sabina spielrein death
"[54] Her husband died in 1936. [58], Destrudo as an evocative name also appears in rock music[59] and video games. [21], He then set out to find an explanation of such a compulsion, an explanation that some scholars have labeled as "metaphysical biology". [43] In another paper, entitled 'The Mother-in-Law',[44][45] she gave a sympathetic account of the role of mothers-in-law and the relationship between them and their daughters-in-law. The Essential Writings of Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of - Springer Her Life - Sabina spielrein Given what has been learned since 1905 regarding a young persons reaction to extreme trauma, many of the symptoms Spielrein exhibited would be more normalized today as natural responses to severe, prolonged trauma. Sigmund Freud elaborated on an earlier concept by Sabrina Spielrein: "death drive". parallels in our thinking and feeling. Kinderzeichnungen bei offenen und geschlossenen Augen.Imago(1931) 16:259291. In the mid1970s, papers pertaining to Spielrein, including diaries and correspondence, which were found hidden in a basement in Geneva revived interest in her. Inside this box was a trove of personal papers that had Psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein in a family photo, January 2, 1918. An English-language biography of Spielrein by Angela M. Sells, entitled Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth,[64] was published by SUNY Press in August 2017. [6] The publication in 2003 of a selection of essays about her under the title Sabina Spielrein, Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis[12] has stimulated interest in her as an original thinker. [9][10] The paper shows evidence of both Jungian and Freudian thought, but appears to mark the point at which she moved from identifying herself with Jung to seeing herself as more of a Freudian. It focused more attention on the mental illness and highlighted the need for more research. This site remains available for all past issues and articles. [48] In the early 21st century, their use amongst Freudian psychoanalysists has been waning, but still designate destructive energy. Stillpoint Magazine holds copyright to all additional images, branding, design and supplementary texts across stillpointmag.org as well as in additional social media profiles, digital platforms and print materials. Her dissertation contributed greatly to the understanding of the language of people with schizophrenia. The oblivion into which Spielrein has fallen is remarkable. Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", p. 275. not only married, but was also her doctor, her analyst, and later, her Jung eventually ended the affair, to save his marriage and his career. . Unfortunately, much of the recent work on Spielrein has focused on her role in a triangle with Freud and Jung, rather than on her own specific contributions. and in his Da!. At one point in the text, her arguments most clearly predict those articulated by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud's conceptual opposition of death and eros drives in the human psyche was applied by Walter A. Davis in Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative[85] and Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9/11. [10] "This equating of Instinkt and Trieb has created serious misunderstandings". Their intense therapeutic relationship led to a mutual fascination that lasted, for Spielrein, for the rest of her life. [34], However, as Freud put it to the imagined auditors of his New Introductory Lectures (1932), "You may perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: "That isn't natural science, it's Schopenhauer's philosophy!" He recounted, it was "the voice of a patient who had a strong transference to me". Its interest however resides in the fact that her idea of a death drive derives from her analysis with Jung. [17] Later, he referred to her twice in letters to Freud as his first analytic case, although in his publications he referred to two later patients in these terms. [7] He concluded that they had consensual and erotic physical contact but stopped short of sexual penetration. Let us know. Jung, as she put it, was deeply stirred by the Jung had been greatly impressed by some of Freuds innovative techniques and writings, and applied them to his treatment of Spielrein. Features thousands of biographic and thematic essays on Jewish women around the world. inevitability of deathcan only be a first step. Unless they consciously take responsibility for the damage of those reactions, Davis claims that Americans will repeat them. The first scholarly biography of her in German, by Sabine Richebcher,[8] places her relationship with Jung in its proper context of a lifelong career of involvement with psychoanalysis and psychology. Shortly after World War I broke out, Spielrein was back in Switzerland. Renatchens Menschenentstehungstheorie.Internationale Zeitschrift fr rztliche Psychoanalyse(1920) 6:155157. psychiatric patient, early analysand, medical student, psychoanalyst, theoretician, "[6]), Founded in 1921 by Vera Schmidt (who had also been one of Freud's students), the "Detski Dom" was intended to teach children based on Freud's theories. Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being (pp. She became the first patient of Carl Jung after being admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Zurich in 1904 and had an affair with Jung. Sabina's father Nikolai (born Naftul) Spielrein was an agronomist. In other words, the term death "instinct" is simply a false representation of death drive. In 1933, he conceived of his original formulation of the death drive 'the improbability of our speculations. [8] Pavel returned to his wife, and their second daughter Eva was born in 1926. [61] A milestone in reclaiming Spielrein as an original thinker was reached during the 2015 congress of the American Psychoanalytic Association, when the opening plenary lecture was given by Adrienne Harris, on "The Clinical and Theoretical Contributions of Sabina Spielrein", crediting her with pioneering relational psychoanalysis. Her Life THE LIFE OF DR. SABINA SPIELREIN Who was Sabina Spielrein? Schopenhauer's pessimism led him to believe that the affirmation of the "will" was a negative and immoral thing, due to his belief of life producing more suffering than happiness. Sabina Spielrein : Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis [72], Jean Laplanche has explored repeatedly the question of mortido,[73] and of how far a distinctive instinct of destruction can be identified in parallel to the forces of libido. Her murder was tragic . [20][11] Freud referenced it in the same volume in his postscript to the Schreber Case;[21] It was the first doctorate to appear in a psychoanalytic journal. As a Following the sudden death of her only sister Emilia from typhoid, Spielrein's mental health started to deteriorate, and at the age of 18 she suffered a breakdown with severe hysteria including tics, grimaces, and uncontrollable laughing and crying. "This deflection of the death instinct, described by Freud, in Melanie Klein's view consists partly of a projection, partly of the conversion of the death instinct into aggression". Cooper-White notes that the concept Spielrein outlines is very different from what either Freud or Jung would eventually propose. There are many parts of Sabina Spielreins life that remain a mystery and there is continued controversy regarding specific dates and activities in her life. Spielrein continued to correspond with Jung and Freud during this time, despite the destructive split that occurred between the two men in 1912. [15] She made a rapid recovery, and by October was able to apply for medical school and to start assisting Jung with word association tests in his laboratory. Spielrein published thirty psychoanalytic papers in French and German. At the close of the decade, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud acknowledged that "To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way".[31]. . The accusations were possibly made in response to attempts by Leon Trotsky to proletarianize the school's intake[6] :214 During Spielrein's time in Moscow, both Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky came to work at the Psychoanalytic Institute and "Dyetski Dom" and studied with her. [25] This is supported by Spielrein's statement in a letter to her mother: "So far we have stayed at the level of poetry that is not dangerous. [13] Another was the mathematician Jan Spielrein. Sabina Spielrein (played by Keira Knightley) was dropped off at the Burghlzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich by her uncle and a medical police officer at 10.30pm on 17 August 1904. [71], Berne's concern with the role of mortido in individuals and groups, social formations and nations, arguably continued throughout all his later writings. In December 1913 she gave birth to her first daughter, Irma Renata. In 1923 Spielrein returned to Russia to visit family and colleagues. Marton's film creatively re-enacted Spielrein's hospitalization, using excerpts from her hospital record and Jung's published material on her 'case'. instinctinsofar as it places destruction as a stage and motor in Etkind's research in Russia in the 1990s shows that she did not "disappear" after leaving Western Europe, but continued as an active clinician and researcher. [8][18] Politically, Spielrein identified with socialism, although some of her Russian student contemporaries were followers of the Socialist Revolutionary Party or of Zionism. Her tragic murder in the Holocaust compounded this erasure. However, the sexual myth dies hard, providing sensational material for a number of theatrical productions and a plethora of articles in the popular press and professional journals. result, much more radical work is required to address humanitys stickiest [60], Mortido was introduced by Freud's pupil Paul Federn to cover the psychic energy of the death instinct, something left open by Freud himself:[61] Providing what he saw as clinical proof of the reality of the death instinct in 1930, Federn reported on the self-destructive tendencies of severely melancholic patients as evidence of what he would later call inwardly-directed mortido. simple fact of her complex personal involvement, especially with Jung, but Jung's correspondence to Freud about his relationship with Spielrein inspired Freud's concepts of transference and countertransference. The Association holds an impressive collection of resources, papers, and photographs depicting tragic life and work of Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942), a Russian-Jewish psychoanalyst and pediatrician with at least thirty publications in German, French and Russian. Spielrein opens the essay and writes: Throughout my involvement with sexual problems, one question has especially interested me: Why does this most powerful drive, the reproductive instinct, harbour negative feelings in addition to the inherently anticipated positive feelings? From these suggestive lines, she goes on to weave a tapestry through which she explores the negative element of libido (including, but not limited to, sexuality): the death instinct. Die usserungen des Oedipuskomplexes im Kindersalter.Internationale Zeitschrift fr rztliche Psychoanalyse(1916)1:4448. Spielrein has been considered by some as the model for Jungs concept of the anima. Schwiez.Internationale Zeitschrift fr rztliche Psychoanalyse(1922) 8:234235. She was the oldest of five children. The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives. Lance S. Owens, Jung in Love: The Mysterium in Liber Novus (Gnosis Archive Books, 2015), 27-35. 