THE UNTOLD STORY OF SABINA SPIELREIN
New translation provides insights into a key patient—and analyst—in the history of psychoanalysis
BY HENRY ZVI LOTHANE 
Illustrations by Austin Hughes
IN APRIL OF 1905, a month before her discharge from the care of Carl Jung at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital, nineteen-year-old Sabina Spielrein visited the University of Zurich and contemplated a return to normal life and resumption of her studies. She wrote in her Russian diary:
I was at the university. I have a pile of impressions but no patience at all to describe it. I was particularly impressed with the professor of zoology. I was passionately interested but presently a reaction kicked in and my heart is heavy again! I cannot become friends with the students; I am closed off from them; what they will see is the cheerful, superficial side of my soul but its very depth will remain hidden from all. It is somehow impossible for me to open up to these children, I feel that I am much more solid, serious, critically developed, independent … But unfortunately, I’m still far from knowing whether I will be able to work scientifically: first, will my health permit it? And most importantly: will I be sufficiently capable? Meanwhile for me life without science is completely unthinkable. What else is left for me without science? To get married? But this thought fills me with dread … I want a good friend to whom I could bare every little trait of my soul … the love of an older man so that I would be loved in the way parents love and understand their child (spiritual affinity). However, between me and my parents it is as if nonexistent … Well, if only I were as wise as my precious Jung!
It is this passion for science that became a determining drive throughout Spielrein’s life, marking the start of the meteoric development of a sophisticated medical student into a mature pioneer of psychoanalysis.
Sabina Spielrein was the first child born in 1885 to dentist Eva Lublinskaya and merchant Nikolai Spielrein, followed by three brothers, Yan, Oskar, and Emil, and sister Emilia. Hers was a highly educated Jewish family that adopted the ideals of the Enlightenment and its Jewish counterpart, the Haskala, identifying themselves with Russian culture, language, and literature.
At age five the precocious Sabina was sent to a Fröbel children’s school in Warsaw, where her father’s family lived, and learnt to speak German and French. At ages seven and eight Sabina “conversed with a spirit, an angel sent to her by God, because she was an unusual person,” notes Bernard Minder. “She saw the angel as a good spirit that helped her and guided her. At first the spirit spoke German, then Russian. Often, she felt she understood the meaning of the words even before she actually heard them.” These were daydreams and fantasies of a highly imaginative girl, prone to exaltation, idealism and Weltschmerz. At age ten she returned to Rostov and was enrolled in the girls’ gymnasium (secondary school), where she studied Latin, took singing and piano lessons, was interested in biology, and expressed a wish to study medicine.
During this period Spielrein was periodically troubled in her relationships with her parents: both father and mother used beating in bringing her up as a form of discipline, then a time-honored method. During a confrontation with her father, she said to him that she could replace him with the company of other people, whereupon there was a big scene and the father got wild and threatened suicide. There were often scenes like this, sometimes lasting for days. When he was kind to her, she felt sorry that she was not kind to him. Despite such recurrent difficulties, she was an excellent student, graduating with a gold medal—a high academic honor—in 1904. But trouble continued that year, so the family took her to Switzerland. After a brief stay at a hospital in Interlaken, she moved to Zurich where the violent family scenes returned. Finally, the police intervened and delivered Sabina to the famed Burghölzli hospital where its chief Eugen Bleuer and assistant Carl Jung became her therapists. Jung cured her of her traumatic memories with the method of abreaction or catharsis—a way of discharging the emotions—treating her with understanding and patience. As of June 1, 1905, therapy ended, and no payments were made; Spielrein settled in a private residence in Zurich.
At some point between 1906 and 1908, Spielrein and her former therapist Jung started meeting in Zurich, conversing and practicing what Sabina called “poetry.” In 1906, in his second letter to Freud in their historic correspondence, Jung mentioned Spielrein but kept her anonymous: “I am treating an hysteric with your method. Difficult case, a Russian girl student” (my italics). Thus, it was not true that Spielrein was still Jung’s patient. Perhaps the fabrication was a sign of a guilty conscience. Freud responded in his fifth letter: “I can subscribe without reservations to your remarks on therapy … Essentially, one might say, the cure is effected by love.”
