Carl Jung - Sabina Spielrein Quotations - Carl Jung Depth Psychology

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Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein

Your thinking is bold, far-reaching, and philosophical. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, August 8, 1911.

Your study is extraordinarily intelligent and contains splendid ideas whose priority I am happy to acknowledge as yours. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Dec. 23, 1912

Minds such as yours help advance science. You [definitely] must become a psychiatrist. – Jung to Spielrein, (Spielrein 13 June 1909, p. 101)

You will see that this investigation is the necessary preliminary work for the psychology of Dem. praec. Spielrein’s case is proof of that (it’s in the Jahrbuch). ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Vol. 1, Page 23.

Sincere thanks on behalf of my wife for the flowers. That was very sweet of you. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Sept. [?] 1910

Your image has changed completely, and I want to tell you how very, very happy it makes me to be able to hope that there are people who are like me, people in whom living and thinking are one; good people who do not misuse the power of their mind to dream up fetters but rather to create freedoms. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, June 30, 1908.

How great would be my happiness to find that person in you, that ‘esprit fort’ who never descends into sentimentality, but whose essential and innermost prerequisite for life is her own freedom and independence. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, June 30, 1908.

I often think that the happiness that I want to give other people is begrudged me, or is returned to me in the form of hidden hostility, which is what has so often happened to me! Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, July 22, 1908

At this meeting I really had an opportunity for the first time to see this great man [Freud] in my world, out of his own milieu, and thus to understand him much more deeply than before. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, September 28, 1908

He [Freud] is truly a great and good man who, by virtue of his wonderful knowledge of humankind and his experience of life, sees incomparably further than I do. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, September 28, 1908

If I have previously only admired this man [Freud] from a distance, now I have really come to love him. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, September 28, 1908

I fear for my work, for my life’s task, for all the lofty perspectives that are being revealed to me by this new Weltanschauung as it evolves. How shall I, with my sensitive soul, free myself from all these questions? ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, December 4, 1908

My mind is torn to its very depths. I, who had to be a tower of strength for many weak people, am the weakest of all. Will you forgive me for being as I am? For offending you by being like this, and forgetting my duties as a doctor towards you? Will you understand that I am one of the weakest and most unstable of human beings? And will you never take revenge on me for that, either in words, or in thoughts or feelings? ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, December 4, 1908

I am looking for someone who understands how to love, without punishing the other person, imprisoning him or sucking him dry; I am seeking this as yet unrealized person who will manage to separate love from social advantage and disadvantage, so that love may always be an end in itself, and not just a means to an end. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, December 4, 1908

It is my misfortune that I cannot live without the joy of love, of tempestuous, ever-changing love. This daemon stands as an unholy contradiction to my compassion and my sensitivity. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, December 4, 1908

When love for a woman awakens within me, the first thing I feel is regret, pity for the poor woman who dreams of eternal faithfulness and other impossibilities, and is destined for a painful awakening out of all these dreams. Therefore if one is already married it is better to engage in this lie and do penance for it immediately than to repeat the experiment again and again, lying repeatedly, and repeatedly disappointing. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Dec. 4, 1908

I can hardly think that there is anything organically wrong with your foot, for the psychological situation is too powerfully and traumatically significant. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Sept. 22 [?], 1911.

Only when you seek the happiness of the other, will your own happiness be granted. I allow myself to write to you so frankly and to admonish you because, after long and solitary reflection, I have eliminated from my heart all the bitterness against you which it still harboured. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Sept. 22 [?], 1911.

But never forget that under no circumstances must you retreat from an immediate goal which your heart considers good and reasonable. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Sept. 22 [?], 1911.

He [Freud] has spoken several times of your dissertation, the best indication that it has made an impression on him. You do not need my recommendation. Approach him as a great master and rabbi, then all will be well. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Sept. 22 [?], 1911.

I am rather worried about how Freud will take the corrections I am introducing into the theory of sexuality. The more I write in my own style, the greater becomes the danger of misunderstandings, for inwardly I am quite alien to the spirit of the Viennese school, though not to the spirit of Freud. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Nov. 24, 1911

He [Freud] wants to give me love, while I want understanding. I want to be a friend on an equal footing, while he wants to have me as a son. For that reason he ascribes to a complex everything I do which does not fit the framework of his teaching. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Nov. 4, 1913.

At the meeting in Munich I saw clearly that Freud is lost to me. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Nov. 4, 1913.

