Sabina Spielrein: From Being a Psychiatric Patient to Becoming an Analyst Herself
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Article SABINA SPIELREIN: FROM BEING A PSYCHIATRIC PATIENT TO BECOMING AN ANALYST HERSELF Francisco Balbuena1
In this paper, I evaluate Sabina Spielrein’s life and ideas from a contemporary understanding. I do this by considering the context and situation in which she lived: a journey from being a hospitalized psychiatric patient to becoming a psychoanalyst herself. From her crucial life experiences she learned that the main psychic conflicts stem from the struggle between life and death, and not from opposing ego drives and sexual desires. Spielrein’s considerable creative potentials were nurtured, as well as blocked by her inner conflicts, but also by the enormous historical conflicts of her time.
KEY WORDS: Sabina Spielrein; C. G. Jung’s patient; becoming an analyst; life experience and theory; feminism; creativity https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-020-09260-0
INTRODUCTION
As Freud (1928) noted in his famous essay on Dostoyevsky, the sources of creativity remain obscure. Thus Sabina Nikolayevna Spielrein-Sheftel (1885–1942) was a gifted and original scholar, thinker, and doctor, as well as one of the first female psychoanalysts (Marchese, 2015). In a similar vein, as Launer (2014) rightly points out, she took a woman’s perspective on psychology long before it occurred to others that gender was important in studying the mind. It might be worthwhile, at this point, to note that her career could be understood as a vivid example for the adherents of modern feminism (Sayers, 1991). In spite of this, the story of Spielrein’s rediscovery is almost as remarkable as that of her life. Supporting this assertion about Spielrein’s early background few details have been known until 1977, when Carlo Trombetta, doing research for a book on Edouard Clapare`de, found by Francisco Balbuena, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Clinical and Experimental Psychology, University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain. Address correspondence to Prof. Francisco Balbuena, Ph.D. C/ Go´lgota, n8 8; 2-D, 41007-Seville, Spain. E-mail: [email protected]
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chance a cardboard box containing Spielrein’s personal documents (her diary and letters) in Palais Wilson, Geneva. Then he passed on the material to Aldo Carotenuto, a Jungian psychoanalyst who wrote Diario di una Segreta Simmetria. Sabina Spielrein tra Jung e Freud [A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Freud and Jung] (1980). It might be appropriate to note that the dramatic events between student Spielrein and Professor Jung had already been published in 1974 in the complete correspondence between Freud and Jung as edited by William McGuire (1974), but nobody paid attention until Carotenuto’s book appeared firstly in 1980 in Italy and 1982 in the United States. Subsequently, new documents were extracted from the archives of Edouard Clapare`de‘s descendant’s, culminating in the 1983 re-edition of the book. That same year, Magnus Ljunggren, a professor of Slavic studies from Sweden, while in the Soviet Union writing an essay on Andrei Bely, met Spielrein’s niece, Menikha Shpilrain (1916–2000
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