Happy Ada Lovelace Day! As my contribution to this international effort, I submit the following story:
David Cronenberg's new film, A Dangerous Method, planned for release this year, delves into the early years of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, their joint contributions to psychoanalysis and some of the complex reasons behind their eventual estrangement. His film also promises to cast a new light on a long-forgotten pioneer of psychoanalysis, the controversial Sabina Spielrein.
Many of Freud's early female supporters, including Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, and Margaret Mahler often chafed under Freud's male-dominated view of psychoanalysis. For most of them, their own contributions only become possible when they broke away from the orthodox Freudian model. While Anna Freud was also a prominent psychoanalyst, her determination to uphold her father's theories prevented her from developing her own unique perspective.
As for Sabina Spielrein, she took a most unorthodox route to becoming a psychoanalyst in her own right. Born on November 7 1885 to a prominent Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, Sabina Spielrein was a highly intelligent and lively woman who apparently developed emotional problems stemming from the death of her sister in 1901. After travelling to Switzerland to study medicine (which wasn't possible for a woman in her native Russia), her symptoms worsened and she was later diagnosed with hysteria (a common diagnostic label for women mental patients of the time). On August 17, 1904, she was admitted to the Burgholzi Clinic in Zurich, Switzerland following a "great commotion" at a local hotel where she had been staying as a guest. Whatever the nature of the commotion, she was placed in the clinic by a police medical doctor and her own uncle although she insisted that she was not insane, simply that she could not stand "people or noise". According to surviving records, Spielrein was behaving very strangely on intake, including "laughing and crying in a strange mixture, sticking out her tongue, jerking her legs, and complaining of a headache". She needed several days to become used to the hospital setting.
It was at the Burgholzi Clinic where she first met Carl Jung and became his patient. The exact nature of their relationship remains controversial and whether what appears to have been a love affair between them was ever actually consummated (Cronenberg's film assumes that she and Jung had been lovers). Jung had only recently read Freud's On The Interpretation of Dreams (published in 1900) and was impressed enough by the fledgling field of psychoanalysis to begin using it with his own patients. Sabina Spielrein was his first analysis patient and together they worked out radical new concepts that would become part of Jung's own theories of human psychology. By June of 1905, Sabina Spielren had been discharged from the Burgholzi and registered as a medical student at the University of Zurich. She continued as Jung's patient however and recurring rumours about their relationship was one of the reasons for Jung's resigning from Burgholzi in 1909.
By 1906, Jung began corresponding with Freud directly asking for advice in treating the "difficult" case involving the "Russian girl student" who was his patient. During their joint sessions together, Jung and Spielrein developed an intense emotional attraction towards one another which seemed to reach its peak between 1908 and 1911. Given the inappropriateness of the "countertransference" that had developed between them, both she and Jung wrote to Freud asking for advice and Jung broke off contact with her in 1909 to head off a potential scandal. While Spielrein requested a personal consultation with Freud, he declined and she continued with her own work in psychoanalysis. Her sessions with Jung resumed in 1911 after she asked his advice on her medical dissertation. By then, they seemed to have learned to channel their attraction towards one another into an intellectual partnership. Spielrein completed her dissertion in 1911 and she went to Vienna where she finally metFreud for the first time.
A month later, Sabina Spielrein presented her first theoretical paper "Destruction as the cause of coming into being" in which she presented the concept of a death instinct. Although Freud did not agree with Spielrein's ideas, Jung later incorporated her death instinct concept into his own theories. The death instinct was later credited to both Freud and Jung but it was Sabina Spielrein who developed it first. When she later expressed concern about Jung using her ideas without giving her proper credit, Jung reassured her as best he could and credited her as being "his" representative in Vienna. Spielrein also became closer to Freud and was eventually accepted into the Psychoanalytic Society based on her dissertation on schizophrenia. At the same time, she was married to a Russian Jewish doctor named Pavel Naumovitsch Scheftel on June 14, 1912. This was apparently a marriage arranged by her family and Spielrein chose to live in Vienna instead of Russia with her husband and newborn daughter, Irma. While she made frequent visits home, her surviving writings have virtually no mention of her husband and daughter and she seemed to devote all of her time and energy to continuing her relationship with Jung and Freud. As the two men became increasingly estranged, it was Sabina Spielrein who worked to heal their relationship until she eventually realized it was useless.
Over the following years, Spielrein worked as an analyst in numerous cities throughout France and Switzerland. While she still returned home when she could, World War I and the Russian Revolution in 1917 ensured that the new Soviet Union had become a very different place from the country she once knew and she preferred to remain abroad. Her restlessness seemed to be linked to her stormy relationship with Carl Jung who eventually cut off all ties with her despite the important role that she played in developing his theories. By 1920, she was working at the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva where she provided therapy to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. It wasn't a particularly successful therapeutic relationship since treatment was terminated after only eight months. Piaget was never a formal disciple of Freud but he and Spielrein were members of the Geneva Psychoanalytic Society and he entered into psychoanalysis as a "learning experience". In his own writings, Piaget described the "didactic analysis" that Spielrein provided. There are differing versions describing why the treatment was terminated and whether it was due to Piaget being "immune to the theory" or whether Spielrein simply decided that further treatment was unnecessary (perhaps a little of both).
Whatever their differences regarding psychoanalysis, both Sabina Spielrein and Jean Piaget shared an intense interest in child psychology. Although Piaget preferred to focus on cognitive processs underlying how a child learned language and formed ideas, Spielren stressed the role of subconscious thought as being the "principal mode of thinking". She advocated teaching methods that encouraged children to become more intuitive and favoured more subjective approaches to encouraging creativity. Piaget rejected what he termed "autistic thought" (including poetry and mysticism) and stressed the role of objective thought processes in learning. There were definite similarities in many of the ideas that they presented in their respective writings during that period but it took them in different directions despite the considerable impact that they had on one another.
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