Respect for the human personality and its motives should not be undermined by psychoanalysis. Because I fight for that I suffer much. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, April 1915.

him. I was looking for a friend to whom I could bare my soul.” Later the poor man fell in love with her mother and when she left for Paris he jumped out of a window. ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 4

Sabina’s other crush was on her paternal uncle Adolf who was also in love with her mother. Asked mother: “Which of them do you really love, your uncle or your [History] teacher?” ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 4

In 1901, “while in the Mother told Sabina stories about angels and demons, clairvoyance and miracle cures, inspired by the Chasidic folklore. ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 3

From age five to seven Sabina was educated in a Fröbel type kindergarten in Warsaw learning to speak German and French. ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 3

Until the age of 6-7 I had no fear of any devil. I was an example of courage for my brother and made fun of him by jumping at him out of a dark hiding place or telling him horror stories. My parents warned me that one day I would feel anxiety and understand how her brother felt. ~Sabina Spielrein, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 3

“I nurtured grandiose fantasies: I was a goddess and ruled over a great empire, I possessed a great power with which I could know everything and achieve everything, even though I did not really believe in its reality, for there was a critic inside me who knew the difference between reality and fantasy.” ~Sabina Spielrein, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 3

Sabina “conversed with a spirit. It was an angel sent to her by God, because she was an unusual person, a good spirit that helped her and guided her. At first the spirit spoke German, then Russian. ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 3

Up to the age of 13 she was “extremely religious in spite of her father’s derisions.” In fifth grade, age 15, she “took a lively interest in the psychological aspects of religion and arranged to have lessons in Ancient Hebrew so as to read the Bible in the original.” ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 3

She [Sabina] had a crush on the history teacher, a man of high intelligence and a sad expression in his black eyes, but with a habit of odd grimaces, who “has opened up to her previously unknown vistas by leaps and bounds. I wanted to make sacrifices for him, to suffer for 6th grade, after the death of my little sister” Emilia of typhoid “my illness began:” a prolonged grief complicated by social withdrawal and mounting difficulties in relating to her father and mother. ~Sabina Spielrein, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 4

In 1904 she graduated with a gold medal from the all-girl Yekaterinskaia Gimnazia and like other rich daughters of Rostov, e.g., Vera Weizmann, the future first lady of Israel, Sabina wanted to study in Switzerland. ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 4

As she increasingly lost control of her aggressive impulses (hitting her mother) and unbearable rage at her father, Sabina had to be committed to the Burghölzli Asylum on August 17 1904, not yet 19 years old, to become director Bleuler’s and his deputy Jung’s patient. ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 4

Nine months later Spielrein recovered and while still in the hospital started attending medical school, from which she would graduate in 1911 with an 80-page dissertation on the analytic treatment of a schizophrenic patient. ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 4

From 1905 to 1911 Jung assumed a new function, as her [Sabina] medical school teacher and, with Bleuler, as her dissertation supervisor. ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 4

Jung and his patient in the hospital, true to her mischievous nature, Sabina acted out all manner of pranks to test the nurses and Jung, never Bleuler. ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 4

I have analyzed the clinical condition almost completely with the help of your method and, early on, with a favorable result. In the course of her treatment the patient had the misfortune to fall in love with me. She continues to rave blatantly to her mother about this love and her secret spiteful glee in scaring her mother is not the least of her motives. Therefore the mother would like, if needed, to send her to another doctor, with which I naturally concur. ~Carl Jung, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Page 4

We must not forget the fundamental difference between man and woman, which is also, provisionally, the rule. Man wants to embrace, woman prefers to be embraced. The reverse can only take place provisionally because men are on average more differentiated. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited extracts from a diary, Page 3

Woman is more discriminating in her choice because it is more difficult to find a personality that fits the ideal; it is for these reasons that the woman is generally monogamous, when she truly loves; for opposite reasons, the man is less discriminating and is more or less polygamous. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited extracts from a diary, Page 4

We always see that a beautiful woman is the determining factor in a man’s choice – let us not get angry! What does that mean: a beautiful woman? It is well known that there is no absolute beauty; the ideal of beauty was simply developed from female forms most frequently encountered, that is, from characteristics that proved most pleasing. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited extracts from a diary, Page 4.

