Multilogue: Twenty-six Historians, Psychoanalysts, Artists, and Writers Discuss Their Interests in Sabina Spielrein in Interviews
Klara Naszkowska (Poland/United States): Sabina Spielrein is largely remembered as a tragic figure of history: robbed of her accomplishments, erased, objectified, and then victimized, usually linked to the male “great” figures of psychoanalysis: Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget. She is best known for being a hysterical psychiatric patient, Jung’s lover, and a “little girl” caught up in the Freud/Jung breakup. Recovered from oblivion in the 1980s, she becomes a kinky addition to the Jung-Freud binary dialectic, first in Aldo Carotenuto’s A Secret Symmetry. Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud (1982) and John Kerr’s A Most Dangerous Method (1993), then in Christopher Hampton’s The Talking Cure (2002) or the Hollywood production directed by David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method (2011) (and sadly many more).
Throughout the past five decades many successful attempts have been made to reframe Spielrein’s story, to deepen the understanding of her life and work. I sat down with twenty-six scholars, psychoanalysts, artists, and writers to discuss the growing relevance of Spielrein’s story, her experiences and thinking. Let me start by asking: what were the circumstances of your first meeting with Spielrein and what captivated you about her life and work at that time?1
It’s a funny question because for some years now I feel that I’ve been living with Sabina Spielrein as a kind of imaginary friend. She has been accompanying me. […] I actually cannot remember how I first heard of her. I’m pretty sure that I learned of Lou [Andreas]-Salomé before I [End Page 599] learned of Spielrein. And what led me to take interest in Lou Salomé was the same general theme that later led me to Spiel-rein. And that was a search for origins, for roots. I’m Russian-born so I became particularly interested in both these figures as early female psychoanalysts but also as early female Russian psychoanalysts. [I found in Spielrein] a quality of engaging on a personal level that made it possible for me to identify [with her] and to almost experience her as a personal presence, despite the distance of time.
A friend of mine [Philip Oxman], now long deceased, wanted to write an opera about Spielrein, Jung, and Freud. This was probably in the early eighties. […] He was married to a Swiss woman from Geneva [who], I think, had known [Jean] Piaget, so [it was] partly a rumor story. […] And so, I learned about [Spielrein] […] first of all through the artistic rather than the psychoanalytic route. And she sounded like an extraordinary woman. […] I remembered her name: it struck me. Oh, I thought, “playing,” “pure play” [Germ. Spiel-rein].
A dear friend, Juan Casco Solis, psychiatrist and director of mental-health training of the Madrid Department of Health, told me about Sabina Spielrein some thirty-five years ago, after [Aldo] Carotenuto’s book [A Secret Symmetry] first came out [in 1980]. He said to me: “Follow her!”. And I did. This includes publishing my book, Juego limpio. Sabina Spielrein entre Jung y Freud (Fair Play. Sabina Spiel-rein between Jung and Freud) in 2014. […] What interested me was her time in the psychiatric hospital and the successful treatment of her neurosis. In Spain of the late 1970s, the psychiatric reform movement was underway. Following the 1978 Basaglia Law, named after the Italian psychiatrist, Francisco Basaglia, psychiatric patients were allowed to leave the hospital to engage with the community. This was known as “opening the asylums’ doors.” At last, in 1985, the “Ministerial Report for Psychiatric Reform” was published by the Ministry of Health and approved the following year. Its main objective was to promote community-based mental-health care. As a teenager I lived near a psychiatric hospital, so much so, that I could see from [End Page 600] my balcony one of its patios, where a woman was talking and wailing loudly. […] When I learned about some of Spielrein’s symptoms [years later], this woman came to mind. […] Above all, I was intrigued by how someone who had gone through such an institution, had not only remedied her neurosis but became a doctor who practiced psychoanalysis.
The first time I heard about Sabina was in a [fictional] romance by Morris West, The World is Made of Glass from 1983. He talked about Jung and his patient, [Magda von Gamsfeld] [who] had some incestual relation with her father. [It is often assumed that] in this book he talked about […] Sabina Spielrein. He didn’t say anything else, but this disturbed me. […] Then, in 1984 I got in my hands the Portuguese translation of [Aldo] Carotenuto’s [A Secret Symmetry]. Oh, I wanted to know more about [Spielrein]. But I [hadn’t] read any articles of hers yet. […] At that time, I was on the editorial board of Percurso, the journal of my association [the Department of Psychoanalysis in the Sedes Sapientiae Institute of São Paulo]. We received an article in which the author [Rubens Coura] wrote: “when Sabina Spielrein left [for Switzerland and Russia], Freud saw his shadow.” […] That phrase [captivated] me. […] And then, in 1989, I read for the first time “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming.” And I though, she was mad or she was a genius. […] I [started] research for a Brazilian foundation sponsored by the Ford Foundation concerning the cases of incestuous sexual abuse and violence that happened to girls and women at public and governmental institutions in São Paulo. I wanted to include Sabina, but the board said “no” because of time constrains. […] [Much later], when my mother died in 2005, I discovered some letters I’ve never seen about my family in Ukraine, 900 kilometers from Rostov-on-Don. I discovered the tragic destiny of my grandmother family that stayed there. Like Sabina, I loved my grandmother. […] All my grandmother’s family died in the Stalin’s purges or went to Kazakhstan. […] When I went to Europe in 2015 to do research, I discovered that many members of my distant family, both maternal and paternal, had died in Auschwitz. […] Many of my family members must have died of hunger in Ukraine. […] I had such insistence; such love for Sabina. I [End Page 601] had personal reason that I didn’t know [about] when I began my research into Spielrein.
Do you think it subconscious?
Yes, I think so. Even [my mother’s] letters. […] These tragic things made me so obsessed, obsessive. Or persistent.
In 1986, I was working as an actress together with an actor, Joseph, from the Roy Hart Theatre in Southern France [a group influenced by Jungian ideas]. Joseph brought me the Carotenuto book about Sabina Spielrein [A Secret Symmetry] and we started a project about Jung and Sabina. We were going to make a performance, but we didn’t have a writer. So, I started to write. […] And, as it happens, I fell in love with my fellow actor. We had a brief love affair, and we were going to play the love affair between Jung and Sabina. So, […] it started off with love. And it started off with voice work because the Roy Hart Theatre was working with voice liberation and sounds and singing. And for me, the language of Sabina and the poetry of Sabina was influenced by the way we worked with sounds and movement, and rhythm. So, that was the beginning of my own writing. […] I wrote two plays about her. […] The first one was called Rent Spel (Clean play)]. In 1996, I wrote a new version called Ser du orden på min tunga? (Can you see the words on my tongue?)]. […] The first play was very much focused on their love affair and had many characters. […] [The second play] was a two- or three-person dialogue. I put a new framework on that story. I started when [Spielrein] is locked in this church with the Jewish population [of Rostov-on-Don] at the end of her life, before they are all executed. And she is reimagining the memory of her life. And she has her daughters with her. In 1997, I returned to the south of France for a Myth and Theatre Biennale arranged by The Roy Hart Theatre where I presented a part of the play. It was on a fictive theatrical tribunal where I—on behalf of Sabina—accused Jung of being indirectly responsible for the Nazi thoughts that led to her death, and for stealing her research. By my side, I had the “Prosecutor” Jay Livernois (editor of the [End Page 602] Eranos publications) and Jung was “defended” by Sonu Sham-dasani (Jung’s biographer). A verdict couldn’t be reached, but the discussions were fruitful.
[In the late 1980s and early 1990s] John Forrester and I were working on Freud’s Women [first published in 1992]. […] We saw an early manuscript of John Kerr’s biography [A Most Dangerous Method published in 1993]. […] Spielrein was an example of the way in which women, at least in part, worked as an intermediary between [Freud and Jung]. […] That was interesting in itself, because most of the women in Freud’s Women have extremely good relations with Freud, and very productive ones, both intellectually and, one imagines, analytically as well. This can be very different from the rivalrous relations Freud had with some of the men in his early entourage. Sons turning against fathers, fathers against sons that you get with male interactions.
Like most people, I first learned about Sabina Spielrein in the context of this scandalous story in the early stages of psychoanalysis [via John Kerr’s A Most Dangerous Method]. She was genuinely in love with Jung, and he really did exploit her in ways that were inappropriate. […] This story was an unspoken secret, but an open secret, a traumatic secret that people in psychoanalysis did not want to know about, didn’t want to speak about. They didn’t want to smear Jung’s reputation. This was something that couldn’t be known for a long, long time. […] And then Freud wrote his technique papers in response to this story, basically to say: “Hey, we’ve got to have boundaries. We’ve got to pay attention to what transference does to us [psychoanalysts] and what countertransference is.” Those technique papers came out of Freud’s dismay that Jung could crash the whole enterprise of psychoanalysis. […] To find out that this was going on would be just too scandalous, and it would sink analysis.
