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There are different types of psychoanalytic works: edited collections, original theoretical statements, clinical vignettes, attempts at synthesis, and many others. Still another, a reissuance of an author's early psychoanalytic writings, may serve diverse functions, too. Inter alia, such publications may provide an opportunity to examine older researches that have been ignored or whose relevance has not been fully understood. It may, additionally, be intended to explore its assertions and hypotheses in a certain temporal framework that may explain later turns in our thinking and researches. And, it may assist us in learning about how this reissued work was first received in hopes of avoiding the repetition of similar mistakes, if, indeed, mistakes were made. It is mostly toward this third purpose that I commend this work to psychoanalysts and historians and towards which I draw my focus in this brief commentary.
Cape and Burt present three newly rendered-into-English papers by Sabina Spielrein (one had previously appeared in English). The first piece presents her Medical Doctor's thesis (1911) (the first ever of a psychoanalytic nature and a pioneering work, at that) documenting her work with a schizophrenic combining empathy, symbolism and myth. This was, perhaps, an early attempt – if not the first – in using psychoanalytic principles in working with the severely disturbed. The second paper (1912) and the one for which she is best known introduces a first psychoanalytic incarnation of the concept of a death drive (todestriebe) eight years before Freud wrote about it and, simultaneously, lays out the details of a Collective/ Mythic Unconscious four years before Jung addressed it in his writings. It's as if, while fighting, Jung and Freud shared a Muse even if their relationships to her were different. The core of this paper was presented at her second meeting at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on November 29, 1911 (Nunberg and Federn, 1974). Finally, a third and b