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: Contribution of Professor Ivan Dmitrievich Ermakov in the development of psychiatry and psychoanalydsis (the 130th anniversary of his birth). [22] In Freud's own words, "What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection". "I, too, was once a human being. My name was Sabina Spielrein." The historian and Freudian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim commented on her treatment and the apparently beneficial result, noting that, "However questionable Jung's behaviour was from a moral point of viewsomehow it met the prime obligation of the therapist towards his patient: to cure her". Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. Initially, both Jung and Freud thought Spielrein was the origin of the scandal as an act of revenge against Jung for ending their relationship. "Life-as-it-is Must Die": Sabina Spielrein and the Death Instinct of She became the first patient of Carl Jung after being admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Zurich in 1904 and had an affair with Jung. [8] Eva trained as a dentist, but did not practice. Einige kleine Mitteilungen aus dem Kinderleben.Zeitschrift fr Psychoanalytische Pdagogik(1923) 2:9599. eBook ISBN 9780429479977 Share ABSTRACT Sex, death, and psychoanalysis were the main preoccupations of Sabina Spielrein both as a patient and as an analyst, and she was the first to write a paper on the destructive or death instinct. [19] Combined with what he called "the compulsion of destiny come across [in] people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome",[20] such evidence led Freud "to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeatsomething that would seem more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides". Carotenuto, Aldo. One of them, Isaac Spielrein, was a Soviet psychologist, a pioneer of work psychology. All three of her brothers later became eminent scientists. These included Esther Aptekman, Fanya Chalevsky, Sheina Grebelskaya and Tatiana Rosenthal. After moving from Warsaw to Rostov, he became a successful merchant. Sabina Nikolayevna Spielrein [1] (Russian: , IPA: [sbin nklajvn plrjn]; 7 November 25 October 1885 OS - 11 August 1942) was a Russian physician and one of the first female psychoanalysts. Nevertheless, Freud eventually adopted the concept, and in later years would build extensively upon the tentative foundations he had set out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Sabina Spielrein's Death Drive, Queer Experience, and Psychoanalytic In her diary entry on 11 September 1910 Spielrein writes of Spielreins case appears to be at least part of what motivated Jung to initially contact Freud. [3] :967 Meanwhile, Jung had resigned his medical post at the Burghlzli, although he continued his laboratory work and university teaching. Her theory had a profound influence onMelanie Klein, who also attended the Congress. can be said about Spielreins death instinctfor example, the nuance of its When Spielrein was fifteen, her six-year-old sister died of typhoid. The publication in 1974, of the correspondence between Freud and Jung,[28] followed by the discovery of her personal papers and publication of some of them from the 1980s onwards,[2][3] made her name quite widely known. Ein unbewusster Richterspruch.Internationale Zeitschrift fr rztliche Psychoanalyse(1915) 3:350. The death drive is sometimes referred to as "Thanatos" in post-Freudian thought, complementing "Eros", although this term was not used in Freud's own work, being rather introduced by Wilhelm Stekel in 1909 and then by Paul Federn in the present context. painstakingly works to prove, the ethical ambiguities of Jungs and Spielreins In 1920 in The Hague, Spielrein spoke at the sixth International Psychoanalytic Congress. is a but and that is that my friend is already married. To a contemporary [8][9] Subsequent psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein have defended the concept. She did not have further therapy from him, although from around late 1907 he informally tried to analyze her wish for his child. Whereas Freud himself never named the aggressive and destructive energy of the death drive (as he had done with the life drive, "libido"),[55] the next generation of psychoanalysts vied to find suitable names for it. While at medical school, Spielrein continued to assist Jung in the laboratory as she had done as an in-patient. After a hiatus of several months caused by the tension, Spielrein and Jung resumed their relationship in the summer of 1909, and continued seeing each other privately up through the last months of 1910. Beitrge