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.
Ideas
- 1912 introduced Destruction as the cause of coming into being
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.
Influence
Lineage
- 1904 analysed by Carl Gustav Jung
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.
- 1911 supervised by Eugen Bleuler
Bleuler, director of the Burghölzli, supervised Spielrein’s medical dissertation on a case of schizophrenia, published in 1911, with Jung.
- 1921 analysed Jean Piaget
Spielrein met Piaget at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva in the autumn of 1921 and was his analyst for eight months.
Conflict
- 1912 disputed with Carl Gustav Jung
In Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens Spielrein observes that Jung sets ideas of death in opposition to sexual ideas rather than in accord with them, whereas her own thesis places destruction within the sexual drive itself.
Affinity
- 1920 influenced Sigmund Freud
In a footnote to Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920) Freud wrote that Spielrein had anticipated a good part of his speculation on the death drives in her 1912 paper, which called the sadistic component of the sexual drive “destructive”, though he found the paper not entirely clear.
Works
- 1911
On the Psychological Content of a Case of Schizophrenia (Dementia Praecox)
Spielrein’s doctoral dissertation analyses the utterances of a patient with paranoid dementia, an intelligent and well-read woman whose prolific talk she recorded almost word for word so that readers could test her readings, many of which the patient herself confirmed. Treating the seemingly incoherent speech as a language to be translated “into our language”, and reading the case file only near the end so as not to be led by it, Spielrein shows that it is organised by symbols: religion stands for sexuality, words such as “Sistine” and “catholicise” carry sexual meanings by sound and association, the earth stands for a woman, and ideas are again and again expressed through their opposites. Fantasies of human beings made from dust, ash or stone are set beside the creation stories of myth, and the patient’s experience of her complexes as autonomous beings is taken as support for the theory of complex autonomy. In Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, published in the same volume, Jung cited the study for the links it showed between mythological and pathological formations and stressed that she had found its symbolism independently of him.
- 1912
Contributions to the Knowledge of the Child’s Soul
A set of observations on the inner life of children, drawn from Spielrein’s memories of her own childhood and from two boys, Otto and Valli. She traces a childhood anxiety, which began with a vision of two black kittens soon after her father warned that fate would punish her, not to suggestion but to her burning wish to create a living being as God does and to a picture of the longed-for child as a dangerous illness; the same case shows scientific interest growing out of sexual curiosity. Otto, tenderly attached to his mother, feared being attacked from behind and dreamed of an old woman; Valli’s slip in telling his mother to call him “father” reveals rivalry with his father, and Spielrein warns analysts not to correct a patient’s words by their own judgement. All three children are intensely occupied with sexual problems and share a fear of being carried off; like dreams and primitive peoples, children know no “either–or”. Following Freud, she holds that pleasure turns into anxiety through repression and a triggering cause, and that the difference between the sexual and the asexual is merely quantitative. Closing remarks on clocks and toys, which children ruin and remake, and on an adult patient’s hourglass fantasy present death fantasies that are at the same time fantasies of birth.
- 1912
Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being
Spielrein’s best-known paper starts from a question that earlier analysts, among them Stekel, Gross, Freud and Bleuler, had touched on: why does the reproductive drive, the strongest of the drives, bring with it anxiety and disgust as well as pleasure? In a first part, drawing on biology and individual psychology, she argues that reproduction requires the individual to dissolve: the drive to preserve the species expresses itself psychically in a dissolution in which the “I” passes into a “we”, and so it works against the drive of self-preservation. The reproductive drive demands destruction from the individual, and its destructive urge gains in tension when it is left unsatisfied; destruction can be carried out symbolically so as to escape it in reality, and self-destruction can be replaced by the destruction of a victim. A second part offers samples from mythology to show that becoming arises from destruction, and the paper concludes that the reproductive drive consists, psychologically too, of two antagonistic components, as much a drive of destruction as of becoming. Spielrein notes that Jung sets ideas of death in opposition to sexual ideas, whereas she places destruction within sexuality itself. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud acknowledged that she had anticipated part of his speculation on the death drives.
- 1922
Written in Geneva, the paper sets the psychological literature on the stages of speech development, from Kussmaul and Gutzmann to Stern and Sully, against a psychoanalytic account of the first words. Gutzmann had explained the likeness of the words for father and mother across languages by the lips and tongue having been prepared for articulation by sucking; Spielrein derives the infant’s “mö-mö” from sucking itself. The baby laid down after a feed cannot at once stop the impulse it needed for sucking, and the continued movements, which repeat the sensations of the feed, let it relive the pleasure of nursing. This needs no assumption of a deliberate hallucinatory wish-fulfilment: at first the word did not name an action but was the action itself. Her diary of her daughter at ten months, who said “Papa” when content and “Mama” when unhappy or wanting something, observations reported by Stern and others and confirmed by several mothers and by Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, lead her to trace the two words to different phases of nursing: “mö” reproduces the sucking most faithfully, as the mouth grips the nipple when hunger grows, while “pö-pö” or “bö-bö” belongs to the sated infant playing with the breast, letting it go and catching it again.
References
- Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being1912Evidence for a relation
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle1920Evidence for a relation
- A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein1993Evidence for a relation
- Sabina Spielrein and Jean Piaget: A History to Be Rediscovered2025Evidence for a relation