Introduction: History is the Fruit of Power

“History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots”

Sabina Spielrein was a vital pioneer of the psychoanalytic movement active in Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, Geneva, Moscow, and Rostov-on-Don. She was a psychoanalyst, child analyst, pediatrician, academic professor, and a scholar of international repute. At least thirty-seven of her articles penned in German, French, and Russian were published in major international journals between 1911 and 1931. After her death at the hands of the Nazis on August 11, 1942, Spielrein largely disappeared from the historical narrative. With the violent erasure of her body, tossed into a mass grave, a shadow of silence fell on the impressive body of her work. Her wide-ranging, theoretically sophisticated, and groundbreaking contributions to the nascent field of psychoanalysis were diminished to a handful of marginal notes, remaining that way for more than three decades. What ensued was a seemingly consistent effort by her contemporaries and followers to erase, or at best, reduce the impact of her work on the development of their theories.

The forgetting of Spielrein was also rooted in power structures. When the mainstream historical narrative about the early stages of psychoanalysis was created, the ones who were included were in positions of power and authority: Freud, Jung, Luria, Vygotsky, and Anna Freud. Spielrein, on the other hand, was part of those marginalized communities that did not have equal access to the production of historical narrative. She navigated male-dominated spaces as a woman and a single mother. As a low-income individual, she often had to move in search of affordable housing, relying on colleagues to cover her membership fees in psychoanalytic societies. She was a Jew

at a time when antisemitism and racial violence were on the r