zur Kenntnis der Kindlichen Seele.Zentralblatt fr Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie(1912) 3:5772. Help us elevate the voices of Jewish women. Neither Ernest Jones in his standard work on Freud (1953), nor Peter Gaysmagnum opus, Freud(1987), nor even Nancy Chodorow, who wrote on the contribution of women to psychoanalysis (1987), mention her in their writings. Briefmarkentraum.Internationale Zeitschrift fr rztliche Psychoanalyse,(1922) 8:342343. In this vein, Pamela Cooper-White writes in The Power that Beautifies and Destroys: Sabina Spielrein and Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being, her rigorous 2014 article: Spielrein cannot be credited with the entire concept of a death instinct but her rendering of it was unique and merited an (albeit somewhat confused) footnote from Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Das unbewusste Trumen in KuprinsZweikampf.Imago(1913) 2:524525. The first problem Freud encountered was the phenomenon of repetition in (war) trauma. Although Spielrein's paper was published in 1912, Freud initially resisted the concept as he considered it to be too Jungian. change, radicalization, and the threat of nuclear war. She lectured and did clinical work, but her most renowned work there was her treatment of Jean Piaget in 1921 as his analyst for eight months. [14][15] After an unsuccessful stay in a Swiss sanatorium, where she developed another infatuation with one of the doctors, she was admitted to the Burghlzli mental hospital near Zurich in August 1904. Spielrein met Dr. Pavel (Paul) Naumovitsch Scheftel, a Russian Jewish physician, and they were married on June 14, 1912. [3] :92 Spielrein also wrote to Freud, making it clear that, for a few months, their relationship had been in some fashion physical, it had involved what Spielrein again called "poetry": "In the end the unavoidable happenedit reached the point where he could no longer stand it and wanted 'poetry'. 329-335).The paper was entitled "Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens" ("Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being") and was published in the Jahrbuch fr . One of these was an account of children's beliefs about sex and reproduction, in which she included recollections of her own early fantasies about this. Her primary role in child psychology has been wrongly attributed toAnna Freudor, alternatively, to Melanie Klein. A second problematic area was found by Freud in children's play (such as the Fort/Da Forth/here game played by Freud's grandson, who would stage and re-stage the disappearance of his mother and even himself). [7] Instead, Launer sees her historical importance as someone who made an early attempt to harmonize psychoanalysis and developmental psychology within an overarching biological framework, anticipating modern ideas from attachment theory and evolutionary psychology. [8] Her diaries show a very broad range of interests and reading including philosophy, religion, Russian literature and evolutionary biology. ISFP Gallery of Russian Thinkers: Sabina Spielrein Sabina Spielrein's Death Drive, Queer Experience, and Psychoanalytic Twogetherness. Freud made a further connection between group life and innate aggression, where the former comes together more closely by directing aggression to other groups, an idea later picked up by group analysts like Wilfred Bion. Artistic images were seen by Joseph Campbell in terms of "incestuous 'libido' and patricidal 'destrudo'";[56] while literary descriptions of the conflict between destrudo and libido[57] are still fairly widespread in the 21st century. Freud found his patients, dealing with painful experiences that had been repressed, regularly "obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something belonging to the past". and developed an exciting theory in the context of child development explaining the meaning of a mother's breast and sucking/nursing. Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" in, Laplanche, Jean; Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand (2018) [1973]. They shared a passionate interest in psychoanalysis that further bonded them. [81], Melanie Klein and her immediate followers considered that "the infant is exposed from birth to the anxiety stirred up by the inborn polarity of instinctsthe immediate conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct";[2] and Kleinians indeed built much of their theory of early childhood around the outward deflection of the latter. and on the position of the early women analysts while Coline Covington discusses the influence on analytical theory of Spielrein's original ideas on the death instinct, on oral sadism and on the roots of aggression . In October 1977, deep in the cellars of the Palais Wilson in [3]:122 The relationship between Jung and Spielrein demonstrated to Freud that a therapist's emotions and humanity could not be kept out of the psychoanalytic relationship. From there, her death instinct offers a markedly more hopeful, life-affirming vision of this core element of the human psyche than do either Jungs or Freuds. Of all that is known about Spielrein, this last pointher intimacy with the two fathers of psychoanalysishas, until recently, drawn the most attention from scholars. Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens.Johrbuch fr psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen(1912) 4:465503. In "Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being" (1912), Sabina Spielrein theorized the death drive as the relational drive toward the death of the I, with the possibility of a future . 