Background music: Tachanka [Tachanka] music: K. Listov, lyrics: M. Ruderman; 1936

  "Some Information about the Life and Works of Sabina Spielrein"

by Tom Federn

(This paper has been published in "The International Society for the Psychological Treatment of Schizophrenia and other Psychoses" (ISPS-US) web site ( www.isps-us.org )

I would like to amplify and to a certain extent even modify the information provided about Sabina Spielrein, not that long ago. I will divide my communication into five parts. The first will deal with the notion that she originated the concept of the death "instinct" [der Todestrieb, AKA Thanatos]. The second with "her successful but complicated treatment by C. G. Jung." The third with the notion that she "was Jean Piaget's analyst." The fourth with the question of whether or not "she and her daughter were killed by the Nazis," and, finally, the fifth will deal with her understanding about what constitutes schizophrenia, something she knew a great deal about for a variety of reasons as you will soon see.

I. Sabina Spielrein and the Death Instinct

Under the guidance of C. G. Jung Sabina Spielrein treated persons suffering from schizophrenia at Burghölzli, the famous Swiss mental hospital. Indeed, she wrote her doctoral dissertation, „Über den psychologischen Inhalt eines Falles von Schizophrenia" ["The Psychological Content of a Case of Schizophrenia"], in Jahrbuch, 1911, pp. 329-400, about one of her patients, who had this mental disorder. Jung makes frequent reference to it in the first version of one of his major works, Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, the first part of which appeared in 1911 in the same volume of the Jahrbuch, pp. 120-227, as Spielrein's dissertation. He also does the same thing in the revision of this same work that he made many, many years later, and which he published in 1952 under a different title, Metamorphoses of the Soul and Its Symbols.

At least some of you might be interested to know how Sigmund Freud responded to the first part of the initial version. After reading it, he wrote Jung the following:

"In it, many things are so well expressed that it is necessary to commit them to memory, because they constitute the definitive form of their expression … But it is the best that this author, who is full of promise, has produced until now, not the best of what he will furnish in the future."

At any rate, what makes Spielrein's views on schizophrenia so significant is that she herself was diagnosed by her analyst, no other than C. G. Jung himself, as suffering from a "psychotic hysteria." He made this diagnosis in an article that he presented at the First International Congress of Psychiatry and Neurology, „Die Freudsche Hysterie" ["The Freudian Theory of Hysteria"]. Previously, in a letter to Freud, he had diagnosed her as suffering from a serious case of hysteria that had lasted for six years. Herman Nunberg, MD (1884-1970), who is the senior editor of the Minutes of then Vienna Psychoanalytic Society mentions in a footnote that during the period when she and he studied medicine together in Zurich , she experienced a psychotic episode. As a result of her emotional difficulties she was hospitalized in Burghölzli from August 17, 1904 , to June 1, 1904 . It appears that then there was not yet such a thing as managed care. It was sometime during this period that Jung encountered Spielrein for the first time, perhaps because she was a participant in the association experiments, which he and his colleagues were performing with patients. According to her journal, it was none other than Ludwig Binswanger who performed them with her. Jung became fascinated by her intelligence and suggested that she become a psychiatrist. He told her that minds such as hers lead to the advancement of science and that she absolutely had to become a psychiatrist. When she was released from Burghölzli, Jung continued her treatment on an outpatient basis. With such bona fides, what she has to say about schizophrenia should be of great significance.

I. Did Sabina Spielrein originate the concept of the death "instinct?"

I will not discuss the extremely important question of whether or not the English word "instinct" is an appropriate translation for the German word "der Trieb," except for stating that in my humble opinion it is not. With regard to whether or not Spielrein discovered the death "instinct" eight years before Freud himself did, I have come to the conclusion that there is no simple answer to this question.

Let us first examine what Aldo Carotenuto, a leading authority on life and work of Spielrein and an Italian Jungian analyst, has to say about this matter. He states that she anticipated almost word for word the concept that Freud would subsequently present in 1920 in Jenseits der Lustprincips [Beyond the Pleasure Principal, 1920g)]. He believes that she did so in what is her by far most famous paper, „Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens" ["Destruction as the Cause of Becoming"] (Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche Psychoanalyse, No. 4, 1912, pp. 465-503). Here is what Freud himself has to say about this issue:

"In a work that is rich in content and ideas, which regrettably were not totally clear to me, Sabina Spielrein has anticipated a considerable portion of this speculation [that about the existence of the death "instinct"]. She characterizes as 'destructive' the sadistic component of the sexual drive [die Sexualtriebe] (destruction as a cause of creation)."