In the summer of 1908, in her third year of medical school, Spielrein was vacationing in Rostov and received a postcard from Jung dated August 27, 1908 in which he wrote, “Never lose the hope that work done with love will lead to a good end … With heartfelt love, your J.” Back in Rostov, Sabina received some good advice from her mother: “I received a letter addressed to you [and] opened it … You have in him a person devoted to you, with a touch of love (more than that is not permitted) [her emphasis] … Had you wished to cause him to divorce his wife … he could be taken, but it is not worth it.” No, Jung could not be taken, for he would not risk forfeiting his wife’s enormous fortune. Sabina wrote back to her mother with a long passionate letter ending with a vow: “I will fall in love again … I will find myself a husband … in the future … therefore do not worry. So far we have remained at a level of poetry that is not dangerous, and we shall remain at that level, perhaps until the time when I will become a doctor unless circumstances will change [her emphasis]. I cannot feel happy without a mother’s blessing, that is, without you approving my actions.” As her later correspondence makes clear, “poetry” meant mutual expressions of tenderness in kisses and hugs.
The year 1908 ended with a heart-rending letter from Jung to Spielrein: “Will you forgive me that I am who I am? … My misfortune is that I cannot live without the joy of stormy, ever-changing love in my life … I need definite agreements so that I do not need to worry about your intentions … Give me at this moment something back for the love and patience and unselfishness that I was able to give you during the time of your illness. Now I am the sick one.”
On March 7, 1909, Jung panicked and once again referred to Spielrein in a letter to Freud as an anonymous “woman patient whom I pulled out of a sticky neurosis with unstinting effort [who] kicked up a vile scandal solely because I denied myself the pleasure of giving her a child.” In German Skandal means a violently noisy scene whereas in English it means a public disgrace. After Spielrein disclosed his name to Freud, Jung insinuated that “She was, of course, systematically planning my seduction … now she is seeking revenge. Lately she has been spreading a rumour that I shall soon get a divorce from my wife and marry a certain girl.” However, in a letter to Freud of June 11, 1909, Spielrein portrayed Jung as the seducer: “Four and a half years ago Dr. Jung was my doctor, then he became my friend and finally my ‘poet,’ i.e., my beloved. Eventually he came to me, and things went as they usually go with ‘poetry.’ He preached polygamy, his wife was supposed to have no objection, etc., etc.”
It turned out to be much ado about nothing. On June 21, 1909, Jung sent Freud “good news about the Spielrein affair … the rumour buzzing around me does not emanate from her at all … My ideas of reference … I wish to retract forthwith … Caught in my delusion … my action was a piece of knavery which I reluctantly confess to you as my father … You and I know of my ‘perfect honesty’ [English in the original]. I ask your pardon many times for it was my stupidity that drew you into this imbroglio … I want to thank you for your help.” On June 24, 1909, Freud wrote to Spielrein, “I see that I have divined some things correctly but that I have construed others wrongly and to your disadvantage. I must ask your forgiveness on this latter count … Please accept this expression of my entire sympathy for the dignified way in which you have resolved this conflict.” Poetry was continued both after the storm in 1909 and during 1910.
In December of 1910 Spielrein passed the written medical school examinations, in January 1911 passed her oral examinations, and on February 9 defended her dissertation. On October 11 Dr. Spielrein began presenting at the meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society as the second woman to join the society. Freud wrote to her, “I fully appreciate your attitude and look confidently to the future.” In 1912 Sabina was again in Rostov, this time lecturing on psychoanalysis. There she met Dr. Pavel Sheftel. They were married in a synagogue later that year. In 1913 her first daughter Irma-Renata was born.
In 1911, at age twenty-six, Spielrein published her medical dissertation about treating a psychotic patient with Freud’s method, the first dissertation in psychoanalysis. (In contrast, her contemporary Melanie Klein began publishing at age 39.) In 1912 Spielrein published a long and complex paper, “Destruction as a Cause of Becoming,” in which she maintained, for example, that a woman dying in childbirth creates new life. She saw a similar motif in a woman’s fantasies of destruction during intercourse, or in Wagner’s operas, e.g., The Flying Dutchman. In 1912 she published “Contributions to Knowledge of the Infantile Mind,” in which she described scenes from her own childhood and observations in the analyses of boys, one thirteen and the other four-and-a-half years old. In 1922 Spielrein published on “The Origin of Children’s Words Mama and Papa: Some Considerations on the Various Stages in Language Development,” harking back to her thought about language at age sixteen (described below). In 1923 she published in French on “Some Analogies between Childhood Thinking, the Thinking of a Patient with Aphasia, and Unconscious Thinking,” cited in 1936 in a book by a prominent French historian of psychoanalysis.
