Sex vs. Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein by John Launer (review)

This is a remarkable book. Its author, John Launer, a British psychoanalyst, has left no stone unturned in his effort to bring to life and to our full historical awareness an unusual woman psychiatrist and psychoanalyst about whom the 2011 film A Dangerous Method spread many inaccuracies. Although we are now familiar with the name Sabina Spielrein, we actually know little about her. Launer, however, has corrected the record on the basis of a plethora of primary sources and has convincingly presented her as a major figure in psychology who influenced several scientific luminaries. The book is also the first book in English to cover Spielrein’s entire life—to move beyond the familiar period when Freud came to Jung’s rescue because of the latter’s questionable relationship with her.

Sex vs. Survival is a rich and eventful book that comprehensively tracks Spielrein’s peripatetic life, and a short review cannot do it justice. For clarity, her fifty-seven years can be presented in six historically significant periods. The first (1885–1904) begins in her birthplace, Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia, where an early and promising brilliance was coupled with a brutally traumatic life, resulting in her emotional breakdown in adolescence. The second covers her time as a patient in Zurich at the famous Burghölzli asylum: nineteen years old, severely agitated, alternately laughing and crying, compulsive and violent, yet able in several months to enter medical school while still officially a patient. Illness and medical school occupied the next seven years (1904–11). The director of the Burghölzli, the renowned psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, diagnosed her as hysterical and not psychotic, and he was able to help her greatly. While there, she also became both the patient and the student of Carl Gustav Jung, Bleuler’s deputy director, and she met Sigmund Freud. Although it is true that Spielrein fell in love with Jung (at first actually a kind of hero-worship) and that Jung was interested in her sexually, it is a myth that Jung ever treated her after she left the Burghölzli or during the several months of their brief affair. Launer pointedly paints an unsympathetic picture of Jung as a compulsive Don Juan.

In a third brief period, Spielrein spent some time in Vienna (1911–12), presenting papers at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and later publishing them in psychoanalytic journals. Launer finds the most notable of these works to be the article “Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens” (Destruction as the cause of coming into being), which he calls a century ahead of its time for its attempt to understand the mind in terms of its evolution and to explain the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology.¹ The readers of this journal will be very interested in her views on sex and reproduction from an evolutionary perspective. But though Spielrein had a prolific publishing career, she had a lot of difficulty receiving referrals and therefore establishing a practice. This particular difficulty was to follow her throughout her professional life, and she sometimes lived in poverty. Launer explains the lack of patients as possibly a result of her independent spirit, but one has to wonder whether it was also the result of the misogynistic biases of the day or perhaps a consequence of the scars of a very traumatic childhood and adolescence taking hold. Today Spielrein might be diagnosed with complex trauma syndrome.

In the fourth phase of her life (1912–20), Spielrein left Vienna to marry another physician in her home city, but the marriage was never a happy one, and the couple spent many years apart. Immediately after marriage they went to Berlin so Spielrein could be involved there with the newly founded Berlin Psychoanalytic Society under Karl Abraham. However, Abraham was not kindly disposed toward her, perhaps as a result of her closeness to Jung—a man Abraham had disliked from the...