I was first introduced to Spielrein when I was researching boundary violations in psychoanalytic settings. There had been a series of boundary violations with formal ethics complaints at my institute, the [End Page 603] Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in 2006–2009 that caused quite a bit of disruption. To try to help us move that process forward, I researched this topic. […] Spielrein is mentioned by Glen Gabbard in his 1995 JAPA article “The Early History of Boundary Violations in Psychoanalysis” as the first victim of boundary violations in psychoanalysis. But he doesn’t say more about her. Although I had already done quite a bit of reading about boundary violations, I hadn’t come upon her name. So, Gabbard is the first to name her as a victim. […] I also have a chapter called “Silencing” in the book Traumatic Ruptures [from 2014, edited by Robin A. Deutsch]. I coined the term “silencing” to describe a component of what happens when there are boundary violations in a community, which is that there are people who want to keep other people quiet. […] There is usually an effort to keep whoever had the power in the position of power, and whoever doesn’t have the power, to have them be more quiet. […] And Spielrein was silenced. […] I think that she probably could not get validation [for her experience of exploitation]. And I am not aware of her having written about it herself. […] She went to [Freud] to talk with him about the problem she was having with Jung.
I agree that this story is about distribution of power. When Spielrein initially reached out to Freud about Jung’s behavior, he chose to dismiss her claims and even mocked her in his letters to Jung. This was at a time when Freud wanted Jung to be his “son” and “heir.” Everything shifted after the Freud-Jung breakup.
To your point, she becomes more of a footnote [in the history of psychoanalysis and Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle]. […] All these words: silencing, erasing, exploiting, fit into Spielrein’s story in different ways. […] This is one of the reasons why I like the #MeToo movement for giving women a place to say, “it also happened to me.” I certainly had women say this to me and I didn’t know that this had been part of their experience. It’s a particular lens and if you take it back to the early 1900s it doesn’t fit in all kinds of ways. But, for Spielrein, you could say she did try to say something about what had taken place in her relationship with Jung. This was [End Page 604] not taken up particularly seriously, at least for her benefit. Nor did Jung stop that behavior at all.
I was first exposed to [Spiel-rein] in [2011] in an independent movie theatre in the West Village [neighborhood of New York] when I saw Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. […] The movie was obviously an over-dramatization […] overly romantciz[ing] the psychosexual. […] Still, it made me see that there’s a bigger picture here of different figures playing out even though Keira Knightley portrayed [Spielrein] like a damsel in distress, sadomasochistic sort of fetishized object of femininity. […] And so, I think from there a seed was planted. [Before I went to graduate school for psychology and changed my career to eventually become a psychoanalyst], I was a professional French hornist […] for about a decade. […] Destruction as a means of coming into being [was] my entry point to becoming a professional horn player. [It] was through growing up in a context in Long Island, New York [in the 1980s and 1990s] that included racist and antisemitic elements. […] But in trying to plant my star somewhere, I actually damaged my ear really bad. […] I developed tinnitus, hearing loss, and hyperacusis eventually, and that’s what initiated my turn to psychology in the first place. […] I’m disabled as a musician, and even as a psychologist there’s a lot that I can’t do. […] [Also] a lot of the myths that drove Sabina Spielrein were very, very central to my identity as a musician. The Siegfried [Horn] Call [from Richard Wagner’s Siegfried] is one of the main things you must learn as a musician. And I had a powerful sense of identification with [Gustav] Mahler [a Jewish Austro-Bohemian composer], who was a very parallel figure to a lot of the development of early psychoanalysis. [He] was actually writing music about the [psychoanalytic] ideas and using the Siegfried myth at the time that Spielrein was developing her ideas, recovering from hospitalization [at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zurich], struggling with her relationship with Jung, and developing correspondence with Freud [in the early 1900s]. Mahler had already actually written works that portray so much between life and death, and rebirth, and using the Siegfried myth as a very powerful devotee of Wagner [in Symphony No. 1 composed in 1887–1888 and Corno Obligatto [End Page 605] of his Symphony No. 5 composed in 1901–1902]. Sabina was really living through an attempt to make sense of the Siegfried myth, which in Mahler’s version of it was an attempt to overcome, also, in a very real way, the impact of antisemitism as not allowing him to progress in his career. […] Eventually, [it] led him to leave Europe [in 1907] and became the first composer to be musical director of the New York Philharmonic. […] He was able to […] pin himself down in the pantheon of the great composers in a way that Sabina was just not.
Unfortunately, and I say this very deliberately, I first heard about [Spielrein] through David Cronenberg’s film. I was doing my analytic training at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association [in New York], and the film was all the buzz, in part because several of the analysts attended the screening. Cronenberg was there, and they really confronted him about the inaccuracies in the film and the creative license that he took. […] So, I went to see the film. […] There was a lot I found intriguing but also a little distasteful […], she seemed so hysterical. And I thought, well, wow, that’s how many women were often portrayed, especially in the psychoanalytic world at that time. It piqued my interest, but I moved on.
Unfortunately, I was introduced to [Spielrein’s] fascinating biography by Cronenberg’s movie, A Dangerous Method from 2011. […] It was a very, very, very gossipy version of the affective triangle between Freud, Jung, and Spielrein. And the problem is that, of course, this affective triangle doesn’t tell us much about the real Spielrein. Still, it says something important about Spielrein’s role in the formation of very important terms in psychoanalysis, as transference, countertransference, [and] Freud’s understanding of the role of love in therapy. […] The problem was that for years, I, probably like other people also, who were not as interested in psychoanalysis at that time, had this image of a woman who was an [ambitious] intellectual, was a psychoanalyst but somehow it was less important than her love life. [And] that image is precisely what Lisa Appignanesi calls “mad, bad, and sad” [in her book Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present from 2008]. [End Page 606]
I’ll start at the beginning by saying, I never expected to be doing any [work on Spielrein]. I’m not a psychoanalyst and I’m not a historian. I’m a family therapist. I used to work at the Tavistock Clinic in London, which is one of the leading mental health institutions in the UK and Europe. The only thing I knew about Sabina Spielrein was that she’d been Jung’s patient and had an affair with him, and that there was also some connection with Freud. […] That was absolutely all I knew about her. The strangest thing happened around 2005. One of my tasks at the Tavistock Clinic was to run a training event. It was like a group organizational training event where I had to turn groups of students, psychiatrists, student psychotherapists into imaginary institutions, to do some kind of management exercise. And, really, picking a name at random, I called one of them, the Spielrein Institute. It was an extraordinary thing to do. Actually, in retrospect, quite disrespectful. […] After I’d been doing this exercise, two or three years running, I thought, well, I should actually find out something about her. So, I went to the library at the Clinic and took out her now much more famous paper “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming.” I read the first page and almost fell out of seat at what she was saying. In fact, I called my wife into the room and said, “You are absolutely not going to believe this!” Because, from the first page it seemed like one of the most prescient papers that I had ever read. Prescient in the sense that her thinking seemed to me fifty or sixty years ahead of its time in many different ways. I have had for a very long time a particular interest in the connection between evolution and psychology, evolution and psychoanalysis, and it seemed to me that her ideas about evolution were very, very way ahead of both Jung and Freud. She understood the necessity to anchor psychological thinking in evolution, to make a connection between biology and psychoanalysis, which for a long time was very, very unfashionable. Around the beginning of this century, it started to become fashionable once more. And that started off the process. I read everything I possibly could about her. And then the film [A Dangerous Method] by David Cronenberg came out [in 2011], a rather awful film about her, […] some friends of mine said, “Well, you are the only one who has amassed this information about her, why don’t you quickly get out a short biography of her,” which I did. My first biography [End Page 607] was short and self-published [in 2011]. And then another remarkable thing happened when I was approached by a major publisher in the UK [Duckworth] and in America [Overlook Press] to say, “Would I be willing to write a full-length scholarly biography,” which I eventually did. Sex vs. Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein was published in 2014. I drew on the research by Sabine Richebächer, Spielrein’s German biographer, on the Russian historian, Alexander Etkind, and others. I also got permission from Spielrein’s estate to quote freely from her correspondence and her works, so I was able to put together the first documentary account of her entire life, and her first full biography in English.
I first got in touch with Sabina’s work in 2011. I was […] preparing a research project for my master’s degree [in Psychoanalytic Studies at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil]. I was studying Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and I read the footnote where he mentions her [“A considerable part of this speculation has been anticipated in a work which is full of valuable matter and ideas but is unfortunately not entirely clear to me: (Sabina Spielrein: Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens, Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse, IV, 1912). She designates the sadistic component as ‘destructive’.”]. I went after her article “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming” and then discovered there was another Brazilian researcher, Renata Udler Cromberg, who was translating [Spielrein’s] works. And she sent me the Portuguese translation of Spielrein’s “Destruction” paper. From then on, I was interested in her other works, but mostly read the “Destruction” paper for my master’s degree [published in 2014 as A construção da pulsão de morte freudiana (The construction of the Freudian death drive)].
I am a clinical psychologist and an Adlerian psychotherapist by training. I do a lot of historical, archival work [in Adler’s Individual Psychological field]. One of my passions, now and then, is women’s voices in Adlerian psychology. […] That actually started in 2011 to 2014 when I had a chance to work in the family archives of [Alfred] Alder that were held by Adler’s only granddaughter, [End Page 608] Margot Adler [author, journalist, and lecturer]. […] Part of my personal interest, too, is that I was retracing the Russian part of it, because Adler’s wife [Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein] was born in Russia and their oldest daughter, Valentina, died while serving a ten-year prison term in the Soviet Gulag in 1942. Adler and his wife got married in Russia. And there were many, many other Russian pages in Adler’s family and professional story. So, I was looking into various historical archives, got access to some Russian archives. […] Somewhere there, the name of Sabina Spielrein came up because the timeframe was very similar. And I recognized the name just vaguely, because the only exposure at that time I had is that I had watched the movie […] A Dangerous Method. […] And then things started clicking […] and I started reading. […] [I was] particularly interested in these two themes: the women’s voices and the Russian part of it. And then, in early 2015, I started collaborating with a group of Jungian analysts in the city of Rostov-on-Don, the city where Sabina was born, lived, and died ultimately. […] I was looking for more information about Sabina. […] And then they told me they’re opening the Sabina Spielrein Memorial Museum in November 2015 in the Spielrein family mansion. […] It’s a small place, but really done with love, with a lot of love. […] And they asked me if I could write a little piece about Adlerian voices of women but also bring in Sabina. The Russian Psychological Journal published the proceedings of the opening of the Museum including my piece in 2016.