Thus one can love nature as a living being and confide one’s inner thoughts to it; for example find similarities between the storm in nature and the storm in one’s own heart, and this similarity is real because our world is a part of the universal world or, if you prefer, a reflection of it. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited extracts from a diary, Page 4

The paper that I have written for the clinic about the value of reaction (Spielrein 1909),4 makes me think that we see our own pain in the soul of the other, that is objectively – hence the relief. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited extracts from a diary, Page 4

Freud’s interpretation that laughter is born of the comparison of two different amounts of energy, the over-abundance of energy being eliminated by laughter, seems to me to be very plausible. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited extracts from a diary, Page 5

When the artist creates, it is not the manifestation of the need to communicate something to the world. It is rather that the complex itself simply wants to emerge! ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited extracts from a diary, Page 5

The most elevated instincts always present themselves as murderous instincts. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited extracts from a diary, Page 6.

Everywhere you see the pleasure involved in destroying and dying. Young people have a strange need to sacrifice their lives for a great cause, a ‘nobler’ cause. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited extracts from a diary, Page 6

The death of a person constitutes the nature of only one complex – the sexual complex. Every individual must disappear as such. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited extracts from a diary, Page 6

001 For a dog, there would hardly be a difference between love and sexual attraction; but a human being can only experience true and profound love a limited number of times; in most cases it will be only a passing fancy. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited Extracts from a Diary, Part I, Page 157

002 It is not the sexual feeling that is uppermost, otherwise one could choose any man for one’s doctor.

One goes to the doctor because one needs to be free of a complex, one confides in the doctor because one knows, or notices, his interest and sympathy; the interest corresponds to understanding, that is, to possession of the same complex.

Hence the sexual feeling. It is not at all necessary for one to react with a sexual complex. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited Extracts from a Diary, Part I, Page 161

If a generation of women, conforming to the utmost subtlety in their emotions and the way of life resulting from these emotions, eventually has a finer subtlety of forms, a purely mechanical sexuality is immediately applied to those forms.

Innovators are rare, especially where an instinct is concerned, and it is still always the rule that a certain shape engenders sexual excitement, a shape which perhaps only simulates a resemblance or in which is to be found only a slight resemblance, but which is more than a similarity between two persons.

After all human beings and animals have similarities which are deemed sufficient by some to engage in sexual relationships; these people are even less discriminating in their choice because an animal can only correspond to a fraction of their personality; from this minimal affinity it would have to be concluded that one can be understood by a cow and confide one’s sublime feelings to her. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited Extracts from a Diary, Part I, Page 158

I come back to the apparent contradictions in sexual life; and this is because associations to death are sexual associations.

But I shall come back to this.

Looking at popular poetry – which must be taken into consideration as it always contains truths – we find that sexual power is considered to be demonic power, a destructive force; the sexual act is a sin!

Where does that come from?

How is it that everyone always puts up so much resistance to sexual feelings?

Why are they hidden, why are they felt to be unbearable, why can they be expressed only in a sublimated or symbolic form?

Why does every young girl (and perhaps also young man) have to live through a period of extreme apprehension of everything sexual (even if she has no idea of the pains it may engender)?

There is an indication here of a contrast between sexuality and the rest of the personality, a contrast which reaches a climax when sexual feelings begin to manifest themselves – as borne out by the numerous psychic problems at the time of puberty – until the ‘demonic’ instinct subdues in part the inner personality and is partly subdued by it. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited Extracts from a Diary, Part I, Page 160

This is how one can explain the numerous representations of the instinct as a destructive force, demonic, etc., … This is also how the resistance of every personality to the sexual instinct can be explained; I do not imply here that two people who feel a sexual attraction wish to be constantly fused into one unit or anything like that.

Sexual feeling is always tamed by other feelings; even during the sexual act, it is suppressed considerably, otherwise you would be facing a passionate killer or a martyr.

I mean that, by destroying, the man wants to annihilate himself while the woman wants to be annihilated.

One sees men as martyrs often enough. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited Extracts from a Diary, Part I, Page 161

Maybe one should regard martyrdom here as ‘feminine’ nature, as a contradictory feeling!

Among very passionate artists like Wagner one must look beyond death for the culminating point of love.

His heroes must die. Siegfried dies and so does Brunnhilde with him; it is thus that the domination of the idea of love is expressed!

‘The race of gods has died away like a breath, I abandon the orphaned world; I now show the world the place of my most sacred knowledge’:

No lands, no treasures,

No divine splendour,

No house, no court,

No princely pomp!

