‘ Distortions of Sabina’, Speilrein’s drawings and Jung’s case notes from Sabina’s time as Jung’s patient in the Burgholzi, combined with photographs of her family and of Sabina in her youth and middle age.
Sabina Spielrein - notes on a life ended much too soon:
Sabina Spielrein was born in 1885, the daughter of wealthy Jewish Russian landowners – her mother university educated and her father a successful businessman. The mystical, rabbinical tradition, to which both her grandfather and great-grandfather belonged, was to make a significant impression on her as a child and continue to feed into her interests as an adult. In 1909 she was admitted to the Bergholzli Institute, a psychiatric hospital in Geneva, where she became a patient of Dr Carl Jung. It was her parents’ intention that she be cured of her ‘nervous’ ailment before embarking on her dream of enrolling as a medical student in Zurich. Jung undertook Spielrein’s analysis in what appears to be record time, corresponding with Freud (at the height of their professional infatuation) and writing case studies about her. Sabina became Jung's laboratory assistant while still his patient and her consultations with Jung continued after her enrolment at the medical school. It was Jung’s suggestion that she consider studying psychiatry. Their correspondence indicates an intense intellectual and intimate relationship, developments in psychoanalytic theory frequently discussed in great depth, with Spielrein contributing significantly to the progression of Jung's thought and he, obviously, to hers. It seems clear from the correspondence and other evidence, that she became his lover30 for some years until this proved problematic for his career and he ended the affair. Sabina graduated form medical school and began her psychoanalytic career while still engaged in this liaison. Moving to Vienna in 1911, perhaps to assist in extricating herself from the relationship, she joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association moving in her thinking towards the Freudians shortly before the severing of the Freud/Jung relationship. In 1912 she married Jewish surgeon Paul Scheftel and subsequently gave birth to two daughters. Scheftel left her for a time to pursue another relationship returning later to present her with the fruits of this liaison, another daughter who Sabina raised with her own. She worked for some years in Germany and Switzerland, during which time she undertook the analysis of Piaget among others. She returned to Russia in 1923 where she played a significant part in the introduction there of the practice of psychoanalysis. Sabina’s two brothers were ‘liquidated’ in the 1930’s under the Stalin regime. In 1941 Sabina and her daughters, along with other Jewish citizens of Rostov-on-don, were rounded up and murdered in their synagogue by a firing squad of the invading German army. They numbered among the unlucky victims of the mythological trial run for the Final Solution. Firing squads proved too expensive in terms of military ordinance and the cost effective gas chambers employed to murder the disabled people and Gypsies of Germany and Poland were brought into service on a massive scale. Her considerable contribution to the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice virtually disappeared from historical record – until significant papers were found in the 1970’s and the letters between Jung and Spielrein were released for publication after his death31.
My playful extra-terrestrial meeting between Sabina and Merleau-Ponty, through Frank’s benevolent intervention, suggests that Sabina would have liked Maurice. I like to think he would have liked her too.
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