The genius of Sabina Spielrein.

For many years, I have helped to run an annual training day on management for young psychiatrists and psychologists who are about to become consultants. We usually spend most of the day doing an exercise where they turn themselves into the managing boards of two imaginary mental health institutions and compete for business. Over the years we have had fun inventing the names and characteristics of these two institutions. There were a few years when I called one of them ‘the Spielrein Institute’. I chose the name as a jokedat least, I thought it was a joke at the time. I took it from a real historical figure called Sabina Spielrein. Like many people, all I knew about her was that she was a patient of Carl Jung and had then become his mistress. I knew Sigmund Freud was somehow connected with her too, but the name mainly appealed to me because it had that middle European flavour that one associates with jokes about psychoanalysts told in mock Viennese accents. I cannot remember what eventually prompted me to do so, but one day I decided I should probably pay Sabina Spielrein the respect of finding out more about her. I read some biographies, 2 and also her surviving letters and diaries. There was a lot of fascinating information in them about her affair with Jung, and how Freud helped the two of them to disentangle from each other while covering up for Jung. Later the two great psychiatrists notoriously fell out with each other, and it now seems this was partly as a result of Freud realising how dishonest Jung had been about what happened. Spielrein then trieddand faileddto make peace between them. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of literature by Freudians attacking Jung over the whole business, by Jungians defending him, and by feminists wishing a plague on both their houses. Setting all of that aside, it does certainly seem that Spielrein conducted herself with greater dignity and restraint over the whole business than either of the men did. DISTINGUISHED CAREER Apart from reading about this famous scandal, I also discovered that Spielrein was a substantial psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in her own right. She inspired both Freud and Jung to come up with some significant new ideas. Later, she went on to pursue a distinguished career of her own. She worked in Switzerland alongside the leading developmental psychologist of her time, Jean Piaget. She then returned to her native Russia where she was a colleague of the great neurologist, Alexander Luria. She anticipated some of the major ideas in child psychology of our time, in advance of the people whose names are usually connected with them, like Melanie Klein and Freud’s daughter Anna. Once I discovered all of this I felt a little contrite at having used her name in a rather facetious way. I decided to make further amends by reading some of her own professional articles myself. She wrote them in the first 30 years of the last centurydin fluent German and French as well as Russiandbut they were only translated into English in the 1990s. Her most significant paper is entitled ‘Destruction as the cause of coming into being’. It was originally published in 1912 but is the transcript of a lecture she gave the previous year in front of Freud and his immediate circle in Vienna. I can remember vividly the moment I sat down to read the first few pages of this paper. It would be no exaggeration to say that I almost fell off my chair with astonishment when I did so. ‘Destruction as the cause of coming into being’ puts forward four significant points. The first is that psychiatrists and psychologists should look to biology to make sense of how the human mind works. Her second proposition, in summary, is that we are all torn as human beings between the will to survive as individuals and the drive towards procreation. This shows itself especially in our mixed feelings about our children, our sexual partners, and indeed about sex itself. The next plank of her argument is that many psychological problems arise from an awareness of this core tension in our lives. Her conclusion is that an understanding of mental disturbance, and any approach to psychological treatment, should address this tension and how it is played out in each individual.