No obscure alliance,

No false treaty,

Neither the hard law

Of false custom!

Love offers to the lover

Only beatitude in pleasure as in sorrow!

It is when it is placed beyond death that a complex attains the sublime.

I would have explained it here in the same way, even if I had not known the essence of the sexual act, and if I did not constantly have these numerous examples illustrating the ‘wish for annihilation’, the destructive instinct.

In the Vaisseau Fantôme (Ghost Ship), the culminating point of love resides in death or beyond

death. ‘I will remain faithful to you until death!’

These are my final impressions.

You yourself of course know of enough situations where the man kills the woman and kills himself afterwards; or the other way round.

Here is enough material for analysis!

I must end this soon for classes begin tomorrow – let us summarize therefore: the sexual instinct – an instinct which is there to renew the whole personality, a partial case of the transformation instinct which every isolated complex possesses! Sexual attraction – attraction of similar people (people with the same nature – only partially so when people are less differentiated). ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited Extracts from a Diary, Part I, Page 161

Sometimes one ideal, sometimes another may feed the psyche, which explains the change in sexual taste.

But the more ideals the lover has, the more lasting is the love.

Some circumstances make some people more accessible to each other.

I believe it is Turgenev who explains this: ‘If a woman regrets something – one knows what will follow’.

If you feel pity, that means that you put yourself in the same situation; the same complex fills you momentarily and similar complexes regulate sexual feelings.

If they are two people of the same sex, a loving, light eroticism occurs; if they are not of the same sex, then the attraction goes deeper.

This explains the sexual affection between a patient and her doctor who are in a psychic relationship.

It is not the sexual feeling that is uppermost, otherwise one could choose any man for one’s doctor.

Hence the sexual feeling. It is not at all necessary for one to react with a sexual complex.

All sympathy between man and woman arouses sexual feelings.

The sight of two magnificent grey eyes may accentuate the sympathy because those eyes by themselves are very eloquent, that is, they are linked to a certain powerful emotional complex, and perhaps express a certain mode of feeling.

The sexual feeling aroused by the same complex disappears as soon as other complexes, which are no longer felt in common, besiege the psyche (besiege in the sense that they ‘become more powerful’).

Let us now examine the transformation of the sexual complex.

Sexual feeling is the origin of a series of representations which we summarize as a sexual complex, in the narrow sense of the word.

But as every strong complex provokes a sexual complex as soon as the partner feels it at the same time, it becomes part of the sexual complex itself.

In this way, the most significant part of the psyche may become the sexual complex, and the magnitude of this cannot be assessed. In the broader sense of the word the totality of the sexual complex, hence the emotions felt for the lover, including all that has been felt simultaneously with him, must now (in the case of an unrequited love) be transformed in its entirety.

The person to whom this is made known assumes great importance.

If the transformation takes place between a man and a woman, the mutual feeling may provoke a new sexual attraction.

Transformation may also take place in the form of artistic work; one is not then linked to a particular person and it is a safeguard against new loves.

Thus the sexual complex in the broad sense of the term can become a powerful motive force, especially in art, but that does not necessarily follow.

It does not follow when, for example, ideals press to be consolidated by a sexual transformation, when nature’s charm is felt by a man in the shape of a woman, that is as a resonance of the ideal in a woman; it is in fact only the consequence of the instinct of transformation or the instinct of self preservation in every complex, that it also wants to be strengthened through the sexual act.

But it is not the sexual feeling which has become the motive force of art etc.; it is the instinct of transformation which every complex possesses, and since each aspect of the personality wants to make its presence felt, the sexual complex also possesses a transformation instinct; and the sexual act is but a particular aspect of this transformation whose function it is to establish a context that is new but also adapted to the same complexes.

Considering its nature, sexual feeling does not need the transformation instinct, but it is present nonetheless; yet the transformation instinct needs the sexual feeling, the latter being a necessary component of the first; otherwise how would the combinations survive?

They would end up dying.

As I have already said, complexes that necessitate transformation are not necessarily linked to the sexual complex; thus a painter who has just experienced a storm at sea can eternalize it in a painting without sexual feeling having anything to do with it; but even if it were also present, it is not the sexual feeling that would have made the artist paint: it is simply the ‘complex gone wild which had to emerge, which needed to find full expression’.

The sexual complex equally aroused would also be equally transformed.