On November 29, 1911 Spielrein presented a portion of this article at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In a footnote to the minutes of this meeting, which were taken by no other than Otto Rank himself, Herman Nunberg states:

"Initially it seems that under Jung's influence Dr. Spielrein has developed well before Freud the hypothesis according to which the instinctual life (see Beyond the Pleasure Principal) consists of two opposed drives - the life drive and the death drive. However, if one examines the matter more closely, one sees that she does not express this theory at all, but rather the theory that the sexual drive, the creative drive - contains a destructive element."

Carotenuto's response to Nunberg's assertion is to reject it as "timid, " something even Nunberg's enemies would not accuse him of being and quotes the following passage from Spielrein's article in defense of his own position:

"… The instinct of procreation contains even when considered from a psychological point of view and consequently from biological facts, two antagonistic components, and that it then constitutes as much as an instinct of life, an instinct of destruction."

In my own opinion, "the instinct of procreation" is just another name for the sexual "drives" (die Sexualtriebe). If one accepts this premise, the notion that it "contains … two antagonistic components, and "that it then constitutes as much as an instinct of life, an instinct of destruction" is completely in accord with Nunberg's interpretation. Moreover, Rank seems to support this interpretation when in his account of Spielrein's presentation he writes:

Dr. Spielrein attempted to prove that the component of death is contained in the sexual instinct itself: a destructive component is in the same time inherent in this instinct, component indispensable to the process of creation [italics are mine].

In the same discussion Spielrein herself states that "in her eyes the sexual drive is a particular case of the drive towards transformation," a statement that has a very Jungian ring to it. It is worth pointing out that, in this discussion, Freud criticizes Spielrein for having attempted "in opposition to our psychological conception … to found drive theory on biological premises (such as the conservation of the species) [italics are mine]."

In his review of Spielrein's article that also appeared in the Zeitschrift (I. Jahrgang 1913, pp. 92-93), an article which Carotenuto characterizes as "a positive critique," my own grandfather, Paul Federn, a pioneer in the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenia, quotes a passage from her work, which summarizes her argument thus:

"… 'Contrary to the instinct of self-preservation, which is a simple instinct, limited to a positive element,' the instinct of the conservation of the species, which is required to destroy the former being, before it can create the new one, is composed of a positive and a negative element, it is essentially ambivalent; it is for this reason that its positive component cannot exert its influence, without that at the same time, it also brings into play its negative component and conversely. The instinct of self-conservation is a 'static' instinct, to the degree that its role consists in protecting the individual, in its actual state, against all exterior influence, while the instinct of the conservation of the species is a 'dynamic instinct,' which has as its purpose the modification of the individual, his 'resurrection' under a new form. Well, now, no modification is able to take place without the destruction of its anterior state.

For Spielrein the destructive component of the instinct of procreation ultimately leads to creation, not to death and destruction as in Freud's death "drive." For instance, she quotes Richard Wagner, who has Brünhilde sing

"Not lands, not riches,
Not divine splendor,
Not home, not royal court,
Not princely luxury,
Not obscure associations,
Not lying treaty
Not false oath,
Not mad inflexibility,
Love only offers to those who love
To remain happy
In joy and misery!

Grane, my mount, I salute you!
Do you know where I lead you?
Below, where your heart, oh blessed Siegfried, oh my hero,
Bursting from the very center of the flames,
Rests. Is that then the one towards whom
You direct your joyous neighs?
Is that towards whom these flames of joy call you?
Feel then my breast, as it too burns!
I wish to embrace him, I wish to submerge myself in him,
I wish, with an invincible love, to unite with him.
Heioho, Grane! Salute this friend!
Siegfried, Siegfried! I salute you, blessed one!"

Spielrein's gloss on this text, a text which despite Wagner's anti-Semitism, at least I find extremely moving, is the following:

"Here, death is a true hymn to love. Brünhilde, so to say, is lost in Siegfried, who is fire, is the salvatory rays of the sun, and, by doing so, she returns to her original element, transforming herself into flames. For Wagner, death mostly is only the negative component of the instinct of life. Der fliegende Holländer [The Flying Dutchman] clearly demonstrates that such is the case. The protagonist will be saved as soon as he finds a woman, who will be faithful to him.

Perhaps the best presentation of Spielrein's argument was written over one hundred years before her article appeared, in 1807, by G. W. F. Hegel's in his famous preface to Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomenology of the Spirit].