MY RECENT BOOK The Untold Story of Sabina Spielrein: Healed and Haunted by Love; Unpublished Russian Diary and Letters is the product of decades of research and translation. I first came across the private Spielrein archive of Mme Hélène de Morsier in Geneva, Switzerland, in the mid-1990s. There I was able to view Spielrein’s Russian diary and unpublished correspondence with Carl Jung and with Spielrein’s mother. In this book, I present these materials in English for the first time. The Russian diary runs from 1896 to 1925 and the letters from 1905 to 1923. The subtitle refers to her being healed by Jung during her hospitalization but haunted thereafter by her inability to stop thinking about him. Already in 1913 Freud had written to Spielrein, “I am sorry to hear that you are still consumed with longing for J … I imagine that you love Dr. J. so deeply still because you have not brought to light the hatred he merits … I can hardly bear to listen when you continue to enthuse about your old love.”
As a new chapter in the history of Spielrein, the book contains material unavailable elsewhere about her and her family as real-life people with their characters and conflicts; dreams, desires, and defenses; and dramas and destinies as shaped by the two world wars and the Russian Revolution. It is also a story about the scientific achievements of her three brilliant brothers, murdered by Stalin in the 1930s. And the new material adds force to the demand that we revise previous damning accounts of Spielrein and appreciate her for her contributions to psychoanalysis instead of for her association with Carl Jung, which has been salaciously mischaracterized by academics, the mainstream media, and Hollywood.
The Russian diary reveals, for example, Sabina’s adolescent interest in language, which would foreshadow her publications on the topic and her precise literary and scientific descriptions. She “keeps imagining how [she] will grow up and be an adult and let [her] children read [her] diary, how [she] will be a housewife,” nascent maternal and feminine feelings which would play a significant role in her relationship with Jung and her meditations in the “Essay on Transformation” and in published works. A sad episode was her mother’s plan to attend a physicians’ convention in Moscow and take Sabina with her, which the father peremptorily canceled; Sabina was deeply disappointed and “of course she cried.” This suggests an identification with her mother’s profession and an early interest in medicine. Another reaction was in a dream: “We were about to resume our travel … I saw a dog spinning in the air … I guessed it was a rabid dog and I knew it would attack me,” an interpretation possibly expressing her anger at her father and foreshadowing her future interest in dreams.
In 1901 she traveled with her mother and six-year-old sister Emilia to Austria and Germany, evincing great admiration for their people, architecture, cleanliness, orderliness, and manners, a stark contrast to Russia. This experience would explain Sabina’s unwillingness to heed the warnings (described in a letter to me by her niece Menikha) of Nazi atrocities and her refusal to flee Rostov. In 1942 Sabina and her daughters were among thousands of Jews murdered while the Russian city was under Nazi occupation.
“I am sorry to hear that you are still consumed with longing for J ... I imagine that you love Dr. J. so deeply still because you have not brought to light the hatred he merits ... I can hardly bear to listen when you continue to enthuse about your old love.”
Cut off from the West, Spielrein could not have known what Jung said on Radio Berlin in 1933: “the Aryan unconscious … has a higher potential than the Jewish … Freud did not understand the German psyche … Has the formidable phenomenon of National Socialism, on which the whole world gazes in astonishment, taught them any better?”; nor about the concentration camps Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald; nor about Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938 when Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues went up in flames and Jews were murdered.
A more clearly existential topic in the letters between Spielrein and her parents and brothers was money. Sabina did not earn enough as a psychoanalyst to support herself and her daughter and depended on generous sums sent her by her parents. Asking Freud for referrals brought this response in 1914: “Now you are going crazy [meshugge] yourself … and your argument that I have not yet sent you any patients! … I have not seen a patient from Berlin for the last six months, or anyone else I could have sent on to you.” Jung’s response to her request was equally dismissive. Moreover, her parents and brothers constantly pressured her to return to Russia, for only there would she become financially independent. If such prospects existed for some time under Lenin, all was gone under Stalin, who outlawed psychoanalysis. Her fate was sealed.
