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The historiography of psychoanalysis is attempting to overcome longstanding foundational and methodological problems. Perhaps the most deeply entrenched of these problems is the dogma that every account of psychoanalysis' origins and development must adopt the perspective provided by Freud's life and work. As Marinelli and Mayer (2006) argue, this view is shared by both the hagiographic and the so-called revisionist—-sometimes openly defamatory—-accounts that have plagued psychoanalysis' historiography until recently and whose influence is far from over even today. These authors critically review traditional psychoanalytic historiography before introducing new and more promising trends and illustrate their perspective quoting Whitehead (1917, p. 115), for whom “a science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.” Even if somewhat hyperbolic, this statement points to the need to adopt a broader historical perspective. More recent historical studies (Ffytche, 2012; Zaretsky, 2004; Makari, 2008) have attempted to achieve this goal and draw a more encompassing picture of psychoanalysis' development than the one allowed by an exclusively Freudian viewpoint.
This article is an attempt to apply these principles to a specific problem: the dominant perception of the role played by the psychoanalysts Barbara Low (1874-1955) and Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942) in the history of psychoanalysis and how Freud's references to them in his epoch-making book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) have strongly contributed to
shape this perception. Low and Spielrein are the two female psychoanalysts whose ideas Freud mentions in this work. These references and a few others elsewhere strongly influenced, not to say determined, how they were approached in the psychoanalytic literature for a long time. More specifically, they were mostly seen as contributing to the new drive theory and the introduction of the death drive concept. Freud credits Low with proposing the notion