Sabina Spielrein

Angela M. Sells

Description

Gold Winner for Psychology, 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards

Long stigmatized as Carl Jung's hysterical mistress, Sabina Spielrein (1885–1942) was in fact a key figure in the history of psychoanalytic thought. Born into a Russian Jewish family, she was institutionalized at nineteen in Zurich and became Jung's patient. Spielrein went on to earn a doctorate in psychiatry, practiced for over thirty years, and published numerous papers, until her untimely death in the Holocaust. She developed innovative theories of female sexuality, child development, mythic archetypes in the human unconscious, and the death instinct. In Sabina Spielrein, Angela M. Sells examines Spielrein's life and work from a feminist and mytho-poetic perspective. Drawing on newly translated diaries, papers, and correspondence with Jung and Sigmund Freud, Sells challenges the suppression of Spielrein's ideas and shows her to be a significant thinker in her own right.
List of Images
Introduction

1. Sabina Spielrein: A Life and Legacy Explored

2. Trauma, Transference, and Suppression: Sabina Spielrein and the Myth of Echo (and Narcissus)

3. An Affair Misremembered: Sabina Spielrein and the So-Called Love Cure

4. Writing as a Way of Coming into Being (Sabina Spielrein’s Diaries)

5. Sabina Spielrein in Academia: Destruction and Transformation

6. Sabina Spielrein’s Correspondence and Traps of the“Feminine”

7. Sabina Spielrein: Coming into Being

Afterword

Appendix A: Timeline for Sabina Spielrein as Reflected in Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth with Select Bibliography
Appendix B: Contributions to the Knowledge of a Child’s Soul
Appendix C: Sabina Spielrein in Image and on the Page
Appendix D: Images of Myths Mentioned

