Commentary on ‘Dream of “Father Freudenreich”’

Sabina (Sheyve) Spielrein (1885-1942) was a Russian-Jewish early pioneer of psychoanalysis and pediatrician, an original clinician and scholar with at least thirty-seven publications in German, French and Russian. Despite her impressive contributions to the development of Freudian theory and practice, she is still mostly remembered for her connection to Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, objectified and reduced to a “hysterical patient,” “lover,” “test case,” and “victim.” Notwithstanding the increasing acknowledgement of her work, especially in the English-speaking world, some of her papers are yet to be translated into English. Until today, the “Dream of ‘Father Freudenreich,’” first published as “Traum von ‘Pater Freudenreich’” in the IPA journal Internationale Zeitschrift für ärtzliche Psychoanalyse in 1913, was on that list.

Typically for the first female physicians and analysts, Spielrein was born in a wealthy upper-middle-class family of assimilated Jews. Her mother Eva (née Khave Lublinskaya) was a dentist. Her father Naftal (later Nikolai) Szpilrajn graduated from the University in Berlin with a degree in agronomy. Both parents were born in Poland; they had emigrated to Rostov-on-Don in Russia before Spielrein was born. The Szpilrajns provided all of their children, regardless of gender, with financial and moral support to pursue higher education and professional careers. Spielrein graduated from a Gymnasium—an eight-year-long secondary school that supplied comprehensive college-level education. In 1905 she started at the medical school at the excellent and progressive University of Zürich—the first in Europe to admit women. She obtained a doctorate in psychiatry in 1911 on the basis of her dissertation devoted to Schizophrenia. It was most probably the first psychoanalytically-oriented doctoral thesis and most definitely the first psychoanalytically-oriented doctoral thesis penned by a woman.