"Similarly, the determination of the relation of one philosophical work with another treating the same subject introduces an unrelated interest and obscures what is important in the knowledge of the truth. As firmly as opinion establishes the opposition between true and false, it equally has to expect in addition either that one approves or that one contradicts a given philosophical system and only to see in a preliminary statement and explanation one of these two positions. It is less likely to see in the diversity of philosophical positions a progressive development of the truth than to see in this diversity only contradiction. The bud disappears in the blooming of the flower and one could say that it is refuted by this one in the same way as the fruit denounces flowering as the false existence of the plant and replaces the flower as its truth. Not only do these forms distinguish themselves from each other, they also suppress each other as mutually incompatible with each other. But, at the same time, their fluid nature also makes them the moments of an organic unity within which they not only do not clash but where the one is as necessary as the other, and it is this same necessity that only constitutes the whole of life. While, on the one side, the contradiction of a philosophical system is not accustomed to view itself in this way, and that on the other side, the consciousness, which comprehends generally does not know how to free this contradiction from its unilateral nature or to maintain this freedom, nor to recognize in the form of what seems conflictual and in contradiction with its own self so many mutually necessary moments."

In my humble opinion, if more individuals would take these thoughts of Hegel to heart, many of the controversies that have plagued depth psychology over the years would not have had to occur! In contrast to Spielrein's constructive "destructive" component of the sexual "drives" (die Sexualtriebe), Freud's death "drive" (der Todestrieb) only leads to destruction and death. A very important topic, which I do not believe has been adequately addressed is what benefits the death "drive" brings to the individual. At least part of the reason why I make this statement is that it has been my experience that the death drive hardly is ever brought up when one is discussing why the treatment of an individual has failed, and such is particularly the case when one is discussing the treatment of persons suffering from schizophrenia.

At any rate, the best characterization of Freud's death drive is to be found in a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik [The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music], which Otto Rank used as the motto for the book of his which although it was dedicated to Freud marked the beginning of Rank's break with him, Das Trauma der Geburt [The Trauma of Birth]:

"According to ancient legend, for a long time, King Midas pursues aged Silenus, companion of Dionysus, in the forest without ever being able to catch him. When he finally succeeds at doing so, the king demanded that he tells him what was the thing that human beings ought to prefer more to all other and ought to value above all. Rigid and obstinate, the demon remained mute, until finally, compelled by his conqueror, he suddenly began to laugh loudly and let escape these words: "ephemeral and miserable race, child of accident and pain, why do you force me to reveal to you what it would be better for you never to know? What you ought to prefer the most, this is impossible: it is not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But, next to this, the best that you are able to desire, this is to die quickly."

Res ipse loquitur!

However, there is at least one passage in Spielrein's article, which, seems to talk about something that is very similar to Freud's death drive. It is for this reason that I began my discussion of this matter by saying that the answer to whether or not Spielrein anticipated Freud's discovery of the death drive is not a simple one. This is the passage.

"To the extent that it is indeed the motivation of our conscious and unconscious the personality, which we seek, it seems to me that Freud is correct in making the principle of seeking pleasure and suppressing displeasure as the foundation of all psychic production. From this perspective, one will say that pleasure returns to some infantile sources. But one can raise the question of whether or not our entire psychic life can be reduced to this life of the personality: do we not contain some instinctual forces capable of motivating our psyche independent of all the sensations of pleasure or pain which our the personality is able to find there? Do the classic fundamental instincts, the instinct of self-preservation and the instinct of the of the conservation of the species play the same role for the totality of the psychic life as it does for the personality alone, that is to say, are they absolutely the origin of all pleasure and displeasure? It is my conviction that the psyche of the personality, including its unconscious aspects, finds itself subject to some sentiments whose cause is much more profound, and is totally unconcerned by how, emotionally, we respond to their injunctions. The personality truly obtains pleasure from obeying these profound injunctions, and so we immediately are able to take pleasure from a trouble or suffering, which, in themselves, only comprise a violent displeasure; all suffering is in effect an attack, which is made against the individual, and the role of the instinct of self-preservation is precisely to protect the individual from such attacks. So, there is something at the very core of the individual, which, as paradoxical as it might seem, motivates them to injure themselves, which makes them take pleasure in doing so. Such a desire for suffering and pain remains absolutely incomprehensible, if one only considers the personality, which in effect pursues only pleasure."

However, when it is understood in context of Spielrein's entire paper, the "destruction" referred to in this passage is the same as the constructive "destruction," which is the theme of this paper. Although "destruction" is negative in that it "motivates [the individual] to injure themselves and makes them take pleasure in doing so," it ultimately is positive, because it leads to creation.