31 December 1999. Spielreins contributions to the early development of psychoanalysis have been overlooked and, until recently, mainly forgotten. Such a shift She was one of the first psychoanalysts to conduct a case study on schizophrenia and have a dissertation appear in a psychoanalytic journal. Though the specifics are lost to history, their relationship is loosely outlined in excerpts of Spielreins diary and correspondence, published by Dr. Aldo Carotenuto in A Secret Symmetry (1982). [36] Nonetheless, Lance Owens has documented that the relationship with Spielrein was indeed crucial to Jung's evolving understanding of what he much later termed the anima. received since then, that makes a return to her and her work particularly She became an active member of the society, attended its Wednesday meetings, gave lectures, and published numerous papers. And it is, in [2], French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, for his part, castigated the "refusal to accept this culminating point of Freud's doctrine by those who conduct their analysis on the basis of a conception of the ego that death instinct whose enigma Freud propounded for us at the height of his experience". But this was not enough to keep her afloat financially. The result was a stormy love affair between them that continued until the spring of 1909. [33] Ernest Jones (who like many analysts was not convinced of the need for the death drive, over and above an instinct of aggression) considered that "Freud seemed to have landed in the position of Schopenhauer, who taught that 'death is the goal of life'". [34] Before this episode, Freud apparently believed that a doctor could numb his emotions when analyzing patients. maintain our present condition, there lies a desire for transformation. We may She attended medical school at the University of Zurich from June 1905 to January 1911, excelling there academically. Quelques analogies entre la pense de lenfant, celle de laphasique et la pense subconsciente.Archives de psychologie(1923) 18:306322. Spielrein and her daughters survived the first German invasion of Rostov-on-Don in November 1941, which was repelled by the Red Army. This fact led my pupil Dr. Spielrein to develop her idea of the death-instinct, which was then taken up by Freud. perspective is possible, whereby the destruction inherent in climate change and problemsembedded, as they often are, in the fabric of our daily lives. Sabina Spielrein: Sabina Nikolaevna SPIELREIN (1885, Rostov-on-Don 1942, Rostov-on-Don) Russian psychoanalyst. [9][10], Spielrein was a pioneer of psychoanalysis and one of the first to introduce the concept of the death instinct. Carl Jung's Acknowledgements of the Work of Sabina Spielrein [Partial As Hall writes: In 1942, together with both her daughters, Spielrein was shot as a Jew by Germans. Sometimes, destruction cannot be redeemed. Sabina Spielrein: Out of the Shadow of Freud and Jung Zur Frage der Entstehung und Entwicklung der Lautsprache.Internationale Zeitschrift fr rztliche Psychoanalyse(1920) 6:401. He had fathered a child with another woman and had been living with her. Spielreins mental health affliction appeared at age seventeen, although she had been beset with problems throughout her young life. [14][15] Literary criticism has been almost more prepared than psychoanalysis to make at least metaphorical use of the term 'Destrudo'. her the noblest of love. . The term is almost universally known in scholarly literature on Freud as the "death drive", and Lacanian psychoanalysts often shorten it to simply "drive" (although Freud posited the existence of other drives as well, and Lacan explicitly states in Seminar XI that all drives are partial to the death drive). "[24] Lance Owens further summarized the documentary evidence in his 2015 study, Jung in Love: The Mysterium in Liber Novus,[26] Zvi Lothane, a Freudian psychoanalyst and scholar of psychoanalytic history, makes the most robust and well-supported case against a consummated sexual relationship between the pair. Sabina Spielrein is perhaps best known for her love affair with her doctor, Carl Gustav Jung. [51], In 1923, discouraged by her lack of success in building up a private practice in Geneva, and with Freud's support, she decided to travel to Moscow to support the development of psychoanalysis there. Regardless of the questionable relationship with Jung, something positive and very useful to psychotherapy was born from it. In October she moved to Vienna, where she was elected a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Spielrein's career started to be affected by the political climate. Der vergessene Name.Internationale Zeitschrift fr rztliche Psychoanalyse(1914) 2:383384. see these destructive realities as the inescapable, oppositional truth of human At the same time, she became director of the child psychology department at the First Moscow University and served as pedagogical doctor at the Third International, a kind of childrens village. She very much enjoyed natural science courses and decided that the direction in which she wanted to move was medicine. Plot. She continued to yearn for him for several years afterwards, and wrote to Freud that she found it harder to forgive Jung for leaving the psychoanalytic movement than for "that business with me".