My book also offers a corrective to a previous biography, Jungian psychoanalyst Aldo Carotenuto’s 1982 book, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud. His book was based on Spielrein’s German diary and correspondence with Freud and Jung from 1909 to 1912 but was missing (1) letters from Jung to Spielrein (published only in German in 1986), and (2) Spielrein’s hospital chart, published in German by Bernard Minder in 1994. Carotenuto claimed that (1) Spielrein was schizophrenic and had a psychotic transference towards Jung; (2) that poetry was a secret metaphor for sexual intercourse based on “a literary analogy … in Proust. Swann and Odette used the metaphor ‘faire cattleya’ to express the physical act of possession.” Both claims were false, my research shows. Carotenuto was the main source for John Kerr’s influential 1993 book A Most Dangerous Method, where he falsely claims that Spielrein was a cause for the break between Jung and Freud. Thereafter, the sexual intercourse myth became a formula repeatedly and uncritically copied in the entire secondary literature about Spielrein, as I outline in the afterword of my book. For instance, in her 2015 coedited book, Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis (including my 1999 paper published in the IJP), Jungian analyst Dr. Coline Covington characterized Spielrein as “perhaps best known for her love affair with Carl Jung.” But why was Spielrein singled out? Wasn’t Jung a paramour too, and an adulterer guilty of professional misconduct to boot? My argument against the commonplace misinterpretation of Spielrein’s relationship with Jung is summed up in the 2016 paper in which I conclude there was no patient-doctor love affair after Spielrein was discharged from the hospital, only a professor and a student, two young people in love, a relationship subject to a different code of ethics.
“I conclude there was no patient-doctor love affair after Spielrein was discharged from the hospital, only a professor and a student, two young people in love, a relationship subject to a different code of ethics.”
In 2011 the alleged sex affair became an inspiration for David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method. Based on Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure, itself founded on John Kerr’s book, it was billed as a historical film. But to me it is a kitschy sexploitation film, in line with a Hollywood precept: why waste a good story if sex is what sells films. Thus, Jung uses spanking as foreplay, culminating in sexual intercourse, as confirmed by blood-stained bedsheets. The film was both commended and condemned by reviewers in the press. An intriguing example is the review by Alan Stone, former Harvard professor of psychiatry and law, published in Psychiatric Times in 2012: “The critics are giving it thumbs up for its achievement in bringing a moment in intellectual history to life for general audiences … But what sent shock waves through the psychoanalytic community … was the revelation that Jung had a prolonged affair with her, [employing] Freud’s dangerous method, the talking cure.” Stone’s enthusiasm for the film exemplifies many people’s reaction to it. However, his opinions do not meet the requirements of a reliable intellectual history.
In the opening diary entry above, Spielrein is yearning for Jung as a person with whom she desires to have a “spiritual affinity,” probably an allusion to Goethe’s famous novel Elective Affinities (Wahlverwandschaften), in which he viewed interpersonal relations between man and woman as analogous to chemical reactions. Whereas Spielrein and Jung experienced mutual erotic attraction, it appears that, contrary to popular belief, both exercised control over their passions. On the other hand, spiritually—as patient and doctor and later as teacher and student—they shared many philosophical and psychoanalytic ideas. For instance, Jung was indebted to Spielrein as the creator of the concept of destruction as a cause of becoming and transformation. ■
Henry Zvi Lothane, MD, is Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytical Association, and author of In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry and The Untold Story of Sabina Spielrein.
FURTHER READING
Carotenuto, Aldo. A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud. Pantheon Books, 1982.
Covington, Coline, and Barbara Wharton. Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2015.
Kerr, John. A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. Vintage, 1994.
Lothane, Henry Zvi. “Sabina Spielrein’s Siegfried and Other Myths: Facts vs. Fictions.” International Forum of Psychoanalysis 25, no. 1 (Jan. 2016): 40–49. DOI: 10.1080/0803706X.2015.1111523.
Lothane, Henry Zvi. The Untold Story of Sabina Spielrein: Healed and Haunted by Love; Unpublished Russian Diary and Letters. The Unconscious in Translation, 2023.
Minder, Bernard. “Sabina Spielrein: Jung’s Patient at the Burghölzli.” Journal of Analytic Psychology 46 (2001): 43–66. Translated from German by Barbara Wharton. Originally published 1994. DOI: doi.org/10.1111/1465-5922.00214.
Spielrein, Sabina. The Essential Writings of Sabina Spielrein. Edited By Ruth I. Cape and Raymond Burt. Routledge, 2018.
Published in issue 58.1, Spring 2024.