II. Sabina Spielrein's Successful but Complicated Treatment by C. G. Jung

Jung's treatment of Sabina Spielrein undoubtedly was successful. When Jung first encountered her, she was a patient in a psychiatric hospital in Swiss City of Zurich , the famous Burghölzli. When her treatment ended, she was a physician, who went on to become a psychoanalyst, though she did not, as one might expect, become a follower of Jung but rather of Freud. However in the course of her treatment Jung, and to a much lesser extent Freud, engaged in some very questionable behavior, which makes her recovery all the more remarkable. It is perfectly acceptable and, at least according to some schools of depth psychology, inevitable that at some time in their treatment the patient will fall in love with their therapist. However, it is quite another matter when the therapist not only falls in love with their patient but also communicates these feelings to their patient in a romantic way and may even become physically intimate with them. Such, unfortunately, was the case in Jung's treatment of Sabina Spielrein.

Sometime after she was released from Burghölzli and while she still was receiving outpatient treatment from Jung, she and Jung fell in love. Carotenuto believes that this relationship could not have begun until after Jung gave his paper, "The Freudian Theory of Hysteria" at the First International Congress of Psychiatrie and Neurology in September 1907, in Amsterdam, because, if for no other reason, it would have been in extremely bad taste to present a case study of the woman, whom he loved. It should be noted that Jung had been married to Emma Rauschenbach (1882-1955), the daughter of an industrialist, since 1903, and they already had had two children together, Agathe, born in 1904, and Grete, in 1906.

According to the letters, which Jung wrote Sabina Spielrein, the excitement had gone out of his marriage:

"You cannot imagine how much importance I attach to the hope to be able to love someone whom I am not obliged to condemn and who does not condemn themselves to be suffocated by the banality of habit [Emma Jung?]."

"My misfortune is that I am not able to live without the happiness of a love, which is passionate and eternally changing."

"Now give me in return a little of the love, of the involvement and selflessness, which I showed at the time that you were ill. Now, it is I, who am ill."

And finally,

"I notice that I am much more attached to you than I ever would have thought. I am otherwise terribly distrustful and I always imagine that others wish to use or tyrannize me. It is with great difficulty that I myself am able to believe in the natural goodness of the human beings, which I encounter. Which, of course, does not apply to you!"

All these passages were written, when Jung was still Sabina Spielrein's therapist!

According to Carotenuto, she opened to Jung the world of feelings, of deeply moving love, outside of a bourgeois hypocrisy, which forces men and women to live eternally in humiliating falsehood. She appears to be a woman for whom love is not a calculation, not a demand for promises, which already were broken when the are made, a Dionysiac woman full of forgiveness and understanding, who is able to give Jung a boost in his spiritual growth. All this, of course, while still remaining his patient!

However, Sabina Spielrein soon found herself in the same situation that many other persons, who are romantically involved with someone who is married sooner or later find themselves in. Although Jung could not live without her, he also could not divorce his wife. The situation was even more frustrating for Sabina Spielrein, as it is for many others who find themselves in her position, because Jung apparently continually complained about how unhappy his marriage made him. Moreover, he preached polygamy to her and exalted the freedom that it brought. Later, Jung would blame his espousal of this position on the influence of another patient he was treating!

What brought the matter to its dénouement was an anonymous letter to Sabina Spielrein's parents back in Russia , informing them about what was transpiring between their daughter and her analyst. Sabina Spielrein herself suspected that Jung's wife wrote it. Her parents immediately contacted Jung and demanded an explanation. Jung's immediate response to Sabina Spielrein's mother was strange to say the least. Moreover, he must have known that his patient, Sabina Spielrein, would learn of its contents.

He wrote that he was under no obligation to satisfy the sexual needs of her daughter and wished to be rid of both her and her sexual claims. As if this was not bad enough, he then goes on to explain to Sabina Spielrein's mother what the difference is between the patient/doctor relationship and friendship. While in the latter there are practically no limits, in the former

"the patient has the right and is in the position to expect from their doctor all the love and all the attention, which they require. The doctor, on the other hand, knows their limits and will never exceed them, because they are paid for their efforts. And this imposes upon them a necessary limitation. This is why I propose to you, in order that I would not have to abandon my role of physician since this is what you wish, that you send me monetary compensation for my efforts on behalf of your daughter. In this way you will be absolutely certain that in all circumstances I will fulfill my obligations as a physician [emphasis by Carotenuto]."

In all fairness to Jung, it should be noted that later, in a letter to Freud, he characterized this communication as due to his "stupidity." One can make whatever judgment that one likes about Jung's character, and here I am thinking also about his flirtation with Nazi ideology, when the Nazis first took power in Germany . He characterized Freudian psychoanalysis as a "Jewish science" and made at least one favorable reference to Hitler in his writings of that period.