I was invited to a performance of Christopher Hampton’s play [The Talking Cure] […] in 2018, and it was through him that I discovered the figure of Sabina Spielrein. She is such a romantic character in this play that I wondered how much of it was fiction and how much was reality. Especially as her role ends after she’s cured and we don’t know anything else about what happened to her, since the rest of the plot focuses on the relationship between Freud and Jung. I wanted to find out more about her, but nothing had been translated into French, apart from Aldo Carotenuto’s book [A Secret Symmetry]. I found a few articles in psychoanalytic journals [which] caricatured her as “Jung’s lover”! So, I read everything [End Page 609] I could find in English and German, traveled to Switzerland, Poland, and Russia, and decided to make Spielrein known to the French public by writing her biography [La vie dérobée de Sabina Spielrein (The hidden/stolen life of Sabina Spielrein), published in 2018].
For me, there’s always been this thread of Spielrein’s place in the history of boundary violations in psychoanalysis. So, when [psychoanalyst and co-founder of the International Association for Spielrein Studies] Adrienne Harris and I were talking about the conference [“Sabina Spielrein and the Early Female Pioneers of Psychoanalysis”], I suggested a talk about Spielrein and the #MeToo movement. […] I spoke about the different ways people have looked at Spielrein’s relationships with Jung and Freud. In particular, I ended up focusing on this debate about whether or not [Spielrein and Jung] had sex. This is not the point. The point is that she had a significant, intimate relationship with someone who had been her analyst, then her professor, then her friend, and, I assume, her lover. Why are we focusing on this question whether they had intercourse? It’s about what happens to an individual when someone in a position of authority takes advantage of that authority for their own sexual pleasure. Whatever he was able to get out of that. And Jung probably took advantage of her and some other women for intellectual companionship and co-creation of analytic theory.
What speaks in my heart in [Spielrein’s] story is abuses of power. […] I’m very sensitive to abuses of power, misuses, and intoxication with power. It is about gender, but gender as related to power, not just gender itself. […] Abuses of power expressed in gender relationships. […] The way I see [Spielrein’s story] is through this lens of misuse of power. Whether it’s her relationship with Jung, whether it’s later her participation in Freud’s circles, and the conversations that were there, and contributions she made, the way she was treated and addressed. And then, facing the greater power of Stalinist repression against psychoanalysis, […] and foreign analysts, and Jew[ish]. […] So, we are talking about the power of one man, Carl Jung, and the power of the whole state, which was Soviet [End Page 610] Union. But, to me, this is the common thread: those who have power, getting intoxicated with [it], taking advantage [of it], and misusing, abusing the power. […] To me, this is a story of abuses of power, whether it’s in the therapeutic environment, the therapeutic context, in academic context, in the greater social context. […] And, also power of who holds the narrative […], a narrative that doesn’t have anybody to respond to the one-sided narrative.
I also think a lot about the power over history, the power over narrative. Who gets to tell the story and how? Who gets to be remembered and how? How can we give a voice back to the marginalized individuals and communities, to shift the narrative about them, to create new narratives?
So, it seems that most of us first learned about Spielrein in the context of her personal-professional relationship with Carl Jung and her, largely exaggerated, role in the Jung-Freud binary. These circumstances have largely shaped our initial interests but were also just the beginning. What was the trajectory for those scholars, analysts, artists, and writers who encountered Spielrein in a different, more professional, context?
I had never in my analytic training read anything of [Spielrein’s] or heard about her. And then, when the relational group began to form [in New York in the 1970s, known as the school of relational psychoanalysis] and a small group of us began to meet with Steve [Stephen A.] Mitchell and Lew [Lewis] Aron and Phil [Philip] Bromberg, that whole world really took shape and became very central for me. […] It brings up sadness to remember [this] and talk here to you about Spielrein [because] neither Steve Mitchell not Lew Aron are here to participate in what they revived and brought to psychoanalysis. Each of them died very young. […] I always feel the sadness of them not having been here to enjoy how interdisciplinary our thinking is [today], how much we locate ourselves in culture, history, and gender. […] I only knew about [Spielrein] because of Steve and Lew. So, there’s a history for me that’s a kind of mandate. Something I feel charged with wanting to represent what they were thinking about, what they [End Page 611] were listening for, what they were attuned to in our psychoanalytic history, which wasn’t part of any curriculum. […] What Spielrein did for the relational group is give a history to the way, in which biography, autobiography, and history are always part of analytic listening. You are not just taking theoretical constructs from psychoanalysis and applying them. You are embedded in a history, in a sociology, as is your patient. It’s not just an analyst and a patient. It’s two figures in history, in time, in culture, bringing very elaborated identities into contact with each other. […] So, countertransference becomes crucial because you’re located always in time, and space, and location, and class, and gender, and all of these phenomena. […] For me and my generation, people like Lew and Steve and Bromberg, the notion of relational psychoanalysis, of thinking about not just the individual intra psychic, but [about] what gets constructed in between, what is co-constructed, and never just identity in isolation. It suited 1960s-era politics and feminism, as well as other ideas. […] Theory isn’t just made in vacuums. It’s made in contexts that are political and social.
Just before I became an analyst [in the early 1980s], I had written a paper on what it was like to be a pregnant therapist [published as “The Pregnant Therapist” in 1974]. Only when I became an analyst, and only when I became more alert to the literature, I realized that actually that [issue] had been left out of analysts. The whole issue of the female body has very much been my bailiwick for a long time. I like to go back to the basics, whenever I’m deeply puzzled about something. Which explains why in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory, I go back to the body. We all inhabit bodies. We have so many different kinds of ideas and thoughts, and fantasies, and so on. But the body itself is actually sort of a stabilizing feature. […] So, during the time when I was a psychoanalytic candidate [in 1974–1981 at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in New Heaven] I wanted to go back to the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society [which] were then slowly being published. […] I was interested in […] how the women had represented themselves in the early days of the psychoanalytic movement. So, I became very interested in Margarethe Hilferding […] and her paper about birthing and motherhood […], all kinds [End Page 612] of things that the men clearly couldn’t cope with [“On the Basis of Mother Love” delivered in January 1911]. Practically the day that she left [the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society] with Adler, it was announced that Sabina Spielrein was coming. […] And I became fascinated with her story and Jungian involvement, her transfer to Freud. […] She was up against all these guys, smoking their cigars. […] They had previous meetings about really outrageous things about women studying medicine, where they feared that women doctors would be treated as prostitutes. Even Freud […] at the end agrees with them that education doesn’t really enhance a woman at all. […] [Spielrein] is bearing news from Jung to them, and she’s open about that. The Viennese [analysts] are of course madly jealous of Zurich and Jung. There’s this tremendous rivalry going on because they’re just about to open the doors to Jung and decentralize, and the Viennese didn’t like that one bit. So, there’s a lot of tension in the atmosphere, and [Spielrein] starts talking about destruction as a way of coming into being [in a presentation published as “On Transformation” in 1912]. In a few months after her first presentation, which was very Jungian, [she gave] her second presentation, entirely Freudian. […] It was about masturbation. She was now focused on the body and women. She talked about castration. But while Freud said, on numerous occasions, with no self-consciousness, that women are castrated, she said: women with a fantasy of castration, which is essentially derived from the male fantasy of castration. She could make the distinction. She also talked in a modern way about the sexuality of women being more diffuse. [In 2003, I published “Women of the Wednesday Society: The Presentations of Drs. Hilferding, Spielrein, and Hug-Hellmuth.”]
In the 1980s, I went to Geneva to do research on Jean Piaget. It ended up being the topic of my doctoral dissertation and then my first book [a historical biography] called Piaget Before Piaget [published in 1994]. I became interested […] through a series of documentary discoveries in the very young Piaget […] and the very early years of his career until his book of 1932, The Moral Judgment of the Child. […] In his Autobiography [from 1952], Piaget mentions that he was psychoanalyzed by a young Russian psychoanalyst. In my work, I wanted to understand what the purpose of Piaget’s [End Page 613] autobiography was. What was the message he wanted to transmit? And so, I went further into the kinds of things Piaget chose to say and chose not to say. And I found interesting that he did mention this. And that is what led me to my first contact with Sabina Spielrein.
In 2003, I came across Sabina Spiel-rein’s name when I was working on an article [“Breve historia del psicoanálisis en Rusia” (A short account of psychoanalysis in Russia) published in 2004] co-authored with Antonio Sánchez-Barranco Ruiz. We focused on the origins and the development of psychoanalysis in Russia. A section of our paper was devoted to the lives and ideas of Sabina Spielrein, Tatiana Rosenthal, Vera Schmidt, and Lou Andreas-Salomé.
