Sabina Spielrein
Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942) was a Russian physician, psychiatrist, and one of the earliest women to work within psychoanalysis. Her career joined clinical psychiatry, early psychoanalytic theory, child psychology, language development, and the intellectual history of the Freudian and Jungian movements. Long remembered mainly through her association with Carl Gustav Jung and Sigmund Freud, she is now increasingly studied as an original theorist whose work anticipated later discussions of destruction, development, and the relation between speech and thought.
Biography
Sabina Nikolayevna Spielrein was born in Rostov-on-Don in 1885 into an educated Jewish family. Her father, Nikolai Spielrein, was a merchant, and her mother, Eva Lublinskaya, had trained as a dentist. The family placed strong emphasis on education, languages, and intellectual achievement, a context that helped shape Spielrein’s later ambitions in medicine and science. As a young woman she left the Russian Empire for Switzerland, where she entered the Burgholzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich in 1904.
At Burgholzli, Spielrein was treated in a clinical environment associated with Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung. Her time there became historically important because she later moved from the position of patient to that of medical student, researcher, and psychoanalytic author. She studied medicine at the University of Zurich and completed a dissertation on the psychological content of a case of schizophrenia. Published in a psychoanalytic journal in 1911, the work has been described as one of the earliest psychoanalytic studies of schizophrenia and as a significant entry by a woman into a field then dominated by men.
After completing her medical studies, Spielrein worked in several European centers of psychoanalytic activity. She was elected to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, corresponded with Sigmund Freud, and remained intellectually connected to Jung even after their personal and theoretical relationship became complicated. She married the physician Pavel Scheftel in 1912 and later had two daughters. Her professional life took her through Vienna, Berlin, Lausanne, Geneva, Moscow, and Rostov-on-Don.
Relationship to Early Psychoanalysis
Spielrein’s name is often introduced through the triangular history linking her to Jung and Freud. That history matters, but it can also obscure her independent work. She was not merely a patient in the early history of analytical psychology or a biographical episode in the Freud-Jung split. She became a trained physician, a member of psychoanalytic societies, a published theorist, and a clinician whose writings crossed the boundaries between psychoanalysis, psychiatry, education, and developmental psychology.
Her experience at Burgholzli placed her close to the first clinical experiments with psychoanalytic methods in institutional psychiatry. Jung’s treatment of her, and the later emotional and intellectual entanglement between them, raised ethical and historical questions that continue to shape discussions of early psychoanalysis. Yet Spielrein’s own writings show that she was not simply the object of another analyst’s interpretation. She developed her own theoretical vocabulary, argued with the concepts available to her, and pursued questions that later became central in psychoanalytic and developmental thought.
Destruction and Coming Into Being
Spielrein’s best-known theoretical text is her 1912 paper “Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being.” In it, she explored the relation between sexuality, self-preservation, transformation, and destruction. Her argument did not simply identify destruction with aggression. Rather, she considered how psychic and biological life may involve a tension between the preservation of individual form and the dissolution required by generativity, change, and relation to another.
This paper became important in retrospect because Freud later developed the idea of a death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud acknowledged Spielrein’s earlier discussion as an anticipation of part of the speculative path that led him toward that concept, although her view differed from his. Spielrein connected destructiveness to transformation and becoming, while Freud eventually placed the death drive within a broader metapsychological account of repetition, tension reduction, and the organism’s relation to inorganic life.
Spielrein’s approach remains significant because it complicates any simple opposition between life and death, love and aggression, or creation and destruction. Her writing belongs to the same early field of problems that produced psychoanalytic accounts of ambivalence, conflict, fantasy, and the unstable relation between desire and loss.
Child Psychology and Language
Spielrein was also an important figure in the development of psychoanalytic and psychological work with children. In Geneva she worked at the Rousseau Institute, where she came into contact with research on child development and education. She analyzed Jean Piaget for a period and participated in an intellectual environment concerned with children’s speech, thought, fantasy, and learning.
Her writings on language and child development anticipated questions later associated with developmental psychology and psycholinguistics. Rather than treating speech as a simple instrument for expressing already formed thoughts, she was interested in the developmental relation between words, affect, fantasy, and the child’s emerging organization of reality. This placed her work near later discussions of symbolic function, early mental life, and the relation between inner experience and social communication.
Spielrein’s attention to children also links her historically to later psychoanalytic figures such as Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and Donald Winnicott. Her work did not found a separate school, but it contributed to the atmosphere in which child analysis and developmental psychoanalysis became central parts of twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory.
Return to Russia
After years in Western Europe, Spielrein returned to Russia in the 1920s. She worked in Moscow and later in Rostov-on-Don, participating in psychoanalytic and educational projects during a period in which psychoanalysis briefly had institutional visibility in Soviet intellectual life. She was connected with the Russian Psychoanalytic Society and with clinical and educational work involving children.
The political situation changed sharply in the 1930s. Psychoanalysis came under increasing ideological pressure, and the Soviet state moved against many intellectual and scientific networks. Spielrein’s brothers were among those killed during the Stalinist Great Purge. Her own professional possibilities narrowed as psychoanalysis and related child-development fields became politically suspect.
Death and Rediscovery
Spielrein was murdered in 1942 during the German occupation of Rostov-on-Don. She and her daughters were killed in the mass murder of Jews at Zmievskaya Balka, a ravine outside the city. Her death belongs to the history of the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet territories and to the destruction of the Russian-Jewish intellectual world from which she came.
For decades after her death, Spielrein’s name remained marginal in standard histories of psychoanalysis. Her rediscovery accelerated after the recovery of diaries, letters, and institutional documents in the late twentieth century. These materials made it possible to reconsider her not only as a person connected to Jung and Freud, but as a theorist whose work bridged psychoanalysis, child psychology, language, and the study of psychic conflict.
Legacy
Sabina Spielrein’s legacy lies in the originality of her questions and in the historical position she occupied. She was one of the first women to enter psychoanalysis as a physician and theorist. She wrote on schizophrenia, sexuality, destructiveness, child development, and language at a time when the field itself was still taking shape. Her refusal to belong neatly to one doctrinal camp may have contributed to her later marginalization, but it also helps explain her contemporary relevance.
Her work now appears as part of a broader reassessment of early psychoanalysis. The field was not formed only by a few canonical male authors, but also by women, Jewish intellectuals, migrants, clinicians, educators, and multilingual researchers whose contributions were unevenly preserved. Spielrein’s writings show how psychoanalysis emerged through clinical practice, personal conflict, institutional experiment, and theoretical risk. Her life also reveals how the history of psychoanalysis was marked by exile, political violence, antisemitism, and the ruptures of the twentieth century.
References:
Balbuena, Francisco. “Sabina Spielrein: From Being a Psychiatric Patient to Becoming an Analyst Herself.” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 80, 281-308, 2020. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s11231-020-09260-0
Richebacher, Sabine. “Sabina Spielrein – a rediscovered voice of psychoanalysis.” Swiss National Museum Blog, 2025. https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2025/11/sabina-spielrein-a-rediscovered-voice-of-psychoanalysis/
Jewish Women’s Archive. “Sabina Spielrein.” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/spielrein-sabina
Wikimedia Commons. “File:Sabina Spielrein.jpg.” Public domain family photograph, dated 2 January 1918. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sabina_Spielrein.jpg