However, he must have been one hell of a therapist! Sabina Spielrein had spent almost a year in a psychiatric hospital. Herman Nunberg stated that she had suffered a psychotic episode, when they both had been studying medicine together. Unlike many analysts who were his contemporaries, and who had little or no direct clinical experience treating patients suffering from psychosis, he had worked for some years in various Swiss and Austrian psychiatric institutions, before moving to Vienna in 1914 and joining the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Therefore, he was in an excellent position to make a correct diagnosis of psychosis.

However, Sabina Spielrein not only managed to weather the break up of her romantic relationship with Jung, but she went on to become a prominent psychoanalyst, even though now, as is the case with numerous seminal thinkers in the field, the name of István Hollós, the author of Hinter der gelben Mauer [Behind the Yellow Wall] is the one that comes most readily to mind, she is largely unknown to anyone besides a specialist in the early history of psychoanalysis. In one of his essays, Bruno Bettelheim even has gone so far as to argue that if there had not been a romantic relationship between Jung and Sabina Spielrein, her treatment would not have been as effective as it in fact was. For the sake of completeness, I think here I should quote Freud's famous warning

to Sandor Ferenzci not

"to accept as being part of psychoanalytic technique the entire repertoire of the demi-vierge and parties involved in groping, which will have for effect that to bring about a substantial increase in the interest in psychoanalysis that is much greater among the analysts than among their patients."

Now, I want to devote some space to Freud's role in this matter. Early in their seven-year correspondence, Freud wrote Jung that

"… our cures occur thanks to fixation of a libido pervading the Unconscious (transference) … It is in fact a cure by love. So, there is in the transference the strongest proof, therefore the most unassailable that the neuroses are dependent upon the love life of the individual."

He also was keenly aware of the challenge that an erotic transference posed for the analyst:

"It is true that it never has happened to me, but I have come close to it several times and I have had a "narrow escape" [original in English] … This is not harmful in any way. So, we grow thick skin that is required of us."

"The grandest natural spectacle is that of the capacity of these women to become charming through the acquisition of every psychological perfection imaginable."

If taken literally, the second passage is clearly sexist. However, it has considerable clinical validity, when applied to patients of both sexes. I am the personally aware of one instance where an analyst, who at least thought he was heterosexual became sexually involved with male patient of his who happened to be gay.

Even before Sabina Spielrein contacted Freud, because she wanted to consult him about her relationship with Jung, Freud knew from Jung's letters to him that Jung was having a great deal of difficulty with a female patient.

For instance:

"A patient whom I have saved in the past from a very serious neurosis by immense devotion, and who has betrayed my trust in the most hurtful manner that one could imagine. She has caused a nasty scandal, only because I have deprived myself of the pleasure of conceiving a child by her."

However, Freud did not know the actual name of this patient. Moreover, the content of Spielrein's initial letter to Freud was written in such a way as to make it impossible for Freud to connect its author with the female patient of Jung about whom they had been corresponding, especially since the letter he had received from Spielrein contained the sentence, "you too have put me in an awkward position. However, when Freud asked Jung if he knew anything about the matter, he learned the truth of Jung's romantic involvement with her.

Initially, Freud sided totally with Jung

"Dr. Jung is my friend and my collaborator; may I also add that I know his character and I am correct in supposing that he would be incapable of acting rashly or in a shabby manner … But if I may be permitted to give you some advice … I would urge you to undertake some self-examination in order that you would learn if the feelings which have survived this relationship would not merit for example to be suppressed or displaced, in your own psyche, of course, and without any external intervention, without an appeal to a third party."

In addition, to his discredit, Freud, in the letter from which the above passage is taken, acted as if he had not queried Jung about the matter. He even boasts to Jung that he had acted "wholly naïve," in this communication to Sabina Spielrein.

However, as he obtained more and more details from Jung about his relationship with Sabina Spielrein, he gradually began to see this very unfortunate situation more and more from her perspective. They went on to develop a warm friendship, which only was marred by Freud's insistence that her decision to remain friends with Jung was a "neurotic attachment." For instance he wrote her:

"My personal relationship to your German hero has ended once and for all. His behavior towards me has been too awful. Since your first letter to me, my judgment about him has changed greatly."

It is to Sabina Spielrein's great credit that she also continued to maintain a close friendship with Jung, even though at first the end of their romantic relationship upset her so deeply that she felt compelled to contact Freud as I have already noted. For example, after his break with Freud, Jung wrote her that

"I was totally discouraged when all this happened to me, when I first became certain that Freud never would understand me and when he subsequently ended his relationship with me. He wishes to give me love, I desire comprehension. I wish to be his equal in our friendship, but he wishes that I would be his son. This is why he considers everything that I did and which did not fit into the framework of his life as an action motivated by a complex."

In view of the above, it is interesting to read what Jung wrote Freud five years earlier, when their close friendship was just beginning.

"The unexpected gift of your friendship signifies for me a certain summit of my life … The evolution of your friendship with Fliess, which certainly is no secret causes me to ask you not to let me savor your friendship as an equal but rather as that of a father to a son [emphasis by Aldo Carotenuto].

Spielrein also continued her scientific collaborate with him, even though she considered herself as a follower of Freud and was a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association. She felt that the differences between the ideas of Jung and Freud were less significant than the similarities between them, a notion, which I share with her. In order to demonstrate this fact she once sent Freud a letter that Jung had written her with her own annotations in its margins. She also felt that the psychological theories of Adler and Freud could be reconciled as well, because she had come to the conclusion that the "instinct" of self-conservation instead of being opposed to the "instinct" of the conservation of the species stemmed from it. It is hardly surprising that neither Freud nor Jung agreed with her.

The critique that Jung made about Freudian psychoanalysis, which I regard as an incorrect one, nevertheless is well worth repeating, because it is extremely applicable to neuroscience, which currently holds such a fascination for those studying the human mind. Echoing the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Jung warns that it is dangerous to confuse the knowledge of cause and effect with all human knowledge. Such confusion is all the more dangerous in the field of depth psychology, because the human personality is irreducible to causality or, to put this matter in another way, there is a profound difference between meaning and causality.

III. Was Sabina Spielrein the Analyst of Jean Piaget?

The accepted wisdom is that Sabina Spielrein was the analyst of Jean Piaget. However, I myself have not been able to find any proof of this assertion, beyond that she was living and working in Switzerland when Piaget's analysis occurred, in 1921. As Carotenuto notes, Piaget makes no mention of his analysis in his autobiography. In one interview about the subject, Piaget attributes to his analyst a number of characteristics, which could indicate that this person was not Sabina Spielrein. Moreover, in another interview about the same subject, he identifies his analyst as a certain De La Fuente, who according to him had been trained by Freud himself, while Spielrein had not been.

IV. Were Sabina Spielrein and her daughter, Renata murdered by the Nazis?

According to Carotenuto, there are no further traces of Sabina Spielrein after 1937, when her name still appeared on the roster of the Russian Psychoanalytic Association. In the twenties she had returned to Russia and had settled in Rostov on the Don, the city of her birth. According to Michael Guibal and Jacques Nobécourt, members of l'École freudienne de Paris, "fondée, dirigée et dissoute par Jacques Lacan" ["founded, directed and dissolved by Jacques Lacan"] she disappeared during the massive Stalinist purges of the late 1930s. These purges involved, among other things, the murder of every officer of the Red Army with the rank of general. They were motivated by Stalin's theory of statecraft, "death solves all problems - no man, no problem," which caused him to sign countless death lists. On December 8, 1938 , alone, he signed thirty of them containing five thousand names, many of them those of his so-called friends. Stalin was in his own way as anti-Semitic as his fellow psychopath, Adolf Hitler, and also at that time psychoanalysis was rejected by so-called "orthodox Marxism" as a "bourgeois science." It is hardly likely that Sabina Spielrein, who was both a Jew and a senior practitioner of psychoanalysis could have survived these purges. She would have been either shot outright, if she were lucky or sent to the gulag were she would have been starved, frozen or worked to death. Her daughter probably would have experienced a similar fate, since, like the Colombian drug lords, Stalin preferred to destroy the entire families of those who evoked his distrust. The image of Sabina Spielrein being killed by some NKVD thugs is more than I can bear!

V. Sabina Spielrein's Theory of Schizophrenia

We have now come to what probably will prove to be the most interesting part of this perhaps too lengthy communication. In her article "Destruction as the Cause of Becoming" [„Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens"] Sabina Spielrein rejects Freud's assertion that dementia praecox conceals a phenomenon consisting of first the retreat of the libido, then its return and finally a conflict between both actions. Her opinion, on the contrary, is that dementia praecox is rather a matter of a conflict between two opposed currents of mental activity, that of the psyche of the self and that of the psyche of the species.

"The second wishes to reduce the representation of the self to one that is typical and impersonal. The psyche of the self then reacts against such dissolution by connecting the affective value of the complex, which is in the process of disappearing to some secondary association to which the self attaches itself (inadequate affect). The patients themselves perceive that the affective value does not correspond anymore with the representation to which it has been linked, that they only 'imitate' the previous affect. So, one observes quite often that they at the same time mock themselves for their own emotionality and view their illness only as a comedy that they stage."

