Sabina Spielrein and Jean Piaget: A History to Be Rediscovered

An account of the meeting between Sabina Spielrein and Jean Piaget at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva, where they met in the autumn of 1921, and of their theoretical exchange. The article argues that Spielrein built an original theory combining psychoanalysis with neurology and linguistics, that the dialogue with Piaget helped shape it, and that it apparently also influenced Piaget’s psychology of the 1920s, a question historians have rarely studied. It notes that Piaget was analysed by Spielrein for eight months and that her medical dissertation was supervised by Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung.