Correspondence

The fact that the April issue of the Journal was sent out in July symbolized the way in which important aspects of its contents possessed what can only be described as a weird timewarp quality. Reading this issue, on several occasions I had the experience of feeling transported way back in time — as if by a time machine.

First there was my surprise that an issue that devoted nearly one third of its space to Sabina Spielrein and her work, ignored the latest and (to date) the most detailed work on the subject. In the summer of 1993 John Kerr's book, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein, was published. Hardly any book in the analytic field has had a greater echo in the popular press in the last ten years: Frederick Crews, ‘The Unknown Freud’,  New York Review of Books, November 18 1993; Jane Dunn, ‘The Foundering Fathers’,  Observer, 13 February 1994; Galen Strawson, ‘Jung Woman's Fancy’,  Independent on Sunday, 13 February 1994; Roy Porter, ‘Sex on the Brain’,  Sunday Times, 13 February 1994; A. C. Grayling, ‘Analysts in Need of a Couch’,  Financial Times, 26 February 1994; Nicholas Mosley, ‘The Heart of a Venomous Squabble’,  Daily Telegraph, 19 February 1994 — to name but a few. Yet the J.A.P. articles totally ignore Kerr's work.

In his book, after careful and lengthy consideration, Kerr writes (p. 501): ‘in virtually every historical work that bothers to mention Spielrein at all, she is credited, wrongly, with having anticipated Freud's theory of the death instinct.’ And he concludes (p. 502): ‘In the end, Spielrein's was a curious literary fate, to be known for a theory she did not hold. “Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being” seeks to solve the problem of sexual repression by appealing to a portrait of sexuality as inherently ambivalent in relation to the self. There is no “death instinct” in it. Neither the term nor the idea in Freud's sense appears here.’

It is understandable that the Russia-based author A. M. Etkin