People like Marx, for example, who have dedicated their life to social problems, believe that the source of all feelings lies in socio-political relationships; according to this belief, all emotions, and thus science as well as art, should be modified by the influence of the new social order.

Isn’t this a huge exaggeration?

We are totally ignorant of the cause of feelings, and it is impossible for us ever to know it!

One could at the most discuss the foundations of feeling; it is clear to me that the foundation, or the alpha or omega, of feeling is the transformation instinct, which could eventually be satisfied by the sexual act. ~Sabina Spielrein, Unedited Extracts from a Diary, Part I, Page 161

In Jung, I found the following passage:

Passionate longing, i.e., the libido, has two aspects: it is the power that beautifies everything and, in certain cases, destroys everything.

Often, one cannot recognize the source of this creative power’s destructive quality.

A woman who, in today’s society, abandons herself to passion soon leads herself to ruin.

One need only contemplate the current bourgeois state of affairs to understand how a feeling of unbounded insecurity occurs in those who unconditionally surrender to Fate.

To be fruitful provokes one’s downfall; at the rise of the next generation, the previous one has exceeded its peak.

Our descendants become our most dangerous enemies for whom we are unprepared.

They will survive and take power from our enfeebled hands.

Anxiety in the presence of erotic Fate is completely comprehensible, for there is something immeasurable within it.

Fate usually contains hidden dangers.

The wish not to wrestle in the dangerous struggle of life explains the continual hesitation of neurotics to take risks.

Whoever relinquishes experiencing a risky undertaking must stifle an erotic wish, committing a form of self-murder.

This explains the death fantasies that often accompany the renunciation of the erotic wish.”

I purposely quote Jung’s words so completely because his observation of an unknown fear lying within erotic activity corresponds so well to my results. ~Sabina Spielrein, Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being, Pages 155-156

This idea came originally Cf. my Symbols of Transformation; also Spielrein, “Über den psychologischen Inhalt eines Falles von Schizophrenic”; Nelken, “Analytische Beobachtungen über Phantasien eines Schizophrenen”; C. A. Meier, “Spontanmanifestationen des kollektiven Unbewussten.” ~Carl Jung’s CW 8, Footnote 2

If one reads the recent researches of the Zurich school, for instance the works of Maeder, Spielrein, Nelken, Grebel-skaja, and Itten, one gets a powerful impression of the enormous symbolic activity in dementia praecox. ~Carl Jung, CW 3, Para 390

regard to the mythological parallels, I would like to call your attention to the work of Boas,1 which includes a magnificent collection of American Indian sagas; then the book by Frobenius, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes; and finally the works of Abraham, Rank, Riklin, Jones, Freud, Maeder, Silberer, and Spielrein, and my own investigations in Symbols of Transformation. ~Carl Jung, CW 3, Para 478

Spielrein, too, gives some interesting examples of archaic definitions which, in the course of the illness, begin superimposing themselves on the meanings of words. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 200

What I said above about a disturbed reality function being replaced by an archaic substitute is supported by a remark of Spielrein’s: “I often had the illusion that the patients might simply be victims of a deep-rooted folk superstition.” ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 201

Spielrein evidently thinks symbols have a similar significance when she says: Thus a symbol seems to me to owe its origin to the striving of a complex for dissolution in the common totality of thought.… The complex is thus robbed of its personal quality.… This tendency towards dissolution or transformation of every individual complex is the mainspring of poetry, painting, and every form of art. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 201

If, for “complex,” we substitute the idea of “energy value,” i.e., the total affectivity of the complex, it is clear that Spielrein’s views fall into line with my own. . ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 201

Spielrein’s patient associated the act of boring with fire and procreation. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 217

Concerning the substance of the rayed sceptre the following may be noted: Spielrein’s patient said that “God pierces the earth with his ray.” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 638

Spielrein’s patient said of her snake: “It is God’s animal, it has such wonderful colours: green, blue, and white. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 677

Spielrein (pp. 358ff.) found numerous allusions to this motif in an insane patient. Fragments of different things and materials were “cooked” or “burnt.” “The ashes can turn into a man,” said the patient, and she also saw “dismembered children in glass coffins.” ~Carl Jung’s CW 5, Footnote 4

Spielrein’s patient (p. 394) speaks of horses who eat human beings and even exhumed corpses. Carl Jung, CW 5, Footnote 29

Spielrein, “Über den psychologischen Inhalt eines Falls von Schizophrenie” pp. 329ff. ~Carl Jung’s CW 11, Footnote 5,

Cf. “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass,” pp. 231f. For dismemberment, transformation, and recomposition in a case of schizophrenia, see Spielrein, “Ueber den psychologischen Inhalt eines Falles von Schizophrenie,” pp. 358ff. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Footnote 2

from my pupil S. Spielrein: cf. “Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens” (1912). This work is mentioned by Freud, who introduces the destructive instinct in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (orig. 1920), Ch. V. [More fully in Ch. VI, which contains the Spielrein reference: Standard Edn., XVIII, p. 55.—EDITORS.]

