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Sabina Spielrein, a young woman from Rostov-on-Don, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, was brought by her uncle to the Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich in 1904. She was 19 years old and a highly intelligent, troublesome hysteric who had been brought to Switzerland for cure. There she met Carl Gustav Jung, who had recently become a member of the staff of the Clinic and, together with his new wife, had an apartment there. He had read some of Freud's work, and was keen to try out psychoanalysis with his gifted young patient. Sabina's fate has been that, until recently, she ‘is perhaps best known for her love affair with Carl Jung’ (p. 1). Her illness and recovery were powerfully represented in a recent play, Christopher Hampton's The Talking Cure, which showed, with a certain amount of dramatic licence, how she became first a link and then a source of friction between the two men.
The publication of this book represents years of work, negotiation and patient waiting on the part of the editors. Various chapters have had to be translated at various times from German, French, Italian and Russian. Sabina's hospital records from the Burghölzli had to be released by her descendents. Her diary and her correspondence with both Freud and Jung were discovered in a cardboard box in 1977, during the restoration of a palace in Geneva which had previously been the Psychological Institute. Their significance was recognized by Aldo Carotenuto, a Jungian analyst. Knowledge of the love affair immediately brought Sabina to prominence; before then, as Sabine Richebacher points out, ‘she was represented in the psychoanalytic literature by four footnotes in the works of Freud’.
Since 1980, there has been much greater interest in Sabina's life and her role in the lives of Jung and Freud, but relatively little in her own work; she published over 30 papers, and seems to have been actively interested in child analysis and the earliest stages of psychic development after the birth of her daughter i