Carl Jung and his medical student Sabina Spielrein
Sabina Spielrein as child (left), with her mother and sister.
Jung and his medical student
Jung never mentioned to Freud that he had been Spielrein teacher for six years and thus an object of admiration and affection, as detailed in her Russian diaries and letters.
In 1905 Sabina writes to mother:
“To-morrow I am going to the medical library and will borrow [Eduard von] Hartmann’s “[Philosophy of] The Unconscious”, which I accidentally saw in the catalog. Since I saw this book at Junga’s [pet name], I believe it is worth reading. I visited him today. He comforted me about Remi; in his opinion her condition has improved markedly. Junga told me that I should not be wearing a hat with holes in it and that I should also have my shoes mended. I replied that I had run out of money, but that I had already received so much that I could not ask my parents for more.
Then he made a proposal to make me a loan of 100 francs and write you about it. But as I objected vigorously, he forced me to accept 10 francs from him for the hat and the repair of the shoes. Naturally, I shall soon pay him this money back. He is coming to visit me on Friday (1st of September) at 3 o’clock. If only I could only learn to cook borscht before then! Today Jung and I went on rounds at our Hospital. There is number of women for whom I am an object of admiration! So there, you can see what kind of a person he is, my Junga.”
In 1906 she expresses her admiration for his “colossal intelligence and character and lecture, which was wonderfully beautiful (not only in the scientific but also in the ethical sense). There you were, able to create so much enthusiasm and feeling — how is it possible? You are endowed with a wonderful potential energy and you could achieve much more than you actually do. — If you could only know how ethically beautiful you were then (when you treated the patients with so much care and love)! … I was completely transformed, soft and warm towards people.
Even though I went home in a flood of tears, I was calm and strong in my decision – one doesn’t need anything else, it all comes from poetry. I love you too much, and therefore perhaps I imagine something that is not there (or perhaps it is there?) (for example, that you despise me, that you do not want that I should stalk you, etc.). Each time that causes me emotional storms and self-torture. For this reason I wanted to leave Zurich for at least three years, but I have found no better university.” ~Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, The real story of Sabina Spielrein: or fantasies vs. facts of a life, Pages 5-6
Sabina Spielrein Biography
Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942)
Sabina Spielrein was born the eldest of four children in Rostov on Don.
Her father, Nikolai Spielrein was a wealthy Russian-Jewish businessman and her mother Eva Luyblinskaja had studied dentistry, practiced this profession is not enough.
Sabina Spielrein attended until 1904, the girls’ school in Rostov.During her school years, showed symptoms of “psychotic hysteria” so that their parents brought them in 1904, according to the Zurich psychiatric clinic Burgholzli.
She was treated by Carl Gustav Jung and 1905 as released from the hospital cured.
That same year she began to study medicine at the University of Zurich, she continued her analysis with Jung continued privately.
1911 Sabina Spielrein doctorate on the psychological content of a case of schizophrenia, it was the first psychoanalytically oriented dissertation of a woman.
They then traveled to Munich to Vienna, where she met with Freud in October 1911 and member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was.
1912 Sabina Spielrein published important theoretical writing, the destruction as the cause of becoming.
In it she took Freud’s reflections on the death instinct in advance, the later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle referred to them.
They formulated the hypothesis that the sex drive is composed of a positive and a negative component and also career-like impulse to destroy, is analogous to biological procreation, in the union of the male with the female cell, each is destroyed by itself, so that new results.
Pleasure and anxiety are the reaction of the ego on the sexuality inherent tendency to dissolution of individuality, whereby the neurotic, the destructive component, the “death instinct” over the love of excitement outweighed.
Sabina Spielrein in 1912 married the Russian-Jewish doctor Pavel Sheftel, a years later, her daughter Renata was born.
From 1912 to 1914 she lived with her family in Berlin and published several papers on child psychoanalysis and dream analysis.
After the start of World War II she moved to Switzerland, while her husband returned to Russia.
They settled in Lausanne in 1919 and founded the psychoanalytic study group Cercle Interne.
In 1920 she moved with her daughter to Geneva and became a member of Geneva led by Edouard Claparède psychoanalytic society.
She gave lectures on psychoanalysis and pedagogy at the Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau and has published numerous works, including several children on the basis of analytical releases of protocols from our childhood to her daughter.
In 1922 she joined the UPU in the Swiss Society of Psychoanalysis. Its most famous analysand in this period was Jean Piaget.
1923 Sabina Spielrein returned to Russia, settled in Moscow and became a member and training analyst of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society.
She held at the National Institute for Psychoanalysis lectures and seminars on child analysis, and worked as a doctor at the clinic.
She was also Head of the Department of child psychology at Moscow University and fellow at the of Vera Schmidt -run children’s home laboratory.
Sabina Spielrein was a pioneer of child psychoanalysis and cognitive and language scientifically based psychoanalysis.
One of her priorities was to explore children’s thought and language. She developed the thesis that there are autistic and social languages, which evolved from the latter the former.
In 1923 she gave several lectures in Zurich, Geneva and Moscow on the subject of aphasia. In their view, have to occur in aphasia thought disorder analogies to the early childhood thinking.
Eighteen months after her return to the USSR Sabina Spielrein moved into her home city of Rostov was living again with her husband and got 1926 their second daughter, Eve.She was on prophylactic as Pädologin school clinic, where she conducted screening for early detection of developmental disorders, as well as a doctor at the Psychiatric Clinic.Following the ban on Pädologie 1936 she worked as a school doctor.
Although psychoanalysis was banned in the Soviet Union, she continued her psychoanalytic work continued until the early 1940s.
1942, after the capture of Rostov by the German Wehrmacht, was Sabina Spielrein and killed their daughters along with the rest of Rostov Jews by the SS-Sonderkommand
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog