Sabina Nikolayevna SpielreinAlso transliterated Shpilrein, Shpilrain, or Shpilreyn. (, ; – 11 August 1942) was a Russian physician and one of the first female psychoanalysts.
She was first the patient of Carl Gustav Jung, then the student of Jung, then eventually the colleague of Carl Gustav Jung. She also had an intimate relationship with Jung during 1908–1910, as is documented in their correspondence from the time and her diaries.Lance S. Owens, Jung in Love: The Mysterium in Liber Novus (Gnosis Archive Books, 2015), 27–35. (Online edition available. ) Spielrein also met, corresponded with, and had a collegial relationship with Sigmund Freud. Spielrein also worked with and psychoanalysed Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget.
Spielrein worked as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, teacher and paediatrician in Switzerland and Russia. In her thirty-year professional career, she published over 35 papers in three languages (German, French and Russian), covering psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics and educational psychology. Among her works in the field of psychoanalysis is the essay titled "Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens"written in German in 1912, published in English as "Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being". Spielrein was a pioneer of psychoanalysis and one of the first to introduce the concept of the Todestrieb (in Freudian analysis called the death drive; sometimes referred to as the "death instinct" in layman's terms).
Spielrein was one of the first psychoanalysts to conduct a case study on early concepts of schizophrenia, and to have a dissertation appear in a psychoanalytic journal.
Spielrein is increasingly recognized as an important and innovative thinker who was marginalized in history because of her unusual eclecticism, refusal to join factions, and feminist approach to psychology.
Sabina Spielrein was killed during the Holocaust on August 11, 1942, by a Nazi SS death squad, during a mass execution of Jews at the Zmievskaya Balka ravine in Rostov-on-Don, Soviet Union.
Biography Family and early life, 1885–1904
She was born in 1885 into a wealthy Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don, Russian Empire. Her mother Eva (born Khave) Lublinskaya was the daughter and granddaughter of rabbis from Yekaterinoslav. Eva trained as a dentist, but did not practice. Sabina's father Nikolai (born Naftul) Spielrein was an agronomist. After moving from Warsaw to Rostov, he became a successful merchant. On her birth certificate, Sabina appeared as Sheyve Naftulovna, but throughout her life and on official documents she used the name Sabina Nikolayevna. She was the eldest of five children. All three of her brothers later became eminent scientists. One of them, Isaac Spielrein, was a Soviet psychologist, a pioneer of work psychology. Another was the mathematician Jan Spielrein. From her early childhood, Sabina was highly imaginative and believed that she had a 'higher calling' to achieve greatness, and she communicated about this privately with a 'guardian spirit'. However, her parents' marriage was turbulent and she experienced physical violence from both of them. She suffered from multiple somatic symptoms and obsessions. Some commentators believe she may have been sexually abused by someone in the family. She attended a Froebel school followed by the Yekaterinskaya Gymnasium in Rostov, where she excelled in science, music and languages. She learned to speak three languages fluently. During her teens, she continued to be troubled emotionally and became infatuated first with her history teacher, then with a paternal uncle. While at school, she resolved to go abroad to train as a doctor, with the approval of her rabbinic grandfather. She completed her medical degree with honors.
Hospital admission, 1904–1905 Following the sudden death of her only sister Emilia from typhoid, Spielrein's mental health started to deteriorate, and at the age of 18 she suffered a breakdown with severe hysteria including tics, grimaces, and uncontrollable laughing and crying. After an unsuccessful stay in a Swiss sanatorium, where she developed another infatuation with one of the doctors, she was admitted to the Burghölzli mental hospital near Zürich in August 1904. Its director was Eugen Bleuler, who ran it as a therapeutic community with social activities for the patients including gardening, drama and scientific lectures. One of Bleuler's assistants was Carl Jung, afterwards appointed as deputy director. In the days following her admission, Spielrein disclosed to Jung that her father had often beaten her, and that she was troubled by masochistic fantasies of being beaten. Bleuler ensured that she was separated from her family, later requiring her father and brothers to have no contact with her. She made a rapid recovery, and by October was able to apply for medical school and to start assisting Jung with word association tests in his laboratory. Between October and January, Jung carried out word association tests on her, and also used some rudimentary psychoanalytic techniques. Later, he referred to her twice in letters to Freud as his first analytic case, although in his publications he referred to two later patients in these terms. During her admission, Spielrein fell in love with Jung. By her own choice, she continued as a resident in the hospital from January to June 1905, although she was no longer receiving treatment. She worked as an intern alongside other Russian students there including Max Eitingon, as well as expatriate psychiatrists who were studying with Bleuler, including Karl Abraham.
