Sabina Spielrein: from psychiatric patient to psychoanalyst

Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology and the link between Darwinism and psychoanalytic theory. She was a pioneer of play therapy for children, and the first hospitalised psychiatric patient to progress to practising psycho-analysis.

She worked with, among others, Freud, Jung and Piaget; she was regarded as Freud’s standard-bearer. Yet she is remembered, if at all, as Jung’s mistress, a hysteric with a taste for spanking; David Cronenburg’s film A Dangerous Method, with Keira Knightley as Spielrein, has provided the only readily available version of her. John Launer’s aim is ‘to promote her recognition as one of the most original and underestimated thinkers of the last century’.

Spielrein grew up in Rostov, gateway to Tsarist Russia, in a ‘sugarcake’ rococo palace. Her father, a rich Jewish businessman, was a polyglot vegetarian, musical and politically aware. He was also depressive and unstable. Sabina recorded an incident when two of her brothers fell out over a torn picture book: ‘Papa then ordered them to beat each other for a whole hour… He gave Sanya a fork, so he could poke out Yasha’s eyes.’ The brothers turned into able scientists, but they were violent men who met violent ends. Sabina was afraid of them; her father was an object of fear, fascination and revulsion. He often beat her, which excited her. ‘She developed an obsession with the sight of her father’s hand, and also with images of him defecating.’ He may have abused her sexually: ‘It is time to sleep, otherwise Papa will come… it always seems that Papa comes and I freeze.’

This is from her diary, written in code to keep her father out. As Launer says, the story of her private papers is almost as remarkable as that of her life.