Pindar, fr. 166f. Spielrein’s patient (p. 371) also had this idea of splitting the earth: “Iron is used for boring into the earth—With iron you can make men—The earth is split, burst open, man is divided —Man is cut up and put together again—In order to put a stop to being buried alive, Jesus told his disciples to bore into the earth.” ~ Carl Jung, CW 5, Footnote 47

Spielrein’s patient said that she too had been shot by God three times—“then came a resurrection of the spirit.” ~ Carl Jung, CW 5, Footnote 52

Spielrein’s patient was also sick from “snake poison” (p. 385). Schreber said he was infected by “corpse poison,” that “soul murder” had been committed on him, etc. (pp. 54ff.). ~ Carl Jung, CW 5, Footnote 66

Spielrein’s patient (p. 336) uses the same images; she speaks of the “rigidity of the soul on the cross,” of “stone figures” who must be “melted.” ~ Carl Jung, CW 5, Footnote 68

This fact led my pupil Dr. Spielrein to develop her idea of the death-instinct, which was then taken up by Freud. In my opinion it is not so much a question of a death-instinct as of that “other” instinct (Goethe) which signifies spiritual life. ~ Carl Jung, CW 5, Footnote 38

Spielrein’s patient received three arrow wounds from God, through her head, breast, and eye, “then came a resurrection of the spirit” (p. 376). In the Tibetan legend of Bogda Gesser Khan, the sunhero shoots his arrow into the forehead of the demoniacal old woman, who then eats him and spits him out again. In a legend of the Kalmucks, from Siberia, the hero shoots the arrow into the “bull’s-eye” that grows on the bull’s forehead and “emits rays.” ~ Carl Jung, CW 5, Footnote 94

Concerning the snake-kiss, see Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, III, p. 969. By this means a beautiful woman was set free. Spielrein’s patient (pp. 344f.) says: “Wine is the blood of Jesus.—The water must be blessed and was blessed by him.—He who is buried alive becomes a vineyard. ~ Carl Jung, CW 5, Footnote 157

Spielrein’s patient (p. 345), in connection with the significance of the communion, speaks of “water mingled with childishness,” “spermatic water,” “blood and wine.” On p. 368 she says: “The souls fallen in the water are saved by God: they fall on deeper ground. Souls are saved by the sun-god.” ~ Carl Jung, CW 5, Footnote 27

SPIELREIN, S. “Über den psychologischen Inhalt eines Falls von Schizophrenie,” Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (Leipzig and Vienna), III (1912), ~Carl Jung’s Collected Works Bibliography

SPIELREIN, SABINA. “Über den psychologischen Inhalt eines Falles von Schizophrenie (Dementia praecox),” Jb. psychoanal. psychopath. Forsch., III (1911), 329–400. ~Carl Jung’s Collected Works, Bibliography.

SPIELREIN, SABINA. “Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens,” Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (Leipzig and Vienna), IV (1912), 465–503. ~Carl Jung’s Collected Works Bibliography

If I have previously only admired this man [Freud] from a distance, now I have really come to love him. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, September 28, 1908

Sincere thanks on behalf of my wife for the flowers. That was very sweet of you. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Sept. [?] 1910

Your thinking is bold, far-reaching, and philosophical. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, August 8, 1911.

But never forget that under no circumstances must you retreat from an immediate goal which your heart considers good and reasonable. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Sept. 22 [?], 1911.

Your study is extraordinarily intelligent and contains splendid ideas whose priority I am happy to acknowledge as yours. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Dec. 23, 1912

At the meeting in Munich I saw clearly that Freud is lost to me. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, Nov. 4, 1913.

Respect for the human personality and its motives should not be undermined by psychoanalysis. Because I fight for that I suffer much. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein, April 1915.