In my PhD, I studied Freud and his concept of the death drive. […] I wrote about Beyond the Pleasure Principle […]. I probably read the footnote in which Freud references Spielrein, but I didn’t pay attention to it. […] When I finished my PhD [at the Federal University of São Carlos in 2006], my PhD supervisor, [Luiz Roberto Monzani], said that a friend of ours, professor [Georgina Maniakas], had Spielrein’s text on destruction in which she proposed a concept of the death instinct. […] [In 2013,] I decided to write a paper commenting on the differences between [Freud’s and Spielrein’s] theories of the death drive [published as “The Death Instinct and the Mental Dimension Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the Works of Spielrein and Freud” in 2017].
I was writing a paper for the international conference “Sabina Spielrein and the Early Female Pioneers of Psychoanalysis” about Barbara Low, another woman psychologist mentioned in [Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle]. There are so few works about her; she is mostly unknown. I prepared the [presentation, later published as “Barbara Low: ‘The Little Bit of Pioneering’ or the Beginnings of British Psychoanalysis” in Early Women Psychoanalysis in 2024]. And then, Fátima Caropreso and I began to discuss it, debate it, and compare the views of Spielrein and Low. [Later published as “Barbara Low and Sabina Spielrein: Misrepresentations of [End Page 614] their Works in the History of Psychoanalysis” in 2022]. […] I’m mostly interested in gaps in the historiography of psychoanalysis. In its unknown characters or mostly unknown characters in the history of psychoanalysis [that] mostly focuses on Freud, [Jacques] Lacan, [Donald] Winnicott, and other big characters. […] Spielrein is an example of someone whose life and work need to be better understood and studied more systematically, because it helps to fill these gaps in our understanding of the history of psychoanalysis.
I first encountered Spielrein when I was doing my PhD at the University of Exeter [in 2016 or 2017]. My supervisor, Laura Salisbury, told me about her. She had come across Spielrein because another one of her students was doing a dissertation on [Soviet psychologist and neurologist] Alexander Luria, who Spielrein collaborated with. So, I encountered Spielrein in that context, through Luria, which I think is interesting because most scholars don’t encounter her through the Russian context.
In 2018, I met Gunilla Bergerham at a writing, directing, and acting workshop with Bob Dolman in Stockholm. […] We got together, and we started working with material from different scenes [from Gunilla’s play about Spielrein]. I instantly wanted to know more about Spielrein. […] We started this artistic research together with [Eveline Grassman, Alexandra Ekelöf, and Bob Dolman] about Spiel-rein’s life. […] We started this dream group together. And we brough dreams to our group and we started talking about them, sharing them. […] We were doing research, and, at the same time, we were working towards a shorter piece of theatrical work for the [upcoming] conference “Sabina Spielrein and the Early Female Pioneers of Psychoanalysis.” […] We read some of [Spielrein’s] essential writings, but we made it into flesh. We took her “Destruction” paper, we read the first two sentences, and then, we improvised, we got on the floor. We were just working and feeling into our bodies. It was so powerful. […] Being on the floor, going into the language, trying to reach deeper into the essence of Spielrein’s words about destruction as the cause of becoming. What it represents in our lives, how [End Page 615] it unfolds and takes its expression in and through our bodies creating movement, voice, music, and poetry.
When the [Covid–19] pandemic came, [and the format of the conference was changed to an online event], we started working toward a short film [Sabina’s Faces]. We put parts of our stage performance, our filmed improvisations, discussions we had about our lives and Sabina’s life, and the research. […] We still have plans to make a [longer] poetic documentary. […] I also want to make a musical stage performance.
[In 2021,] I started my PhD studies at the Film School in Łódź, Poland. I’m an actress and also a musician so I wanted to make a [musical] about a psychological female protagonist. […] My professor and mentor, film director, Kuba Mikurda, introduced me to Sabina Spielrein and suggested [her] for my doctoral film. I started to research. […] I ordered the one biography translated into Polish [Violaine Gelly’s Skradzioneżycie Sabiny Spielrein published in 2020]. I was really moved, and I felt a strong connection [to Spielrein]. At first, I didn’t really know why, but when I was reading her story, I was crying all the time. […] [The first connection] was music. She wanted to study composing, but she didn’t. She took a few lessons, and she also played the piano when she was a kid, and me, too. […] I felt that she had a passion for music.
And what are you most captivated by today?
I think it is interesting to ask the question: “Which one is the real Spielrein?”, “Early on, was she still too hypnotized by Jung and has not come into her own fully?” or “Was this her at her best before she was broken by life and by all the difficulty, all the hardship of the setbacks that she had experienced?”. […] [At the beginning], for a few years I mainly thought of [Spielrein] as the author of the paper on destruction […]. A mystical thinker and almost like someone who writes in some spiritual trance or state. […] Eventually after incorporating, more fully digesting her destruction [concept], I could also factor in her later work, and the thinker and [End Page 616] researcher she later became. A more sober one, much more modest, much more systematic. When I pause to think about it, it is still not fully integrated for me, that gap between the [“Destruction”] paper and some of the later papers, the most sober papers. [This gap] is great, in terms of temperament. […] So now I think of her as both the younger researcher and writer, and the more mature one.
[…] I set for myself this challenge, an intellectual challenge […] to think of what it might be like for Spielreinian to be a psychoanalytic orientation. […] I hope it was not too ambitious to even pose this question because, objectively speaking, we do not have enough information to answer [it] definitely. So, it will require some imagination to compensate for what we don’t know. […] What it might be like for Spielreinian to be a psychoanalytic orientation, a treatment. If she [had been] asked to write a comprehensive textbook on psychoanalytic treatment or to head an institute and determine what the study contents would be, the highlights of training […] What would Spielreinian psychoanalysis look like had she received the recognition and institutional support that is needed to have the authority to establish a school of psychoanalysis. She did have the genius and she did have the foundations of the training that would have made it possible for her to become a founder of a school. But she didn’t have the recognition and institutional support. What core principles for psychoanalytic work she would choose. I think that many of these principles would match our contemporary sensibilities.
I’ve often had that fantasy [of a Spielreinian Institute I had imagined around 2005] in more recent years. Wouldn’t it be remarkable if, after all this work that we’ve done on Spielrein, that actually somebody did name an institute after her? Who knows? […] I think [a Spielreinian Institute of Psychoanalysis] would be very much like a lot of the cutting-edge movements in psychoanalysis now. But it would have happened 100 years ago instead. So, I think it would be much more eclectic in bridging, as she did, psychoanalysis, pediatrics, educational psychology, experimental psychology. As you know, one of the very unusual things about her was that she bridged many different areas of thought, particularly in relation to children’s [End Page 617] development. She made links that other people at the time were very much reluctant to do, because psychoanalysis had become so sectarian. [A Spielreinian Institute] would be much more modern, much more eclectic […], very much ahead of its time, and not being shy of links with biology and evolution, in particular. And it would take on some of the subjects that people are now becoming very interested in, like neuro-psychoanalysis.
What I was particularly struck by was Spielrein’s eclecticism. The way she uses in a very, very original and kind of non-judgmental way the work of various scholars from many different fields. Eclecticism to some extent was typical of the modernist period, but in psychoanalytic circles, it was quite unusual. Of course, there were many overlaps with philosophy, literature and so on, but we do not see historically prominent psychoanalysts combining various approaches from various psychoanalytic schools, along with medicine and linguistics, and neurology in quite the same way as she did. I found this approach very refreshing. This is something I’d like to see in scholarship today too. Even though we talk very much about interdisplinarity, there are still these animosities between fields, and a bit of prejudice, and who can work together with whom, and what theories go well together. Spielrein was somehow beyond these divisions, and I think we can learn a lot from her through that. […] This part of her work was well taken up by her Russian students and colleagues, like Luria and [psychologist] Lev Vygotsky.
Indeed, her highly original eclectic approach was even frowned upon.
Yes, well, she certainly encountered a lot of animosity in her life because of this approach. A lot of people who do combine various theories in such a way are very frequently not understood because people try to determine: “Was she a Freudian, or was she a Jungian? Or was she something else?” She combined various theories in a really productive manner. There are not many psychoanalysts from that period in particular who tried to combine psychoanalysis and neurology or [End Page 618] medicine in quite the same way as she did. This is paradoxical, as psychoanalysis has its roots in neurology and medical science. As we all know, Freud started as a neurologist, Jung started with experimental studies in neurology. But somehow, later on, people seemed to think that psychoanalysis has to be on its own. It has to have nothing to do with its beginnings. It was a kind of negation or even denial.
I find it interesting that other women psychoanalysts have also attempted to show the “great men” that many different psychoanalytic theories can coexist. For example, Margarethe Hilferding with Freud and Alfred Adler.
Yes, and part of the reason for this, valid especially for Spielrein, had something to do with their position on the margins of psychoanalysis. Very often scholars who are positioned on the margins somehow care less about these divisions because they know that they will not be the most famous name of a certain school, of a certain approach. So, on the one hand, this is a discriminatory practice, but on the other hand, it gives them a certain freedom. […] From Spielrein’s life story we can learn what it is like to be a figure coming from a relatively marginalized background and what advantages this can have when approaching a particular field of study. Also, it’s important that she was a person with a lived experience. She was a patient first, then an analyst. This should be stressed, especially, when we are asked: “Is this possible?” Well, it very much is.
[…] What I also really like about Spielrein—and this is on a more personal note, but it has to do with her marginalized position—is her almost complete lack of self-promotion. When I was reading her letters and her work, and what others have said about her, the impression I got was of someone who was really interested in the work as such and not in building up a career for herself. And of course, in terms of career progression, of being accepted by various psychoanalytic schools, it did not serve her well, but in terms of her scientific originality, it served her very well indeed. You must be very brave to do what she did. [End Page 619]
I believe that Spielrein’s theory has impacted me clinically or my perception of what is possible to do in clinical work. [While] I am unable to pinpoint her specific theories and influences, I have somehow absorbed some of them. […] Her work helped me have a broader vision, to detach myself a little more from this Freudian orthodox view. And expand the kinds of interventions I was able to do with my patients.
Are you talking about her inclusive approach combining different perspectives, schools, and fields?
Yes, exactly. Because, after studying her work, I also read some of the contemporary [psychoanalysts who] are not quite Freudian most times [such as Siegfried Bernfeld, Otto Fenichel, Otto Gross, Viktor Tausk]. This helped me become more flexible with the technique.
As professor of psychology and religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York, I was doing a Fulbright at the Freud Museum in Vienna [in 2013–2014] and uncovered a great deal of information about antisemitism being the origins of psychoanalysis [which resulted in my book Old and Dirty Gods: Religion, Antisemitism, and the Origins of Psychoanalysis from 2017]. I take the position that psychoanalysis could not have developed in any other way than it did. It required the view from the margins of an oppressed people to get at the underside of the Psyche. The underside of society was also a way of understanding the underside of the Psyche, sex, and aggression. […] Shortly after, as I was working on translating the “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming” for my edited anthology Sabina Spielrein and the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis (with Felicity Kelcourse), I learned that Spielrein was trying to bring together some kind of a dialectic unity between Judaism and Christianity, or between Jews and gentiles, and that it was a strong part of her desire. […] Also, I don’t know if we could assign the word “feminist” to that era, but she certainly had a woman’s point of view, a feminine point of view about sexuality and the death instinct, which was different from Freud’s. [End Page 620]
What fascinates me about Sabina Spielrein is her creativity and imagination, manifested in “Contributions to Understanding a Child’s Mind” from 1913 and her diaries. For example, she didn’t need anyone to read fairy tales to her when she was a child because she could create them herself. I read her as an independent thinker, who narrated her own life and paved the way as a patient, doctor, and psychoanalyst. Spielrein reminds me of the fundamental importance of preserving that independence in the context of not following the IPA training. This training is presently highly criticized in some psychoanalytic circles in Mexico, particularly in Mexico City. These circles present problems of intellectual inhibition when discussing psychoanalysis, writing, or expressing their position on current problems. They primarily cite and repeat the thoughts of Freud and Lacan. Perhaps inadvertently, intellectual erudition, the heavy weight of the master, and the referential knowledge of the works of Freud and Lacan, overshadow and hinder the possibility of imagining and creating.
I was always less interested in […] the sensationalist or morbid attention to Sabina Spielrein which characterized a number of early, and perhaps also current works. I find excessive attention to those aspects of life impoverishing. […] My initial focus was not either really on her theories or contributions to psychoanalysis, although I did end up studying them too. But it was on her contact with [Jean] Piaget, on the connection that she and Piaget had that led to a number of important […] and fascinating insights. For example, […] the fact that [Piaget] and Spielrein presented themselves as collaborating and announced a common publication. Their collaboration never saw the light of day concretely. […] The fact that Sabina Spielrein describes Piaget as a psychoanalyst [was also significant]. […] So, I increasingly tried to imagine what their collaboration might have consisted of. What is it that they both claimed to be working on together? I also speculated a little bit about why they didn’t reach a published result. And then, I was very interested, as a historian, in the entire context of the [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau Institute. Geneva in the 1920s was a very vibrant city, intellectually rich, very avant-garde, in [End Page 621] many respects, both artistic and intellectual, and scientific, and Sabina Spielrein was there, for a relatively short time, [from 1920 to 1923], but they were very intense years. [She] enriched that cultural milieu, was part of it, and was in interaction with the people at the Rousseau Institute, in particular with Piaget, who was ten years younger than her. […] They felt that they were on common ground, [doing research about] symbolism and the subconscious in the child.
Could you elaborate on why the Spielrein-Piaget collaboration didn’t come to full fruition?
My hunch is that […] in the end, in spite of their common interests in symbolism, the subconscious, the language of the child, child development, and so on, they had very, very different basic attitudes […] toward the world of symbolism, the subconscious, and symbolic thought. […] In Piaget’s case, they were [rooted] in his early very strong religious and mystical experiences. […] But in his efforts to leave those experiences behind, he ended up ultimately mistrusting symbolism [and] symbolic thought [as forms of knowledge]. […] Whereas in Spielrein, not only her ideas but also the way she talks about, for example, child language, her observations of [her older daughter] Renata, manifest a different sensibility to the richness, [to] the potential of symbolic thought to produce something positive. I think she described it as the “sap” of thinking. Whereas for Piaget, it might have been an early stage of thinking, but one that had to be superseded. […] That is one part. And then there’s a more intellectual [dimension] which is that, basically, Sabina Spielrein was involved in psychoanalysis [and] psychoanalytic theory. Fundamentally, that was her world. Whereas for Piaget, in spite of all he was doing in child psychology, his basic questions, his fundamental query, had to do with epistemology (and its connection with other phenomena, such as moral judgement). […] Also, Spielrein left [for the Soviet Union in 1923]. […] They didn’t end up writing together on the thought of the child. The winds of history […] contributed to interrupt this collaboration. [I wrote about their collaboration in “Sabina Spielrein, Jean Piaget—Going their Own Ways,” published in 2001]. [End Page 622]
I have recently finished editing two books on Hans Loewald (with Elizabeth A. Brett and Lawrence Levenson): The Legacy and Promise of Hans Loewald and The Emerging Tradition of Hans Loewald (both forthcoming in Routledge in 2024). Loewald could have read Spielrein. His 1988 book on sublimation [Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis] has all that material that Spielrein is talking about […], the merger with plants and animals in the natural world. […] So, Hans Loewald was also very involved in that archaic level of mentation, which really transcends every single school. […] I’ve wondered about Spielrein and the reciprocities of teaching. This phrase “coming into being” is [Martin] Heidegger’s phrase. So, I wondered, was that before Heidegger? Did he pick that up from them? Is that a Jungian phrase? […] Loewald is very involved in Heidegger without speaking directly much, except to say that he started as a Heideggerian philosopher and then, because of the Holocaust and the antisemitism, he hated Heidegger. But his work is nevertheless imbued with the Heideggerian issues, like the gradualness of coming into being. That’s what [Spielrein] is talking about.
In 2014, I was reading an essay by [the Hungarian psychoanalyst] István Hollós […], representative of the Budapest school. [It was] an essay about the origins [of] language and language development [“Felemelkedés az ösztönnyelvtĘl az emberi beszédhez” (From the language of instincts to human speech) from 1940]. And in his essay, he spoke about Spielrein but only [by] name [as well as of her paper “The Origin of the Child’s Words Papa and Mama. Some Observations on the Different Stages in Language Development” from 1922]. I had not heard about Spielrein before. I began looking for some sources and information on her. […] I am originally a linguist and that is why Spielrein’s […] linguistic [papers] were interesting to me. […] My PhD dissertation titled “Érzések a szavak mögött—a pszichoanalízis klasszikusai a nyelvről” (Feelings or emotions beyond words. The way of thinking of the classical psychoanalysts on language) at the University of Pécs in Hungary [analyzing linguistic approach in psychoanalysis in the works of] Sigmund Freud, Sándor Ferenczi, István Hollós, Michael Balint, Hans Sperber, and [End Page 623] Sabina Spielrein. [I found Spielrein to be the most important and original of them because] she aims to describe the whole system of language from the sounds, like “p” and “m” in the words “papa” and “mama,” to full sentences. [Second], she was a committed biologist in researching the questions of language origin and language development from her first publication, the 1911 doctoral dissertation “On the Psychological Content of a Case of Schizophrenia (Dementia Praecox) onward. She followed [the German zoologist and naturalist Ernst] Haeckel, [French naturalist Jean-Baptiste] Lamarck, Darwin, and later on […] the biological points of view of [Jean] Piaget. […] [Third], from 1920 onward, she was a scientist of children’s language. [Fourth, since 1920], she became more and more interested in the impact of society and the outer world, and the impact of socialization. In parallel, she worked within a psychoanalytical framework. […] [Fifth], she was interested not in the forming of words or sentences but in describing the functions of the language. […] All these aspects of her way of thinking remain inspiring for modern psycholinguists.
[What stands out for me is that] in her clinical practice, the word occupied the first place. She always paid attention to the spoken word; listening guided her in her interventions. […] Her [work with children was characterized] by freedom and plasticity, allowing us to observe a transfer. In the case of children, the psychoanalyst in the position of transference embodies the Other, the place of the word. This allows the child to display [their] relationship with objects of desire through play, drawing or words. […] The intervention [of the psychoanalyst] occurs from the core of the transfer, which allows treatment. […] [She was] an authentic pioneer of childhood listening. […] Furthermore, I find her work on language to be extremely important today. The birth of the articulated word linked to the presence/absence of the mother and [to] the act of breastfeeding. These findings [have been] confirmed by observation. They [are substantial] in the current work with autistic children and childhood psychoses.