Notes
Bibliography
Copyright Acknowledgments
Index

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781438465807
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sabina Spielrein
Sabina Spielrein
The Woman and the Myth
Angela M. Sells
Cover Art: Katie Hoffman, Queen Mab and the Little Death , Oil on Canvas, 2009. © Katie Hoffman.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
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Printed in the United States of America
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
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Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sells, Angela M., 1987– author.
Title: Sabina Spielrein : the woman and the myth / Angela M. Sells.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016034116 (print) | LCCN 2016038874 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438465791 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438465807 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Spielrein, Sabina. | Women psychoanalysts—Europe—Biography. | Mentally ill women—Europe—Biography. | Psychoanalysis—History.
Classification: LCC RC440.82.S66 S45 2017 (print) | LCC RC440.82.S66 (ebook) | DDC 150.19/5092 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034116
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Sabina Spielrein, 1909 Photograph.
To all who encouraged and assisted me throughout the writing process. And to Dr. Sabina Spielrein, whose words inspired me in the first place.
Contents
List of Images
Introduction
Chapter 1. Sabina Spielrein: A Life and Legacy Explored
Chapter 2. Trauma, Transference, and Suppression: Sabina Spielrein and the Myth of Echo (and Narcissus)
Chapter 3. An Affair Misremembered: Sabina Spielrein and the So-Called Love Cure
Chapter 4. Writing as a Way of Coming into Being (Sabina Spielrein’s Diaries)
Chapter 5. Sabina Spielrein in Academia: Destruction and Transformation
Chapter 6. Sabina Spielrein’s Correspondence and Traps of the “Feminine”
Chapter 7. Sabina Spielrein: Coming into Being
Afterword
Appendix A: Timeline for Sabina Spielrein as Reflected in Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth with Select Bibliography
Appendix B: Contributions to the Knowledge of a Child’s Soul
Appendix C: Sabina Spielrein in Image and on the Page
Appendix D: Images of Myths Mentioned
Notes
Bibliography
Copyright Acknowledgments
Index
Images frontispiece Sabina Spielrein, 1909, Public Domain. Figure 1. Judith I (und der Kopf des Holofernes [and the head of Holofernes]). Gustav Klimt. 1901. Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. Public Domain. Figure 2. Judith II (Salome) . Gustav Klimt. 1909. Musei Civici Veneziani, Venice. Public Domain. Figure 3. Sabina Spielrein, ca. 1925, Public Domain. Figure 4. Sabina Spielrein, ca. 1909, Public Domain. Figure 5. Sabina Spielrein, ca. 1898, Public Domain. Figure 6. Sabina Spielrein’s Diagram of the Unconscious, 1917, Public Domain (See Tagebuch und Briefe , Kore: Verlag, 2003). Figure 7. Sabina Spielrein’s Letter to Freud, 1909, Public Domain (See Tagebuch und Briefe ). Figure 8. Sabina Spielrein’s Diagram of Introvert and Extravert. This diagram appears originally in the Kore Tagebuch publication of Spielrein’s unabridged diaries and correspondence (in German, p. 145) and is reproduced here. Figure 9. John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus , 1903, Public Domain. Figure 10. John Duncan, Tristan and Isolde , 1912, Public Domain. Figure 11. Charles Ernest Butler, Siegfried and Brunnhilde , 1909, Public Domain. Figure 12. Frederick Marryat, The Phantom Ship, 1847, Public Domain. Figure 13. Persephone and Hades: tondo of an Attic red-figured kylix, ca. 440 BC. Public Domain, CreativeCommons. Figure 14. John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott , 1888, Public Domain. Figure 15. W. E. F. Britton, The Lady of Shalott , 1901, Public Domain.
Introduction
And what about the noble idea of my youth—to roam the earth surrounded by students like the ancient Greek philosophers, while teaching my students in harmony with nature [and] the great outdoors?
—Sabina Spielrein, 28 August 1909
W ho was Sabina Spielrein? Clearly, with the release of the 2011 film, A Dangerous Method— based in part on the fictionalized play The Talking Cure by Christopher Hampton—the story of Sabina Spielrein is still stirring in collective consciousness, though the scope has been greatly limited. Outside of the current cultural trend of presenting Spielrein solely as C. G. Jung’s patient and mistress, relatively little has been written (in English) on her academic contributions to the field of psychology. Additionally, Spielrein’s professional and personal writing proves profoundly important not only to psychology, but also to the fields of mythology and literary autobiography, and to the larger psychosocial concerns of gender equity and female suppression.
Accordingly, I explore from the kaleidoscope lens of mythology, psychology, and gender studies the life, early academic publications, and personal diaries and correspondence of Dr. Sabina Spielrein, one of the first female psychoanalysts in history. Spielrein (1885–1942) was institutionalized at the age of nineteen at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zurich, Switzerland, where she became a patient of C. G. Jung from 1904–05, and where, subsequently, the two engaged in an intimate relationship. However, instead of examining Spielrein as a “patient” of, or “mistress” to Jung, I attempt to see beyond this pathologizing and analyze her contributions to the field on their own merit.
Indeed, after healing from a period of trauma, Spielrein enrolled in the University of Zurich, completed her doctorate in psychiatry, and formed her own philosophical and psychological insights about female sexuality, the “death instinct,” and child psychology. Her professional career continued for more than thirty years after her split from Jung; in a 1911 diary entry, she felt precious, determined, and confident of her vocation, which diverged from the “traditional” female role: “I resist, because I have something noble and great to accomplish and am not made for the mundane. It is a struggle between life or death.” 1 She also helped to establish psychoanalysis in her native Russia, where she practiced as a teacher and analyst until her untimely death during the Holocaust in 1942.
Yet what has been written about her has predominately been from a clinical perspective and myopically focuses on her affair with Jung. Contrary to this, I argue that the affair was not a “romance,” but instead a relationship built upon unequal power dynamics as well as a breach of professional trust. History has also stigmatized Spielrein as mentally ill, maligning her with labels such as “schizo,” “seductress,” “Jewess,” and “hysteric.” However, leading cultural critic Elaine Showalter agrees: “Hysteria is no longer a question of the wandering womb; it is a question of the wandering story, and of whether that story belongs to the hysteric, the doctor, the historian, or the critic. The stories of race and gender in hysteria still remain to be told.” 2 Paramount to any discussion about Spielrein is her constructed narrative (or existing mythos ) as maintained in recent scholarship, which has often used her “hysteria” as a weapon to discredit and devalue her academic work.
While I will examine Spielrein’s significant relationship with Jung as maintained in the scholarship surrounding them both, I will also examine her own perspective on the affair as it appears in her diaries and letters. I explore her words from mythopoetic and feminist perspectives, instead of solely on clinical or diagnostic terms; in other words, I underscore the literary, symbolic (mythic), and psychosocial aspects of her writing. Undoubtedly, by reducing Spielrein to the intrigue of pathology, a wellspring of emotionally charged philosophical inquiry and personal insight by a prominent female scholar in the history of depth psychology is denied a wide audience. What this means is: Spielrein’s diaries (and work) are less about Jung and more about her .
Her diaries and letters reveal her own transformational narrative as related to her personal and professional lives. She confronts such diverse topics as sexual desire, indigenous iconography, animal symbolism, death, and love. Therefore, her writing is interpreted both in relation to the history of depth psychology, as well as significant to the study of autobiography and female expression. Through these interpretations, I hope to link Spielrein’s writing to the literary line of such profound women writers and confessional poets as H.D., Anaïs Nin, and Sylvia Plath. Apropos, the notion of “madness,” and specifically female madness, will be examined in relation to Spielrein’s history.
What did Sabina Spielrein offer to psychoanalysis in the early stages of its development, and are these insights relevant or even correct today? A number of questions follow from this initial query: What was her experience in the early years of psychoanalysis? What consequences did her personal life have o