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Klara Naszkowska (Poland/United States): Sabina Spielrein is largely remembered as a tragic figure of history: robbed of her accomplishments, erased, objectified, and then victimized, usually linked to the male “great” figures of psychoanalysis: Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget. She is best known for being a hysterical psychiatric patient, Jung's lover, and a “little girl” caught up in the Freud/Jung breakup. Recovered from oblivion in the 1980s, she becomes a kinky addition to the Jung-Freud binary dialectic, first in Aldo Carotenuto's A Secret Symmetry. Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud (1982) and John Kerr's A Most Dangerous Method (1993), then in Christopher Hampton's The Talking Cure (2002) or the Hollywood production directed by David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method (2011) (and sadly many more).
Throughout the past five decades many successful attempts have been made to reframe Spielrein's story, to deepen the understanding of her life and work. I sat down with twenty-six scholars, psychoanalysts, artists, and writers to discuss the growing relevance of Spielrein's story, her experiences and thinking. Let me start by asking: what were the circumstances of your first meeting with Spielrein and what captivated you about her life and work at that time?1
Esther Rapoport (Israel): It's a funny question because for some years now I feel that I've been living with Sabina Spielrein as a kind of imaginary friend. She has been accompanying me. […] I actually cannot remember how I first heard of her. I'm pretty sure that I learned of Lou [Andreas]-Salomé before I
learned of Spielrein. And what led me to take interest in Lou Salomé was the same general theme that later led me to Spielrein. And that was a search for origins, for roots. I'm Russian-born so I became particularly interested in both these figures as early female psychoanalysts but also as early female Russian psychoanalysts. [I found in Spielrein] a quality of engaging on a personal level that made