From 2014–2015, I was in a research group [at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais] where we decided to [End Page 624] study the works of women psychoanalysts and we translated some [texts for] personal use. [It was an unofficial, somewhat marginal research group.] Sabina was one of [them]. But I got to read other psychoanalysts, like Tatiana Rosenthal, Barbara Low, Karen Horney, and some Brazilian [analysts] like Vírginia Bicudo, and Helena Besserman Viana. So, [Spielrein] was my entry into this universe [of women psychoanalysts].
Spielrein led me to discover all those pioneering women of psychoanalysis, neglected and forgotten because they were women. I’m currently working on a French dictionary of women psychoanalysts in the twentieth century, and the way they approached the psyche and the construction of the feminine.
[In 2015 or 2016] I was approached by a group of female analysts who were doing a play called The Women: Our Psychoanalytic Mothers [created by Louise DeCosta, analyst and creative director, and Susan Quinn, author], and I was offered to play the part of [a Swiss Jungian psychologist and scholar] Marie-Louise von Franz […] I said I would be happy to participate because I [had] trained as an actor, and I had studied acting for many years prior to becoming a psychoanalyst, if I can write the part. […] We performed all around [including] at the Freud Museum in London [in May 2017] […]. I happened to mention to [Louise DeCosta], one of the women I was collaborating with [that] one of the female analysts that most intrigues me […] is Sabina Spielrein. She was having tea with Carol Seigel [Director of] the Freud Museum. Carol had just put an exhibition together called [“So This is the Strong Sex.” Early Women Psychoanalysts on display in 2017–2018]. So, they thought, why don’t you all get together and write another play? And so, Louise, Susan Quinn and I did, and I played Sabina and wrote her part too. […] I did as much reading as I could. I did a deep dive. […] I wanted to spin off and write a one-woman show [Her Extraordinary Ability: An Elegy for Sabina Spielrein]. And so, in the writing of my Sabina one-woman show, one of the things that was really fascinating to me was her relationship with her guardian spirit. She had this internal figure that she says came to her. She wrote about it a lot in her diaries. It came to her in very difficult moments [End Page 625] in her childhood. It was an internal figure […] that spoke to her in German and told her, you are extraordinary, you will do great things. […] It stayed with her for the remainder of her life, as far as I know. And so, my one-woman show really focused on how that assisted her and how that became threaded in her life. […] She more than survived many, many hardships. She thrived. And I saw this aspect, this guardian spirit, as a very fundamental part of what she came to rely on. That helped her. […] So, I really wanted to use that as sort of theatrical device but also as a sort of a deep underpinning of who I felt she was. […] I started performing in November 2019. I won the [2019] Gradiva Award [of National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, NAAP]. […] I will be performing this [staged reading] in Zurich in August of 2025 [at the IAAP International Congress for Analytical Psychology].
When I started working on my grant [project] devoted to first psychoanalysts [in 2018 at the University of Warsaw and Sorbonne University], I was looking for papers that were less known in Poland or are not known at all, not translated, I thought that Spielrein needs to be included in the anthology [published as Imago Psychoanalizy. Antologia (Imago of Psychoanalysis. An Anthology) in 2021]. […] The most important discovery for me was […] her famous paper “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming.” I was in Vienna for the first time, doing research, looking for all these psychoanalysts who[se] names we know, like Otto Gross, Georg Grod-deck, Victor Tausk. Many of us, especially in Poland, didn’t have any real contact with their texts. So that was the idea that I will be able to translate some of these texts [with Marek Chojnacki]. And her text was really a discovery because it was so interdisciplinary. […] She was able to combine […] philosophical reflection, anthropological reflection psychoanalysis, and biology, altogether, written in a very beautiful language, which is also rare for psychoanalysts. […] What happened on the margins of the [psychoanalytic] movement was that other psychoanalysts [than Sigmund Freud] took the ideas Spielrein presented. I think about Otto Gross who was very much inspired by Spielrein’s presentation [to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1911] and then [“Destruction”] paper and he tried to [End Page 626] take the idea of this desire of destruction or death wish and incorporate it in his idea of anti-patriarchal psychoanalysis. He was basically saying that we are so destructive that our sexuality is destructive, so, we need to change that. Mostly, what he was saying is that women are victims of these destructive urges. Or [Sándor] Ferenczi. […] In [the “Destruction”] paper Spielrein writes about mother and Thalassa, the ocean-mother. This is something that in anthropological sense, symbolic sense, is one. This sphere without an ending, without a beginning, without time. […] Soon after, in 1914, Ferenczi starts working on his [Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, first published in Hungarian in 1929]. […] And also, Otto Rank with his Trauma of Birth [from 1924]. […] So, it was very interesting to see how [the “Destruction”] paper could have worked on the margins, and then how it just blossomed but in different papers of different psychoanalysts.
It’s wonderful that, thanks to you (and Marek Chojnacki), we now have Spielrein’s “Destruction” paper in Polish. There are others who continue to search for her lost talks and papers and translate her work into more languages.
In 2003, at forty-nine-years old, I went to the university and began my Master [to pursue work on Spielrein]. […] I discovered so many [of her] works online and expanded my research so much that it became a doctorate. I published part of it in 2014 with translations of [Spielrein’s dissertation on schizophrenia and the “Destruction” paper as Sabina Spielrein. Uma pioneira da psicanálise. Obras Completas, volume 1]. And then I decided to do research about Spielrein’s [ideas about] language. I did a two-year post-doctorate [which became the second volume of the book]. […] I did a lot of research on psychoanalysis in Russia and situated her work in this [political] context before and after the Russian Revolution. […] I situated her between Piaget and Vygotsky. At last, I talk about her ethics. […] I was very sorry that we [still haven’t] found her ethics speech from 1914 with Karl Abraham.
I moved to Berlin in 2018 and eventually enrolled in a master’s program in Anglophone modernities [End Page 627] in literature and culture at the University of Potsdam. I was studying the émigrés who had come to Berlin from all over […], people like Ai Weiwei, Søren Kierkegaard, Samuel Beckett, and Audre Lorde. A lot of people have come to Berlin for a time, including Spielrein, I came to find. […] I found this out on a plaque near my therapist’s office, there’s a plaque that commemorates Spielrein’s time in Berlin [at Thomasiusstraße 2]. […] What I found out with Spielrein is that most of her writings from that time had not been translated into English. […] One of them was “The Dream of ‘Father Freudenreich’” [which I translated and later published in the “American Imago” summer 2022 issue].
What is the relevance of Spielrein? How does she help you understand the world we live in?
There were various aspects of Spielrein’s work that captivated me throughout the years. In my recent chapter [“Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of Medical Science”] co-authored with John Launer for the anthology Early Women Psychoanalysts, I wrote about how she combined linguistics, neurology, and psychoanalysis with evolutionary studies. This was one of my original interests. My interest in linguistics and neurology led me to Spielrein’s childhood studies. She was one of the first child analysts, but also really one of the first people to contribute to the theory of childhood, of the development of language, and drives in childhood. And this is barely recognized at all in scholarship today. Certainly, when we compare the extent to which Spielrein is known to someone like Anna Freud or Melanie Klein. This is why my colleagues and I decided to organize a conference on Spielrein and Childhood Studies at the University of Essex, together with the International Association for Spielrein Studies.
[…] Another issue I’m really interested in, and always have been, is the political aspect of psychoanalysis. How analysts, who themselves came from marginalized positions in society, were able to read psychoanalysis differently. In Spielrein’s work you can see clearly that she’s always looking at the social context. She discusses this in her letters to Jung and in her work repeatedly. For example: familial context. What is the family [End Page 628] like? What are the actual relationships in the family? How do they contribute to a child’s development? This is something she talks about specifically when she writes about her little daughter [Renata]. This is true not just because she moved to Russia [in 1923], where she had to stress the social aspect. She was interested in how the society impacts the individual all along. How society influences the way drives are formed or the patters that are produced in interpersonal relationships. […] It was a very, very relational approach, which is always social.
Interesting. And that’s why scholars, like Esther Rapoport, have called Spielrein a proto-relational psychoanalysts.
Oh, yes, I would very much agree with that. Current relational psychoanalysts who are now grappling with the question of drives and gender could learn a lot from Spielrein’s approach. […] We could learn a lot from her combination of drive theory and relationships, including object relations and the social context. Her work provides a very good way of uniting these three approaches, while today they are still very much divided. In psychoanalysis, anyone who takes drives seriously, frowns on objects relations theory. And then the psychosocial scholars have various other conflicts with other groups and so on.
[Her work] is relevant to the understanding of child’s mind. Her theory on the development of language […] she proposed, and about the human mind is still relevant. […] What is interesting too is Spielrein’s methodology because she always discussed with biology, with neurology. This is important for psychoanalysis. Because today there is resistance. Psychoanalysts don’t like this debate between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. [She] was very innovative [when] she tried to support her theory in biology, in linguistics.
