Person
Sabina Spielrein
Russian-born psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Admitted in 1904 to the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich, where Carl Gustav Jung treated her, she went on to study medicine, wrote one of the first psychoanalytic doctoral dissertations, on a case of schizophrenia, under Eugen Bleuler (1911), and joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; in Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens (1912) she argued that the sexual drive has a destructive as well as a creative component, and Freud acknowledged that she had anticipated part of his death drive theory. After years in Berlin, Lausanne and Geneva, where she was Jean Piaget’s analyst, she returned to Soviet Russia in 1923, and in 1942 she and her two daughters were murdered in Rostov-on-Don by a German Einsatzgruppe unit.
- Born
- 1885
- Died
- 1942
- Influenced
analysed by
- Carl Gustav Jung 1904 Spielrein came to Jung as a patient after her admission to the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich in 1904; he treated her there, and she later became his student and colleague.
supervised by
- Eugen Bleuler 1911 Bleuler, director of the Burghölzli, supervised Spielrein’s medical dissertation on a case of schizophrenia, published in 1911, with Jung.
introduced
- Destruction as the cause of coming into being 1912 Spielrein set out the thesis in Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens (1912), concluding that the reproductive drive consists, psychologically as well, of two antagonistic components, and that becoming is the result of destruction.