According to Spielrein, who here cites the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, the self is something perfectly inconsistent, nothing more than an ephemeral constellation of sensations, which, themselves, are eternal. She also cites Jung, whose viewpoint she considers similar to that of Mach, for whom the psyche is composed of a multitude of individual entities. Underlying this viewpoint, is the notion, "of the autonomy of the complex," over which the self does not hold sway necessarily. As a result, they constantly struggle against each other to achieve supremacy with the self acting as a sort of referee.

Sabina Spielrein considers that the best confirmation of Jung's ideas is the mental activity of those persons, who have the misfortune of suffering from schizophrenia. They are so much under the control of their isolated complexes, which are separated from the self, that they consider their own unconscious desires, so to say harmful beings, capable of taking life. Her patient [the one who was the subject of Sabina Spielrein's doctoral dissertation] calls such desires "conjectures." During her analysis the patient says, 'the conjecture very well could be able to find fulfillment, in order to manifest its right to existence.'

In an extremely insightful passage Sabina Spielrein goes on to state

"… the characteristic principal of the individual is that they are someone, who is 'separated from others.' The more we engage in conscious thought, the more our representations are differentiated and, inversely, the more we sink into the unconscious, the more our representations, become general, typical. The most profound part of our psyche does not recognize "I, myself" any more, does not recognize their summation any more, the "we," or let us rather say that the actual self is considered only as an object, dependent upon other similar objects. So, in the course of a trephination, the person who has had the operation although gradually losing all self-consciousness at the same time as the sensibility to pain, nevertheless is able to continue to receive some impressions from the external world, to the extent that he began to cry "Enter!" when the surgeon attacked his cranium. He then continued indeed to perceive his cranium, but under the aspect of an object exterior to the self, apparently, that of a room."

Sabina continues her exposition thus:

"So, one witnesses the objectivization of diverse parts of the self. In the following example, it is, on the contrary, the entire self, which finds itself objectified. My patient [again the one who was the subject of Sabina Spielrein's doctoral dissertation] has informed me that, under the effects of anesthesia, she no longer has been able to feel the pain caused by the operation to the point that she believes herself able to minister to the sufferings of wounded soldiers, whom she pitied with all her heart. … pain presumes a representation of the self already differentiated, isolated, I add, particularly linked to the consciousness of the self. It is a known fact, that the pity originates from that one substitutes oneself in thought for the suffering the self.

Well now, what precisely strikes one in the cases of dementia praecox where the representations of the self are transformed into the representations of objects or of species, this is an inadequate affective reaction, the indifference; this disappears when we are able to reestablish the relationship to the self, who for example will say to the patient 'I have been soiled by the sexual act,' rather than 'the earth has been soiled by the urine.' In my opinion, it is there that one finds the sense of the symbolic expression. The symbol in effect signifies the same thing as the painful representation that it translates, but its form is less differentiated, less individualized: the representation 'a woman' contains many more possible realizations, these only being connected to a very general realization, than the individual representation 'Martha N,' which is much more precisely determined. … The hysteria, which is a case of the hypertrophy of the self, increases the patient's sensibility greatly.

Nevertheless, it would be without a doubt completely false to attribute a richer psychic life to hysterical patients than to patients suffering from dementia praecox: it is in effect in these later cases that one encounters the most significant thoughts. The sole consequence of the restricted activity of the self, which characterizes this illness, is that all thought is archaic, analogous."

Here is how Sabina Spielrein describes the schizophrenic process.

"The illness' onsets are often accompanied by depressive states, by profound anxiety, because the standardization of the diverse parts [of their mental life] that have emotional value for the self are experienced as an obstacle to their need for an individual relation to things, to their need to integrate themselves into the present. The patient finds themselves in a situation in which the emotional attachments of the past have not disappeared totally, while the exterior objects already are escaping all relation to the self. Then one has the feeling that the world is changed, it is now terribly strange, like a scene in the theater, and at the same time, one starts to think that one also is perfectly estranged from oneself. Thoughts are depersonalized, they seem to the patient as an 'imitation,' precisely because they stem from some innermost depths [of their human soul] which escape the self, from some depths, which already have made out of the 'I' a 'we,' or rather a 'they.' The affect that still exists no longer finds an object, only can express itself in a pathetic way, in the manner of an orator who, lacking the corresponding representations, expresses this affect directly. The anxiety persists as long as any remaining affect causes the patient, who then still feels the need for an individual relation to things, to feel that their self ([now] a peculiar power) is ruined; as the illness progresses this anxiety, will relinquish its place to that indifference, which is so familiar: such patients are no longer concerned about anything, and even if they continue to say 'I,' in doing so they none the less consider themselves to be simple objects, who lack a self and individual will.

