Despite her success as a psychoanalyst, Sabina Spielrein did not get along well with her colleagues in Geneva due to differences over how psychoanalysis was being taught. She continued to correspond with Freud until 1923 (her last known letter to Jung was in 1919) and it was at Freud's suggestion that she move to Moscow rather than to Berlin as she had originally planned. In that same year, she returned to Russia to visit relatives and colleagues and quietly took a new position at the Moscow Psychoanalytic Institute. Although the changes brought on by the Bolshevik Revolution made life more difficult, her Moscow career flourished for a time and she held posts as director of child psychology at First Moscow University and as pedagogic medical consultant to the Psychoanalytic School of Moscow. She was also one of the leading lights of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society which brought her into contact with other prominent Russian intellectuals such as Aleksandr Luria and Lev Vigotskii. It also meant a reunion with her husband and daughter and they lived for a time in a student residence in the heart of Moscow. That reunion was likely awkward at first considering that she and her husband had been apart for many years and he had already had a child with another woman during their separation.
Psychoanalysis in Russia already had a turbulent history but its influence was strongest between 1921 and 1923. The Moscow Psychoanalytic Institute was established in 1922 under the direction of Moshe Wulff with Spielrein joining the staff full-time in 1923. She then became involved with an ambitious new project in children's learning known as the Detski Dom Laboratory (which also became known as the White Nursery due to the all-white furniture used). 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. Along with Schmidt's own son, the school had children from prominent Bolsheviks (including Josef Stalin, whose son Vasilii was enrolled as well). Use of discipline was avoided and children were allowed maximum freedom of movement. Sexual exploration and curiosity was also permitted (which is likely what provoked the eventaul crackdown on the school). The school was closed in 1925 following allegations of pornography and sexual abuse.
Since psychoanalysis was a special interest of Leon Trotsky, shifting politics ensured that the psychoanalytic movement didn't long survive Trotsky's downfall in late 1923. Given the worsening status of psychoanalysts in Moscow and partly motivated by the birth of her second daughter, Renata, in 1925, Spielrein and her husband decided to return to Rostov-on-Don where she opened a child psychoanalytic nursery. Although she attempted to remain active in the international psychoanalytic movement and taught at the local university, her last formal publication would be in 1931. By 1936, psychoanalysis was formally banned by Stalin across the entire Soviet Union and she lost her university position. The years of terror following Stalin's rise to absolute power took a heavy toll on Spielrein and her family. Among the victims of Stalin's various purges were her husband and her brother Isaac (a prominent psychologist in hs own right).
There is little available documentation on Sabina Spielrein during this final period of her life. Relatives described her as being a solitary figure, very intense with a puritanical appearance, dressed in old clothes since she preferred to spend little money on herself despite working long hours in her practice. Her tragic story came to an end with the Nazi occupation of her town during World War II. Despite being driven out of the area once previously, the Nazis managed to retake Rostov-on-Don in the summer of 1942 for an extended period of time. During the months that they held Rostov, the Nazis targeted the Jewish residents of the city, which included Spielrein and her two daughters. The last known sighting of the three of them was in a column of Jews being herded by the Einsatzgruppen towards the Zmeyevsky gully where they were all shot. Nothing more is known about her fate although the house where she lived and saw patients is still standing.
Although Sabina Spielrein was largely forgotten after her death, the story of her relationship with Jung resurfaced in 1977 when Aldo Carotenuto, a Jungian psychoanalyst at the University of Rome, discovered some long-lost documents in the former headquarters of the Geneva Institute of Psychology. The documents had been written by Spielrein during her time in Geneva and she had apparently left them behind fwhen she returned to her native country. The papers included a series of letters that both Freud and Jung had written to her as well as her personal diary and copies of the letters that she had written to them. Carotenuto published the letters in his 1982 book, A Secret Symmetry, and highlighted the intimate nature of Spielrein's relationship with Jung and the significant role that she had played in developing early psychoanalysis. In his 1992 book, A Dangerous Method, John Kerr explores the complex relationship between Spielrein, Jung, and Freud even further. In what he described as "an unusually gruesome ghost story", Kerr examined the reasons for the estrangement between Jung and Freud and why both of them neglected to give Sabina Spielrein proper credit for her psychoanalytic contributions.
Will new revelations about Sabina Spielrein (not to mention the Cronenberg movie) help restore her to her rightful place as one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis? Time will tell.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.