For Sigmund Freud, therapeutic successes are "blown away like spray before the wind." In Sabina Spielrein's case, Carl Gustav Jung violates psychoanalytic ethics: he seduces the patient who realizes he is a "psychopath" (letter to her mother, at end 1908). He obliterates the required "conditions of abstinence" and fails to comprehend the fundamentals of psychoanalytic technique�he does not analyze the "delicate" ambivalence of Sabina's transference as resistance (see Freud, 1912, 1912a, 1913, 1914). Jung's marital infidelities with other patients too (for example, Antonia Wolff from 1911 to her death in 1952) anticipate his rapid descent into psychosis which together with delusions of sublime Übermensch powers eventually realizes a book on flying saucers! (see Jung, 1959 [1958]). After their break in July 1914, Jung's anti-Semitism finalizes Freud's rejection�he aids and abets Goebbel's brother in expelling all Jews from the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and bans the 'Oedipus complex' as Jewish.

Spielreiniana overstates Sabina's significance for psychoanalytic history. She sublimates hysterical symptoms and psychotic episodes into creative writing. She neither generates unique psychoanalytic concepts nor originates a school of thought. Without Freud's genius, her ideas derive from the culture of her time, from Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. Freud does his best not to moralize nor to berate Jung over the ill-judged affair in the hope that it serve as a salutary learning experience: "But now I entreat you," he writes to Jung on 18 June, 1909, "don't go too far in the direction of contrition or reaction." Freud, so temperate in our resentful (Bloom) political correction times, urges Jung to "remember Lassalle's fine sentence about the chemist whose test tube had cracked: 'With a slight frown over the resistance of matter, he gets on with his work'." Freud was tirelessly admiring of this chemical analogy, "in view of the kind of matter we work with, it will never be possible to avoid little laboratory explosions." Then in a witty sexual analogy of which he must surely have been aware, Freud writes: "Maybe we didn't slant the test-tube enough, or we heated it too quickly." The rub lies in the treatment's premature climax for "in this way we learn what part of the danger lies in the matter and what part in our way of handling it." While Freud appreciates Sabina's education and intelligence, he finds her "demanding" and "ambivalent," and with far too great a personal investment in the biological not psychoanalytical aspects of theory. "What troubles me most," he writes to Jung on 30 November, 1911, in a comment that might well apply to the aberrations of the Lacanian School as to neuro-psychoanalysis today, "is that Fräulein Spielrein wants to subordinate the psychological material to biological considerations; this dependency," Freud insists," is no more acceptable than a dependency on philosophy, physiology, or brain anatomy." And then a worthy motto in Italian: "yA farà da se"�Psychoanalysis will be what it will be, will do what it does, in its own way (see Freud, 1988). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud with characteristic lightness of touch, savoir-faire no less, annotates regarding the possibility of primary masochism:

A considerable portion of these speculations have been anticipated by Sabina Spielrein (1912) in an instructive and interesting paper which, however, is unfortunately not entirely clear to me. 

She there describes the sadistic components of the sexual instinct as 'destructive.' 

A.Stärcke (1914), again, has attempted to identify the concept of libido itself with the biological concept (assumed on theoretical grounds) of an impetus towards death. See also Rank (1907). All these discussions, like that in the text, give evidence of the demand for a clarification of the theory of the instincts such as has not yet been achieved.�[A later discussion of the destructive instinct by Freud himself occupies Chapter VI of Civilization and its Discontents (1930 [1929]).]

See Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) SE 18:55, 1.
[Freud refers to Spielrein on four occasions in SE.
See Spielrein, Sabina in bibliography below.]

Our genealogical interest is in Spielrein's biography and the tragic circumstances of her death. Born in 1885 in Rostov-on-Don in Russia (a city which in 1939 has a population of 260,000) on the so-called 'Jewish corridor' between Riga in Latvia and Odessa on the Baltic, SABINA NIKOLAJEVNA SPIELREIN
is the daughter of wealthy parents GILDE-KAUFMANNS NAPHTUL ARKADJEVITCH SPIELREIN and EVA MARCONA LUJUBLINSKAJA: the eldest of five children with three brothers, JEAN, ISAAK, and EMIL, and a sister EMILIA who dies of typhus at age 6, her grandfather is a Rabbi. 

In 1905 at age 18 she arrives at Berghölzli, Zurich for treatment with Jung, she enters Medical School under Eugen Bleuler at University of Zurich in 1905 and by 1909 writes to Freud to rescue her from Jung's malpractice: Freud's stern reply, 6 August, 1909, advocates "restraint, repression of feelings for Jung, and proper conduct." She achieves an MD in 1911 with a dissertation, "The Psychological Content of a Case of Schizophrenia (dementia praecox)," she travels to Vienna in October for Freud�s scientific meeting on transformation and in 1912, publishes her article, "Destruction as a cause of coming into being," concerning castration, transubstantiation, and Christological resurrection�pantheisitic ideas which derive from Segantini whose Ave Maria on the Lake (1886) (a gift from Jung, in reproduction) hung over her piano in her pensione room as a student in Zurich.

http://www.segantini-museum.ch/ 

She returns to Rostov-on-Don in April, 1912 and marries a medical doctor, PAWEL NAUMOWITSCH SCHEFTEL. The couple return to Berlin in December, 1913 where she gives birth to a daughter, IRMA RENATA before moving to join Jean Piaget and Edouard Claparède in Geneva. In 1920, she attends the 6^th International Psychoanalytic Congress at The Hague and her paper on linguistic development in children owes more to Stekel and to Piaget, who was averse to psychoanalysis, than to Freud. She is co-founder with DIMITRIEVITCH ERMAKOV and MOSHE WULFF in 1921 in Moscow of the first Psychoanalytic Society in the USSR, which prospers under Trotsky�s protection. She returns finally to Moscow in Fall 1923. Stalin purges psychoanalysis in 1936 and her three brothers perish in the Gulag. On 27 July, 1942, Hitler�s troops occupy Rostov-on Don. They round up and slaughter a group of Jews in the synagogue. Among those murdered are SABINA SPIELREIN (56 years) and her two daughters, RENATA (28 years) and EVA (18 years). My own maternal grandparents, ZHITOMIRSKI and EIDELBERG originate from Rostov-on-Don. 

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