… It can happen though that the patients experience truly adequate feelings, I have seen the proof of it on different occasions, where the direct relation, not a symbolic one, to the self is restored. But in the cases, which we see, the disturbance is clearly so advanced that the patient immediately lands back in an inadequate rapport to the world; the future will determine if psychoanalysis is able to accomplish anything significant in such cases.

Because this communication already is much too long and also because Sabina Spielrein's theory of schizophrenia easily stands on its own, I only will make one comment here. Not so long ago, I received a publicity leaflet from Yale-New Haven Hospital . Among other things, it stated that "ongoing research suggests that identifying which people are likely to develop schizophrenia and then treating them appropriately can prevent or delay full-blown psychotic episodes." Well, if one uses just a modicum of imagination in reading between the lines of the Sabina Spielrein passage, which I just have quoted, you easily can see that she already was aware of this fact in 1912!

I now would like to present another passage, this time one which summarizes what according to Sabina Spielrein constitutes the outcome of the schizophrenic process.

"So, the weakening of the feelings of pleasure and of displeasure does not engender the extinction of all psychic life: certainly, the need for differentiation and the realization of one's own personal desires decreases, but, on the contrary, one witnesses a phenomenon of the assimilation of differentiated individual representations to archaic representations which have formed some entire cultures, this is to say to a phenomenon of the dissolution of individual representations, and of their transformation into typical representations, common to the entire species. Such representations from which entire peoples are formed, and which do not possess an affective reach anymore, teach us about the exact content of our instinctive impulses. The self only seeks its pleasure, but the psyche of the species teaches us what we really seek thereby, what truly calls forth from us a positive or negative affect: we then realize that the desires which come to us from the species do not correspond absolutely to the desires which come to us from the self, and that the psyche of the species wishes to integrate the more recent psyche of the self, while the self, each fragment of the self, tries hard to conserve itself in its current form (the force of inertia). The psyche of the species which, thus, asserts itself as the negation of the current self, at the same time regenerates it through this very negation, because the fragment of the self which has been swallowed up will reappear in some new representations, more richly adorned than ever."

You probably already have noticed it yourself, but for the sake of completeness I should like to point out that at the end of this passage Sabina Spielrein takes a much more optimistic view of the outcome of the schizophrenic process than she did at the end of the previous one.

Needless to say, I have found this article by Sabina Spielrein to be a remarkable piece of work. As I already have mentioned, Jung held her intellectual capacities in very high regard, and he did so even before he developed, at least consciously, romantic feelings for her. When Jung paid her the compliment of expressing his surprise over the similarities of the second part of his Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, with the work of hers discussed immediately above Sabina Spielrein became afraid that she had stolen his ideas without intending to do so. Incidentally, it was the second part of this work, which Jung believed led to his eventual break with Freud. Jung attempted to reassure her by writing: "the work is extremely intelligent and contains some ideas for which I voluntarily concede priority to you."

Curiously, Jung gives a much different opinion of this work to Freud:

"Just before my departure, I received the article by Spielrein. It is necessary to say about it: 'desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne' ['What at the top is a superb-looking woman, ends up being a fish,' Horace, De arte poetica, 4.] … She has not read enough and becomes dull, because she does not get to the bottom of things ... as for the rest the article is conditioned strongly by the complex [emphasis by Carotenuto]."

You are, of course, free to draw your own conclusions about this disparity. However, I think that Jung made these comments because he had to denigrate, at least to Freud, the work of a woman, who not only had succeeded in ending a romantic relationship with him, but who also had chosen to join the group around Freud rather than remain solely under Jung's own intellectual influence. According to Michael Guibal and Jacques Nobécourt, Jung then became romantically involved with another female patient of his, Antonia "Toni" Wolff, who, at the age of twenty-one, was referred to him for treatment, because she was suffering from a severe depression occasioned by the death of her father.

Unlike Sabina Spielrein, Toni Wolff never left Jung's side until his death, and also unlike in the case of Sabina Spielrein, Emma Jung eventually accepted Toni Wolff's romantic relationship with her husband. Jungians consider her as the very young woman close to the old sage, as the Salomé of Elijah, as the companion of his dramatic "encounter with the Unconscious," which he undertook in the solitude that followed his rupture with Freud and, finally, as the incarnation of eternal youth and the support of the Anima. Curiously, Jung makes no mention of her in the autobiography, which he wrote at the end of his life.

Incidentally, the same also is true of Sabina Spielrein.

Now, I finally have come to the end of my communication about what a remarkable person Sabina Spielrein was. I hope that whoever reads it will come to the same conclusion about her and her scientific work as I have.