Sabina Spielrein, 1885–1942

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 Reviews Sabina Spielrein, 1885B1942 linda munk Ronald Hayman. A Life of Jung New York: W.W. Norton and Company 2001. 522, illustrated. US $35.00 Until the publication of The Freud/Jung Letters in 1974, Sabina Spielrein had been forgotten, even in psychoanalytic circles. Jung to Freud, 4 June 1909: >Spielrein is the person I wrote you about. ... She was, of course, systematically planning my seduction, which I considered inopportune. Now she is seeking revenge.= In 1977, parts of Spielrein=s diaries for the years 1909B12, as well as her unknown correspondence with Freud and Jung for the years 1906B23, turned up in Geneva in the cellar of the Palais Wilson, the former headquarters of the Institute of Psychology. They=d been hidden away for sixty years. Edited by Aldo Carotenuto, many of her papers were published in his Diario di una segreta simmetria (1980); an English version appeared in 1982 (2nd edition, 1983): A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud. Permission to publish the forty-odd letters from Jung to Spielrein was held up; the ones we now have appear in the (indispensable) German edition of Carotenuto, Tagebuch einer heimlichen Symmetrie: Sabina Spielrein zwischen Jung und Freud (1986). Another cache of Spielrein=s papers was discovered in 1982, this time in the family archives of Edouard Claparède, the Genevan psychologist. Among them is a handwritten folio with fragments of Spielrein=s diaries for 1907 and 1908; edited by Mireille Cifali and translated into French by Jeanne Moll, they were published in Bloc-Notes de la Psychoanalyse 3 (1983). A bibliography of the thirty-one essays she published between 1911 and 1931 is given by Carotenuto. Everyone writing about Spielrein is indebted to John Kerr=s A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (1993). In August 1904, Sabina Spielrein was admitted to the Burghölzli, the psychiatric clinic of Zurich University. She was eighteen. Diagnosed by Jung as a case of >psychotic hysteria,= the brilliant, troubled girl from Rostov-on-Don (Russia) was his first analysand. (He was thirty in 1904, and married to Emma Jung.) Once Spielrein was discharged from the Burghölzli in June 1905, she entered the medical faculty of 758 linda munk university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 Zurich University, graduating in February 1911 with a dissertation on schizophrenia: >Über den psychologischen Inhalt eines Falles von Schizophrenie (Dementia praecox).= Jung cites it in his monograph of 1912, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. According to Ronald Hayman, Spielrein=s >Jewishness disturbed and excited him [Jung], while, for her, one of his attractions was his Teutonic appearance. He could hardly have looked less like the Jews and Russians she had known.= By 1906 >Jung was dangerously involved with Sabina, who said she could read his thoughts telepathically.= >Her fantasy was that Jung was descended from the gods, that their child, Siegfried, would heroically blend Jewish and Aryan qualities.= Jung writes to Freud on 6 July 1907: a >hysterical patient= has a (Russian) poem running around her head: The poem is about a prisoner whose sole companion is a bird in a cage. The prisoner is animated only by one wish: sometime in his life, as his noblest deed, to give some creature its freedom. He opens the cage and lets his beloved bird fly out. What is the patient=s greatest wish? ... She admits that actually her greatest wish is to have a child by me who would fulfil all her unfillable wishes. For that purpose I would naturally have to let >the bird out= first. (In Swiss-German we say: >Has your birdie whistled?=) By the summer of 1908 Jung had stopped >suppressing his feelings= for Spielrein, according to Hayman (whose documentation is meticulous and generous). >They made love and collaborated on a prose poem about Siegfried ... Jung loved her for the magnificence of her passion, he said, and she had taken his unconscious into her hands.= If Hayman=s expression >made love= means sexual intercourse, that=s conjecture. (Not that it matters in this painful case.) >Poetry was her euphemism for lovemaking,= Hayman says...