Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis, 2nd Edition, edited by Coline Covington and Barbara Wharton,  Routledge, London and New York, 2015,  257pp.

Anyone who may have been looking for and expecting an alternative to beach or resort novels by delving into the story of one of our most illustrative and unique founders - Carl G. Jung and his sexual-romantic-intellectual involvement with Sabina Spielrein, his patient at the Burghölzli sanatorium in Zurich from August 17, 1904 to June 1, 1905 - will have wandered into a big surprise. The recently published book reviewed below, is a dense and challenging undertaking consisting of numerous documents including diary entries, correspondences, psychoanalytic papers (mostly by Dr. Spielrein) hospital records and other treasures that will leave you Aspin.

Unlike what I expected, this is more like a trip through the Smithsonian Hall of Documents; the editors, through patience, persistence, and detective work, have managed to create an ensemble, a compendium of formerly unknown and inaccessible material from one of our most creative and imaginative leaders. Yet, this work makes no attempt to weave together all of this rich material into a biographical coherence; this challenge is left to the reader. Sift through the artifacts and archeological valuables and figure it out for yourself…and, by the end at p. 257, it all congeals and now you truly “know” this forgotten wonder.

The hospital records, primarily written by Jung and director Eugene Bleuler, verify a good deal of the historic veracity of director David Cronenberg's (2011) film, A Dangerous Method in which Sabina emerges as the true heroine and savante. This film, surprisingly remained conscientiously aligned with the Burghölzli medical charting, right from the opening scene, in which a 19 year old Spielrein sent by her family to Rostov-on-Don, Russia, is dragged from a horse drawn carriage by 3 men. She is exhibiting violent symptoms consisting of hard to watch body contortions twisting her arms together, yelling and screaming while alternatively laughing and crying…displaying the classical evidences of hysteria known t