Medical student, 1905–1911 She attended medical school at the University of Zurich from June 1905 to January 1911, excelling there academically. Her diaries show a very broad range of interests and reading including philosophy, religion, Russian literature and evolutionary biology. She lived in several different apartments, mixing in a social circle of predominately fellow Russian Jewish women medical students. Many of these, together with Spielrein, became fascinated with the emerging movement of psychoanalysis in western Europe, and studied with Bleuler and Jung. Spielrein's main focus while in medical school was on psychiatry. A number of the students, like Spielrein, subsequently became psychiatrists, spent time with Freud in Vienna, and published in psychoanalytic journals. These included Esther Aptekman, Fanya Chalevsky, Sheina Grebelskaya and Tatiana Rosenthal. Politically, Spielrein identified with socialism, although some of her Russian student contemporaries were followers of the Socialist Revolutionary Party or of Zionism.
Supervised first by Bleuler and then by Jung, Spielrein completed her medical school dissertation, a close study of the language of a patient with schizophrenia. It was published in the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, which Jung edited. She was one of the first people to conduct a case study on schizophrenia and have it published in a psychoanalytic journal. Freud referenced it in the same volume in his postscript to the Schreber Case;S. Freud, Case Studies II (PFL 9) p. 220 It was the first doctorate to appear in a psychoanalytic journal. Her dissertation contributed greatly to the understanding of the language of people with schizophrenia. It focused more attention on the mental illness and highlighted the need for more research. It was also the first dissertation written by a woman that was psychoanalytically oriented.Hall, Karen. Sabina Spielrein 1885–1942 Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. Accessed 1 May 2015 She left Zürich the day after graduation, having resolved to establish an independent career as a psychoanalyst elsewhere.
Relationship with Carl Jung While at medical school, Spielrein continued to assist Jung in the laboratory as she had done as an in-patient. She also attended his ward rounds and met him socially. The strong feelings she had developed towards him as his hospital patient continued during her first three years at medical school, and she developed a fantasy of having a child with him to be called Siegfried. She did not have further therapy from him, although from around late 1907 he informally tried to analyze her wish for his child. In the summer of 1908, as she entered her fourth year at medical school, she and Jung began to have increasingly intimate encounters, which she described in her diaries as "poetry". There are differing views as to whether they had sexual intercourse. John Launer has reviewed the evidence from her diaries and their letters in his 2015 biography of Spielrein, Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein. He concluded that they had consensual and erotic physical contact but stopped short of sexual penetration. This is supported by Spielrein's statement in a letter to her mother: "So far we have stayed at the level of poetry that is not dangerous." Lance Owens further summarized the documentary evidence in his 2015 study, Jung in Love: The Mysterium in Liber Novus.Owens, Lance S., Jung in Love: The Mysterium in Liber Novus (Gnosis Archive Books, 2015), 27–35. (Online edition available. This work was originally published in Das Rote Buch – C. G. Jungs Reise zum anderen Pol der Welt, ed. Thomas Arzt, Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2015. Zvi Lothane, a Freudian psychoanalyst and scholar of psychoanalytic history, makes the most robust and well-supported case against a consummated sexual relationship between the pair. Lothane summarizes his conclusions:
During the ensuing months, Jung wrote to Freud about the relationship, at first accusing Spielrein of having tried unsuccessfully to seduce him, and then admitting that he had become romantically involved with her. He sent a series of letters to Spielrein's mother, writing "no one can prevent two friends from doing as they wish...the likelihood is that something more may enter the relationship". Spielrein also wrote to Freud, making it clear that, for a few months, their relationship had been in some fashion physical, involving what Spielrein again called "poetry": "In the end the unavoidable happened...it reached the point where he could no longer stand it and wanted 'poetry'. I could not and did not want to resist, for many reasons". Eva Spielrein threatened to report him to Eugen Bleuler and came to Zürich to do so, but in the end decided not to. Meanwhile, Jung had resigned his medical post at the Burghölzli, although he continued his laboratory work and university teaching. A document-based account of these events, including the three-way correspondence among Spielrein, Jung and Freud, appears in Launer's biography.
After a hiatus of several months caused by the tension, Spielrein and Jung resumed their relationship in the summer of 1909, and continued seeing each other privately up through the last months of 1910. Spielrein permanently departed Zürich around January 1911.Owens, Lance, Jung in Love: The Mysterium in Liber Novus, 29. In Spielrein's private diary entry dated 11 September 1910—just four months before graduating from medical school, and leaving both Jung and Zürich—she mused again upon her fantasy of bearing Jung's son. Sabina saw in reality how totally impossible it was, how it would ruin her chance of finding another love and destroy her scientific and professional ambitions:
Written shortly before her departure from Zürich, these words seemingly imply that whatever the nature of their physical "poetry", Jung and Spielrein had not engaged in sexual intercourse.Owens, Lance S., Jung in Love: The Mysterium in Liber Novus, 31.