As a clinical practitioner […], I am fascinated with this idea in the “Destruction” paper and not only about how maternal love and erotic love or erotic drive are essentially the same. I think this is still counter-intuitive. […] She had [End Page 629] this x-ray vision that she could see some very deep archetypal qualities of human drives and human emotions. There are still ways [for her thinking] to enrich our clinical sensibility. But I also think that we can try to compensate her for all the systemic injustice that she was subjected to. Even just imagining her in the position of authority, someone who is deferred to, who is viewed as a founder. To me, even this game of imagining is healing. It is a way to overcome reality in imagination. To think of what could have been.
I also consider our work as a form of reparations: an attempt to symbolically compensate Spielrein (and other women pioneers) by remembering her as a psychoanalyst and thinker, creating new narratives about her, and continuing her work in one way or another. Spielrein has clearly planted seeds in us all, seeds that grow differently in different people.
Yes, it is like a very fruitful soil. You start digging and things begin to grow. If we use the imagery from the “Destruction” paper where she speaks of the individual dissolving into species and the individual merging into the collective, it is comforting to think that we may be continuing her individual [work]. We may be merging into her, she may be merging into us. […] Our work is speaking up and continuing her life and work along the lines of what she had theorized somewhat madly in the [“Destruction”] paper. […] I elaborated on this in my paper on queerness of the death drive [“Sabina Spielrein’s Death Drive, Queer Experience and Psychoanalytic Twogetherness” from 2021]. Our world and social environments are becoming increasingly violent, and the social fabric disintegrates, and we are pulled into this violence. I am speaking to you from Tel Aviv at the height of the war. Her thinking in the “Destruction” paper on this, this dialectic of dying and becoming, and of death and dying as real and omnipresent and inescapable, and yet not being the end of it all. To me, that is becoming incredibly relevant, in the context that I am in. We have been losing people. We’ve lost some academics and thinkers. And the dialogue with them continues. There are creative ways to commemorate them. There are creative ways to continue their work. We need a [End Page 630] brave bipolar theory like [Spielrein’s] to live in the reality we are living in and to be able to think about it, to stay present, not to dissociate, not to oversimplify or reduce. […] And the violence is unimaginable. And yet, creativity and regeneration are still possible in this reality.
I think about historical figures [in terms of] what they give us today. They’re not just history. I think a lot of what I took from [Spielrein’s] work, and that tradition, there was a lot of interest in envy, and how envy constructs treatment and transferences, and countertransference. […] One of the things she talks about is the move from bewilderment to chaos. And just the way, in which she’s opening up tolerance for practice being something that has to unsettle the analysts as well as the analysand. I think she’s very central to all kinds of discoveries about countertransference and what countertransference is necessary in regard to clinical work and clinical progress. […] What I brought to psychoanalysis was a very long history of feminism, as a psychologist studying the history of women’s issues and women’s projects. For me, given my relationship to feminism and radical political thought as well as psychoanalysis, Spielrein was a very natural point of interest. [Spielrein represented] radical theory at its most radical.
Do you consider Spielrein to be a feminist?
We’re talking about a period before there was a kind of formal theory of feminism. I think she is of tremendous importance to feminism. What was the complexity of her though? Was it more about history and the social, and not necessary [about] gender? Gender theory wasn’t very evolved in that era. […] Oh, this was feminism, but this is pre-history, this is proto-history. […] It is very important to understand what was possible for women in each generation.
I fully agree with John Launer and Janet Sayers that Spielrein took a woman’s perspective on psychology long before it occurred to others that gender was important in studying the mind. In this respect, we cannot understand the historical development and the current state of psychoanalysis [End Page 631] without women like Sabina Spielrein. More still, we cannot understand the human condition if we negate the feminine side immersed in it. [See my paper “Sabina Spielrein: From being a psychiatric patient to becoming an analyst herself”].
The Freud Museum in London [has recently] asked me to curate an exhibition based on [the book] Freud’s Women [titled “Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists”] and that’s going to open in October [2024]. It’s going to be absolutely wonderful. […] It’s not only historical and archivally based. It brings us into a near present to do with women and women analysts. But it also includes a lot of women artists [such as] Louise Bourgeois, Paula Rego, Cornelia Parker, and many more […]. [These artists] have a kind of affinity with psychoanalytical thinking and have a conversation with [psychoanalysis] in an interesting way. And, of course, Sabina will be part of the exhibition.
[…] I think history is important. I think it’s even more important now in a world where we live so much of our lives online. And in a world which feels simultaneous and is spread across the globe but has little depth in terms of centuries. And so, what we bring out of the past tends to be essentialized and very much reduced [in its complexity]. […] I don’t think this [flattening] is very useful to either our body politic or human endeavor and possibility. I don’t want to sound sententious, and it’s not the language I would normally use, but I do think [it’s crucial to keep alive] the specificity [and complexity] of history, which goes deep [and allows comparisons and ambiguities], and doesn’t just do a kind of an instantaneous social media version of the now or [makes use of reductionist] views of history which are brought in only to shore up the present, but for nothing else. Archives have become increasingly important […] to the training of historians […] at this time when the digital flattens everything. So, when everything became instantly available and could be done very, very quickly, speedily, and easily, the kind of more specific, more alternative views that come out of the archives become more important within the academic ethos, but also, one hopes, in the general cultural world. [The exhibition will run from October 30, 2024, until May 5, 2025]. [End Page 632]
She will always be a part of my thinking in my studies of the Holocaust. Her murder by the Nazis in Russia is also a tragic piece of the whole story of the Holocaust and the émigré analysts who escaped to America and South America, and other places, and of the antisemitism leading up to the Holocaust. I just continue to find it completely tragic and poignant that because she admired German society and literature, because she knew multiple languages (she was also a pianist and a brilliant polymath), she couldn’t believe that the Germans could do such terrible, terrible things. And so, she stayed where she was, in Rostov-on-Don. Finally, when the Nazis invaded, she was hideously murdered along with her daughters. […] Her story continues to be for me just a very tragic and sad, and poignant moment in the many, many, many moments of people who were destroyed by this. […] I see so many parallels to what’s happening in authoritarian regimes today, as well as the potential for more authoritarian regimes in the future. We struggle with that very much now in the United States with Donald Trump. Most people who are not his followers think that if he’s elected again, he will try to become basically a permanent president-dictator. Similar things are occurring in Poland, as you know, and in Hungary. Viktor Orbán is claimed as a model for a lot of the right-wing folks in the United States. So, I see a lot of parallels. And I don’t like to make parallels to the Holocaust lightly because it means arguing from extremes, but I see the creeping toward supposedly democratically elected authoritarian dictators, like Vladimir Putin. He is theoretically elected, but because of all the violence that is used to suppress opposition, it is not a free and fair democratic election. Spielrein was in her time a victim of that history of authoritarian rule. It is a very poignant story of someone who was very idealistic in many ways, and who went back to Russia, who believed in bringing psychoanalysis, child analysis, and educational reform to Russia. To see that idealism turned on its head, because she didn’t see the danger that was coming, is a message for many of us. […] Stories like hers are cautionary tales for us today. [End Page 633]
These days, because of the war in Ukraine, I’m worried about Rostov-on-Don, the memorial that bears [Spiel-rein’s] name, the little museum in her childhood home, and the fate of the researchers who guard her memory [professors Viktor Apryshenko and Elena Romek].
I’m not as much a historian as I am trying to understand current time by looking into the past [as you and other scholars do] in your recently edited book, Early Women Psychoanalysts. I tend to think of Spielrein more when I’m trying to orient myself in history, when trying to explain something from the past and the present at the same time. Like I did in my 2023 paper “Sabina and Me: How Thinking About Sabina Spielrein Accompanied Me Through the Early Pandemic.” [During the pandemic] I found, as many people did, enormous changes in our lives to be very disorienting, the isolation in particular. And we were dealing with Black Lives Matter and climate change in very big ways. So, there was this constant sense of disruption. […] I particularly used Spielrein’s theory of destruction and creation being a combined energy. I described an image of a deer that had been hit by a car near my property in the country. We had a real reduction in services, so this deer just lay there. There was no animal control to come and pick up the deer. Nobody buried the deer. It was going through the process of decay. […] We walked into town down this road, and we watched it decay. It went through decomposition, including the maggot phase until it was just bones on the dirt. It was easy to imagine it both being a destruction of life and the creation of life, because these creatures were feeding on it to complete their life cycle. So, I wrote the piece to, among other things, try to show the progression of time during the pandemic, and talk about the distortion, the disorientation of the progress of time that you didn’t feel because of the lack of structure.
Sabina Spielrein has just been present in my life since that day [of the workshop in 2018]. I have been just so inspired by her and so many aspects of her life. I see parallel processes in my life now. […] When I first encountered Sabina, I made my own journey toward listening into myself, [End Page 634] starting therapy, finding a new way of relating to myself, and coming back to myself in so many ways, as a woman, as an artist. […] Learning more about myself, coming from wounds, and healing. […] Also, I started writing poetry. That was sort of an organic flow.
I started to write my dreams all the time, and many years later I took an education as a dream therapist. So, I do dream work with groups.
