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When your kind invitation to participate in the symposium “Passionate Encounters in the Therapeutic Relationship” reached me, my own interest centred on writing a book to be called Wrestling with Freud: A New Look at Psychoanalytic History. My interest in the history of psychoanalysis goes back to a book I wrote in 1976, The Evolution of Psychoanalytic Technique. It was therefore natural for me to approach the subject from a historical perspective The history of psychoanalysis is an exciting topic today because many primary documents are now available. Furthermore, the proliferation of psychoanalytic schools makes it particularly important for all of us to have such a historical perspective. As I see it, history can contribute to the understanding of our differences.
I select first the 1906 encounter between C. G. Jung and the patient Sabina Spielrein. Freud acknowledged the contribution of Sabina Spielrein to the death instinct in a footnote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
A considerable portion of these speculations have been anticipated by Sabina Spielrein in an instructive and interesting paper which, however, is unfortunately note entirely clear to me. She there describes the sadistic component of the sexual instinct as “destructive” (p. 55)
The Index of Psychoanalytic Writings by Grinstein (1956-75) contains 30 references under her name written between 1912 and 1934. Her name would have been forgotten long ago were it not for the fact that she played a role in the relationship between Freud and Jung, and