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Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. Sigmund Freud |
Sabina Naftulovna Spielrein (Russian: Сабина Нафтуловна Шпильрейн, also transliterated "Shpilrein" or "Shpilreyn"), born 7 November 1885, died 12 August 1942] (both in Rostov-on-Don), was one of the first female psychoanalysts. She studied under Carl Gustav Jung, with whom she was rumored to have had a romantic relationship. One of her more famous analysands was the Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, who had also met Jung during a postdoc in Zurich in 1918–1919.
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Born 1885 into a family of a Jewish doctors in Rostov, Russia, her mother was a dentist, her father a physician. One of her brothers, Isaac Spielrein, was a Soviet psychologist, a pioneer of labor psychology. Sabina was married to Pavel Scheftel, a physician of Russian Jewish descent. They had two daughters: Renate, born 1912, and Eva, born 1924.
Before enrolling as a student of medicine in Zürich, Spielrein was admitted in August 1904 to the Burghölzli mental hospital near Zürich, where Carl Gustav Jung worked at that time, and remained there until June 1905. While there, she established a deep emotional relationship with Jung who later was her medical dissertation advisor. The historian and psychoanalyst Peter Loewenberg argues that this was a sexual relationship, in breach of professional ethics, and that it "jeopardized his position at the Burghölzli and led to his rupture with Bleuler and his departure from the University of Zurich". Spielrein graduated in 1911, defending a dissertation about a case of schizophrenia, and was later elected a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. She continued working with Jung until 1912, and later saw Sigmund Freud in Vienna.
In 1923, Spielrein returned to Soviet Russia and with Vera Schmidt established a kindergarten in Moscow, nicknamed "The White Nursery" by the children (all furniture and walls having been white). The institution was committed to bringing up children as free persons as early as possible. "The White Nursery" was closed down three years later by the authorities under false accusations of sexual perversion with the children. (In fact, Stalin actually enrolled his own son, Vasily, into the "White Nursery" under a false name.)
Sabina's husband Pavel perished during Stalin's Great Terror, as did her brother Isaac. Sabina and her two children were killed by an SS Death Squad, Einsatzgruppe D in 1942 in Zmievskaya Balka.
While Spielrein is not often given more than a footnote in the history of the development of psychoanalysis, her conception of the sexual drive as containing both an instinct of destruction and an instinct of transformation, presented to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1912, in fact anticipates both Freud's "death drive" and Jung's views on "transformation". She may thus have inspired both men.
Spielrein's letters, journals and copies of hospital records have been published, as has her correspondence with Jung and Freud.
A documentary, Ich hieß Sabina Spielrein (My Name was Sabina Spielrein), was made in 2002 by the Hungarian-born Swedish director Elisabeth Marton and was released in the United States in late 2005 (see http://www.sabinaspielrein.com/). The documentary was released in the U.S. by Facets Video, a subsidiary of Facets Multi-Media. There is a biopic The Soul Keeper (Prendimi l’Anima), directed by Roberto Faenza, with Emilia Fox as Spielrein and Iain Glen as Carl Gustav Jung. Spielrein figures prominently in two contemporary British plays: Sabina (1998) by Snoo Wilson and The Talking Cure (2003) by Christopher Hampton, in which Ralph Fiennes played Jung on the London stage. Both plays were preceded by the Off Broadway production of Sabina (1996) by Willy Holtzman. Hampton adapted his own play for a feature film called A Dangerous Method, produced by Jeremy Thomas, directed by David Cronenberg, and starring Keira Knightley as Spielrein.
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