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.