The Absent Feminine

Sigmund Freud first heard Sabina Spielrein express ideas from her provocative essay, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,” on November 15, 1911. She spoke at the end of a long and “very animated” discussion on death and love during a psychoanalytic meeting at Freud's home. Almost everyone else spoke before Spielrein was “finally recognized” (Kerr, 1993, p. 363). Nor were her ideas referred to subsequently. This resembles, on the discursive level, Spielrein's absence from a photograph of “The Third Psychoanalytic Congress…at Weimar in 1911.” For social theorist Avery Gordon, Spielrein's non-appearance at Weimer renders her a “ghost” of feminine erasure. (1997, p. 32). In a corroborative action, Spielrein hides her face in a photograph of her family. But, making herself disappear reaches its tragic apogee when, having decided years earlier to leave Europe and return to her native Russia, Spielrein is murdered by the Nazis in Rostov on Don in 1941.

Stalin had turned violently against psychoanalysis in 1936, forcing Spielrein to work in altruistic obscurity. When the war began, she refused to believe the civilized Germans were capable of the atrocities that had been attributed to them. This sounds like a not uncommon form of denial among a certain level of educated European Jew, but psychoanalysis might find deeper motives when self-disappearance culminates in self-destruction. In any event, Spielrein was thus expunged from the living, but not entirely from psychoanalytic history (Collins & Jervis, 2008, p. 148).

Jung, Freud, and the Problem of in-Sufficient Acknowledgement

“Destruction as a Form of Coming Into Being” was published in the Psychoanalytic Yearbook in 1912. The acceptance was diminished when Freud, as one of the editors of the Jahrbuch, wrote to inform her of a forthcoming negative review. According to John Kerr, the review, by Paul Federn, was not only dismissive but uncomprehending (1993, p. 448). Freud's comments regarding her “