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Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, Mrs Spielrein, Dr méd., former assistant of Professor Freud of Vienna, is available on Tuesday evenings for free consultation with people desirous of information on educational and scientific psychoanalysis.
She is thirty-five years old, and she is going to settle in Geneva to obtain the position to which she aspires. It is 1920. This is the last stage of her migration, before her return to Russia, her native country. She does not know that yet, however. The move to Geneva is her last in a journey which began for her as an adolescent who settled in Zürich to undergo psychoanalysis and to obtain a diploma in medicine. She went on to Vienna and became a member of the psychoanalytic society. She set herself up next in Berlin, married and became a mother; and lastly she lived near Lausanne, evidently because of the illness of her child.
She chooses Geneva, without apparently being put out by the fact that she will have to speak French, the language she spoke to her father when she was a child, and in which he still writes to her sometimes from Rostov-on-Don.** Because of this I feel less embarrassed addressing you in French. It is poor consolation for ‘my difficulties with foreign languages’: however, speaking French on this occasion makes some sense in relation to Sabina Spielrein's history.
Her story has been known since the publication of the documents1 she left with Professor Edouard Claparède in Geneva. She has been taken out of the closet; she is remembered particularly for the love she bore Carl Gustav Jung, for the indiscretions committed by him, and for the fact that she turned to Freud. She was made to occupy a position between the two men, her story in fact bringing together the two future enemies, the father and the son, the Jew and the Protestant, the Viennese and the citizen of Zürich; at the centre was