page_title: Sabina Spielrein
section_title: Russian career 1923–1942
hierarchical_section_title: Sabina Spielrein / Russian career 1923–1942
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Памятная доска на доме, где жила Сабина Шпильрейн. Ростов-на-Дону, ул. Пушкинская, д. 83. Надпись на доске: "В этом доме жила знаменитая ученица К.Г. Юнга и З. Фройда психоаналитик Сабина Шпильрейн 1885-1942 г.г.". English: Memorial plaque on the house where Sabina Spielrein lived at 83 Pushkin St, Rostov-on-Don. The sign says: "In this house lived the famous student of C. G. Jung and S. Freud, psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942)".
context_page_description: Sabina Nikolayevna Spielrein was a Russian physician and one of the first female psychoanalysts.
  She was in succession the patient, then student, then colleague of Carl Gustav Jung, with whom she had an intimate relationship during 1908–1910, as is documented in their correspondence from the time and her diaries. She also met, corresponded, and had a collegial relationship with Sigmund Freud. One of her more famous analysands was the Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget. She worked as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, teacher and paediatrician in Switzerland and Russia. In a thirty-year professional career, she published over 35 papers in three languages, covering psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics and educational psychology. Her best known and perhaps most influential published work in the field of psychoanalysis is the essay titled "Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being", written in German in 1912. Spielrein was also known as a pioneer of psychoanalysis and one of the first people to introduce the death instinct.
context_section_description: Psychoanalysis in Russia already had a turbulent history but its influence was strongest between 1921 and 1923. On her arrival in Moscow, she found herself the most experienced psychoanalyst there, as well as one of the most closely connected with analysts and psychologists in the west. She was appointed to a chair in child psychology at First Moscow University, and took up work in pedology (children study), an approach to pediatrics that integrated it with developmental and educational psychology. She also joined the Moscow Psychoanalytic Institute, which had been founded in 1922 under the direction of Moise (Moishe) Wulff. She then became involved with an ambitious new project in children's learning known as the "Detski Dom" Psychoanalytic Orphanage–Laboratory (also known as the "White House.")
  Founded in 1921 by Vera Schmidt (who had also been one of Freud's students), the "Detski Dom" was intended to teach children based on Freud's theories. The school was only an orphanage in name: along with Schmidt's own son, the school had children from prominent Bolsheviks (including Joseph Stalin, whose son Vasily Stalin was enrolled as well). Use of discipline was avoided and children were allowed maximum freedom of movement. Sexual exploration and curiosity was also permitted. Spielrein's involvement included supervision of the teachers, and she may have supported them in a protest about their poor conditions of work, which led to their dismissal.  The school had to close in 1924, in the wake of accusations of experiments to stimulate the children's sexuality prematurely. The accusations were possibly made in response to attempts by Leon Trotsky to proletarianize the school's intake  During Spielrein's time in Moscow, both Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky came to work at the Psychoanalytic Institute and "Dyetski Dom" and studied with her. Spielrein's characteristic way of combining subjective psychological ideas from psychoanalysis with objective observational research of children is likely to have been an important influence in their early formation as researchers, leading them to become the foremost Russian psychologists of their time.
  In late 1924 or 1925, Spielrein left Moscow. She and her daughter rejoined her husband Pavel in Rostov-on-Don. As well as probably being disillusioned by her experience in Moscow, Spielrein may have been impelled to return because her husband by now was in a relationship with a Ukrainian woman, Olga Snetkova (born Aksyuk), and they now had a daughter, Nina. Pavel returned to his wife, and their second daughter Eva was born in 1926. For at least the next decade, Spielrein continued to work actively as a pediatrician, carrying out further research, lecturing on psychoanalysis, and publishing in the west until 1931. In 1929 she presented a vigorous defense of Freud and psychoanalysis at a congress of psychiatry and neuropathology in Rostov, possibly the last person to mount such a defense at a time when psychoanalysis was on the point of being proscribed in Russia.
  The paper also made it clear that she was up-to-date with developments in the west, and included sympathetic comments on the approach of Sandor Ferenczi, who was advocating a more emotional engaged role on the part of the therapist. She also talked of the importance of clinical supervision for psychological work with children, and described an approach to short term therapy that could be used when resources did not allow for extensive treatment. Her niece Menikha described her from the 1930s as "a very well mannered, friendly and gentle person. At the same time, she was tough as far as her convictions were concerned." Her husband died in 1936. In 1937 her brothers Isaac, Jan and Emil Spielrein were arrested, and executed in 1937 and 1938 during the Great Purge. Spielrein came to an agreement with Pavel's former partner, Olga Snetkova, that if either of them died, the surviving woman would care for their three daughters.
caption: Memorial plaque on the house where Sabina Spielrein lived at 83 Pushkin St, Rostov-on-Don. The sign says: "In this house lived the famous student of C. G. Jung and S. Freud, psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein (1885–1942)"
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