[When I started working on my full-feature doctoral film about Spielrein in 2021] I didn’t know anything about psychoanalysis. […] Discovering her scientific works and letters, and biography […] was a big adventure for me. […] I spent so many hours trying to understand what she meant. [By coincidence, a month earlier] I also started my own psychoanalysis with a therapist. When I was reading about her patients and [their] dreams, I was thinking about my dreams and analyzing them with my therapist. […] It was a gate into something bigger in my life. Thanks to her. […] She’s helping me to understand […] my privacy and my intimate thoughts. […] Justyna Bilik, she’s a screenwriter, wrote a beautiful, [touching] text. […] Daria Żwań is the director [who] also graduated from the film school [in Łódź]. […] I will be playing Sabina [Spielrein] and also, I will be playing Sabina-the-actress. […] And I’m also [composing and writing] the music. […] It is very important for me to create music that would resonate with her. […] We connected Sabina’s scientific works with our times. […] We used four of her scientific works and also letters. […] We used the “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming,” “Two Menstrual Dreams,” “The Three Questions,” and “On the Origin of the Words Mama and Papa.” […] We have a [tentative] title, A Few Lessons from Sabina Spielrein. […] It’s a story about discrimination at work, society’s rules, conscious parenting and motherhood, femininity, and an academic career. […] It was her story and [these are] also our stories. […] She was robbed of her achievements, and it still [happens] in this business, especially in showbusiness. And we want to talk about it. [End Page 635]
It’s fascinating to learn how she’s changed your lives—personal and professional—and the methodology of your work as actors, writers, and filmmakers.
I have so many aspects of my life just relating to Sabina’s different phases in her life. That’s what I’m interested in working on now, for myself. Probably a poetry book, maybe a longer monologue too […] She’s been like a key opening a door where I enter to meet with myself in a new way […] as an artist, as a human being, as a woman of today. […] She’s been really inspiring me as a woman in decision-making. […] My boundary setting is different, how I relate to people in my life, in its different aspects: private life, relationships, work. I also started listening within and being more sure [about what] brings more peace and light into my life, and to what I can say: no, thank you.
This is the most important thing for me: she taught me how to trust my own voices, to be brave to trust them. No matter what people say. […] And also, the voice of an artist.
[…] Trusting that the voices that I have within, that I hear from inside are real, and are making sense. She herself had such a strong voice that needed to be expressed. It was a research voice, it was a poetic voice, it was a magic voice. And she trusted it. […] She could transform this voice into thoughts [and research]. […] Where did she come from?
There’s a personal connection there to the city of Warsaw, where a good portion of my family is from. [They] were probably part of a similar community, even if only peripherally [as Spielrein’s family]. I’m sure [they] knew each other. [Talking about Spielrein] gets me in touch with all the unspoken trauma of what my family lost. My family came here [to New York, in the aftermath of the First World War]. We don’t talk about what happened there. And yet, one of the things I’ve learned in becoming a psychoanalyst is [that] you cannot erase the past. And the more you try, the more you get caught in it, repeating compulsively. […] My family was erased, my history of erased, Spielrein was erased, as so many others were erased. [End Page 636]
Last [academic] year, [during a small seminar “Psychoanalytic and literary discourses of desire in the fin-de-siècle period”] with my students [at the Institute of Polish Culture] at the University of Warsaw, I also wanted to read [Spielrein’s “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming”]. […] I think [that] only one [of my students] saw the movie A Dangerous Method. […] So, for them, it was the first meeting with Spielrein, and they really enjoyed the text […] [and] the whole idea of reproduction and destruction at the same time. We tried to use her theory in reading early modernist literature. So, we tried to understand [Thomas Mann’s] Death in Venice. […] I think that’s somehow the most important [thing] that younger people, students, can pick some of her ideas [to] interpret literature. […] What I wanted to do is read [literary] texts […] published pretty much at the same time [as the psychoanalytic texts]. So, we read Mann, and [Robert] Musil, Artur Schnitzler, and Mihály Babits, among others. […] So that we could see how, in the same timeline, exactly the same or similar ideas were developing. And we were also trying to establish if these people knew about each other or if they read each other. That was the idea of the class. As for myself, […] when I work on Central European modernist literature, I also try to work with psychoanalytic texts that can be inspiring [including] Spielrein’s. […] When I wanted to write […] in one of the chapters for my book [The Politics of Life Writing in Psychoanalysis. Autobiographies, Memoirs, and Biographies of Freud’s First Collaborators, forthcoming] about [Gustav] Mahler [and] “Resurrection” Symphony [which] was clearly the same idea as Spielrein was writing about in a similar timeframe, so I just use her text [on “Destruction”].
I’d love to take your class! My own interest in women psychoanalysts started with Lena Magnone’s seminar at the University of Warsaw, where we read nineteenth-century women’s literature with feminist-psychoanalytic theories.
I just wrote a paper [as part of my PhD at Northern Illinois University] about plasticity in writing transfer and [French philosopher] Catherine Malabou, a student of Jacques Derrida. Her idea of plasticity, rooted in psychology too, is about the state of transformation that starts with neuro-plasticity [End Page 637] in the brain. The brain is something that can always change and does always change. […] Now, over a hundred years ago, Spielrein was writing about destruction and how that’s a part of becoming long time before Malabou was writing about it. Well, this is plasticity. I don’t know if Malabou knew about Spielrein, I doubt it. This is another interesting thing about Spielrein, how nascent her ideas were. They kept coming back up at later points in history. […] I am interested in transformalism of how things are susceptible to change, politically speaking, materially speaking, and narratively speaking. This is why liminality was interesting to me and Spielrein’s Berlin phase, which was a liminal phase for her in this process of becoming [after] she had left Freud and Jung.
I want to talk about [Spielrein’s] thinking about envy, which was not exactly like [Melanie] Klein’s. The whole question of: does the mother envy the daughter? Does the daughter envy the mother? […] What are the implications? In some sense envying a parent is part of growth. If you could envy them, maybe you would want to be like them. Whereas the envy that goes intergenerationally toward the child can be very destructive. So, I just think, this question of who envies whom and in what way, is incredibly important and complicated; worth paying attention to clinically and socially. […] There’s a very interesting place of difference and links [between Spiel-rein and Klein].
If I were to [write about Spielrein], I would do something more contextual about her in that 1920s milieu in Geneva. […] My sense is that it was such a rich period and place. […] I would look at how she fits in that culture, and how she fits in that environment. By the way, there were many Russians [and] Poles, people from the Russian Empire. […] Geneva was a university where women could study. So, there were lots of female Russian students there, for example, in the medical school. […] Then, of course, we have this theatre piece, “Le Mangeur de rêves” (The Dream Eater) by Henri-René Lenormand, which is about a psychoanalyst and the premiere was introduced by [Edouard] Claparède [the Genevan neurologist and child psychologist who founded the Jean-Jacques Rousseau [End Page 638] Institute in 1912]. And then, Spielrein wrote about it in [the Journal de Genève, in January 1922, an article “Qui est l’auteur du crime?” (Who committed the crime?)]. Everything was interconnected. […] If I were to look again into Spielrein, it would be with a focus on the culture and the multiple contexts that also have political connections. I wrote about the politics of 1920s Geneva and its relations to education, pedagogy, religion, and so on [in “L’Institut Rousseau au temps de passions” (The Rousseau Institute in Times of Passion) from 1988 and then again, with focus on Piaget, in “Immanence, affectivité et démocratie dans Le jugement moral chez l’enfant” (Immanence, affectivity, and democracy in The Moral Judgement of the Child) from 1998]. […] It would be interesting to be able to tell the story of these few years in 1920s Geneva by placing Spielrein at the center, with the League of Nations, with all sorts of turbulences, with an incredibly rich artistic, theatrical, intellectual, and political scene. One could perhaps write a story, partly fictional, where Spielrein plays an important role. She might appear as a pivotal figure [which] I think she was, but we don’t have the documentation. One sees that in the traces of her relationships with [Swiss linguist] Charles Bally, with Claparède, with Piaget. […] An alternative story: Sabina Spielrein right there in the middle of a rich cultural scene rather than Sabina Spielrein just a victim of evil men and huge emotional turmoil. Another project I’d be very interested in pursuing or reading is a comparison between Spielrein and Melanie Klein, another major woman psychoanalyst dealing with children at the time. […] I think they are very different. […] They are profoundly diverging in sensibility toward childhood, toward emotions. […] There are many historical, circumstantial factors that explain Spielrein’s relative disappearance and Klein’s huge success. […] Lots of institutional factors [and] once again, the winds of history were blowing in different directions.
Thank you all so much for taking the time to talk to me!
Klara Naszkowska, PhD, is a cultural and oral historian of Jewish women exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, Jewish studies, psychoanalysis, migration, memory, and post-memory. She is the Founding Director of the International Association for Spielrein Studies, and recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library Research Support Grant. Her most recent book is an edited anthology, Early Women Psychoanalysts: History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance (Routledge, 2024). In her current research project, she uses archival materials and interviews to reconstruct biographies of Polish Jewish women psychoanalysts who fled the Nazis to the United States. She focuses on their accounts of the past, and the retellings of their stories of loss and survival by their children and grandchildren. Klara is now completing a narrative nonfiction book, Clara Happel, Judaism, and Psychoanalysis in America: Memory, History and Interpretation (Routledge,2025). She is an Adjunct Professor at Montclair State University in NJ.
Notes
1. The present paper grew out of a series of twenty-four oral history interviews and two written communications conducted in May and June of 2024.
