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In the opening paragraph of Sabina Spielrein's seminal paper, Destruction (1912/1994), she put forward the following question:
Throughout my involvement with sexual problems, one question has especially interested me: Why does this most powerful drive, the reproductive instinct, harbour negative feelings in addition to inherently anticipated positive feelings? These negative feelings, such as anxiety and disgust, must be overcome in order to use the drive appropriately. (p. 155)
In asking this question, Spielrein begins with a straightforward psychoanalytic problem; a relationship between sex and death, or destruction. What Spielrein was proposing with the above is a theory of sex and death that, as Launer (2015) notes, “would subsume the theories of Jung, Freud, and Bleuler, and take everything back to Darwin's first principle: the preservation of the species” (p. 135). However, it may be noted, that her query as to whether there is a relationship between sex and death is one that had not gone unnoticed both within and outside of the psychoanalytic field during the period Spielrein was occupied with this problem.
For example, Sigmund Freud, in a letter to Swiss pastor and psychoanalyst Oskar Pfister in 1909, mentions the idea of an “indissoluble connection between sex and death” (Freud & Meng, 1963, p. 20). And Spielrein, quoting Nietzsche: “Loving and dying have gone together from eternity. The Will to love: that is to be willing to die!” (1912/1994, p. 168). The sentiment expressed by Nietzsche is echoed in a comment by the only other woman present at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
presentation of Spielrein's “destruction thesis” on November 29, 1911, in the person of Frau Dr. Margarete Stegman. She offered the “most understanding interpretation” (Cooper-White, 2019, p. 89) of Spielrein's thesis in the following way: “The fear of love is the fear of the death of one's personality” (Nunberg & Federn, 1974, p. 334). The connection of sex and death was also a we