis on the Person, the Shadow and the Soul may be the result of those former experiences".
By this time, the relationship between Freud and Jung started to break.
The young Russian tried hard to keep these two great figures together. In January 1918 she writes to Jung. "You see neurosis mainly as a regressive process. Freud considers it as the detention of development. If you take the definition in its general sense, both are right. You sustain that an unfulfilled vital purpose causes neurosis; i.e., regression. According to Freud, when the development is detained the vital purpose cannot be found; i.e., enough sublimation cannot be reached. Where can you find the contradiction? (Spielrein, according to Carotenuto).
Soon after World War I began, Spielrein moved to Switzerland. In Zurich she renewed her contact with Bleuler and later with Jung. From there she traveled to Laussane and during this period (1914 - 1916) she published a series of articles, though few of her psychoanalytical writings of this time are known at present. The documentation produced during this time and until 1919 relates to the letter exchange with Jung. Eight letters by Spielrein are kept today... The letters with Jung consist of ten until (Kerr). During this time, Sabina translated some of Jung's papers into Russian.
In 1920, Spielrein published five essays and participated of the Sixth International Psychoanalysis Conference held in The Haye. Later, she returned to Geneva, to the Rousseau Institute, which was turning into one of the major pedagogical centers. Between 1921 and 1923, she wrote eleven psychoanalytical essays, some of which were of special relevance. It should be said that most of Spielrein's papers pioneered in the field of child psychoanalysis. The most relevant ones are "Time in the unconscious life of the soul" and "Some analogies between the child's and the aphasic's thought". The latter -Kerr explains- was published together with one of Piaget's first important essays in the Archives de Psychologie.
In 1923, Sabina Spielrein, encouraged by Sigmund Freud among others, returned to the Soviet Union with her husband and daughter, and joined the Russian Psychoanalytical Society, founded in 1921 in Moscow by Moshe Wulff and Ermakov.
History would prevent her from pursuing her projects. She was a didactic analyst at the Institute and in 1925 she participated in the Conference held here. In 1926 she went back to Rostov, her city of birth, where she opened and directed a home for psychoanalytical children and newly-borns, where she practiced psychology and gave classes at the Rostov University. However, in 1936, the Stalin government forbade the official practice of psychoanalysis.
In 1937 her name appears for the last time among the members of the Russian society.
Since then, Sabina Spielrein started to practice clinical medicine.
Her father died; some years later her husband passed away. Her brothers were killed by agents of the Stalinist government.
In 1941, the Germans invaded Russia. Sabina Spielrein, together with her two daughters, Eva and Renata, was murdered with a group of women at the synagogue, according to the information received by Carotenuto from the Swede journalist Ljunggren (1983).
These references were corrected by Nitzschke. In 1941 the German troops stayed in Rostov for a short time." The organized massacre of Jews -when Sabina Spielrein and her daughters were killed, according to contemporary reports (compare Issel 1999) - started only in August 1942, after the city was re-conquered and occupied for a long time. All Jews were taken to Smijewa Balka where they were shot to death."
Since her return to Russia, Sabina Spielrein and her scientific work were slowly covered by silence and finally forgotten after her death.
Her figure remained hidden under the debris until her texts, diaries and letters were found. New pieces of information will probably appear from under the debris which will help us to unravel this tragic and meaningful history of the XX century involving psychoanalysis and its two titans (Lothane) Jung and Freud and two political situations involving Hitler and Stalin, blamed for the murder of 57 million persons (Lothane).
Kerr says: "When Spielrein returned to Russia, she disappeared from the annals of the psychoanalytical movement. Her essays were not read and she was slowly forgotten. In time, she was covered by an almost absolute darkness and there she stayed until the letters exchanged by Freud and Jung were published. ...The distinctive trait of her fate was that she was remembered for the only controversial contribution to the psychoanalytical theory. She literally had her own foot note in the history of the psychoanalytical movement."
On October 9, 1910, Sabina wrote in her diary: "The night is wonderful and terribly warm. The sound of a violin can be heard in the distance. Sigfrid, my child! One day you will have to say what your mother feels today. If this cannot happen, the intelligence and great sensitiveness will only help me to admit how useless my life was and to see how my dream of youth is broken."

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