Comments on the film My Name was Sabina Spielrein

Sabina Spielrein has been called ‘the most intriguing’ of all the ‘secondary characters’ in Jung's life and by extension, the history of analytical psychology1. When she left Switzerland for her native Russia, Spielrein entrusted her archives to Edouard Claparède, under whom she worked at the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute. She was a pioneer in research about the origins of children's thinking and one of her patients/analysands was Jean Piaget.

Claparède stored the boxes containing her diaries, writings, photos and drawings, and her correspondence with Jung and Freud, in the Institute's cellars. In 1977, Professor Carlo Trombetta found and sent them to Professor Aldo Carotenuto because he had just published a book in which he speculated about Spielrein's contribution to the Freud-Jung dialogue2. The documents provided Carotenuto with material for his influential 1980 book, A Secret Symmetry, an appraisal of Spielrein's role during the years when Jung and Freud collaborated, cooperated, differed, sparred, and eventually separated.

In his subtitle3, Carotenuto called Spielrein ‘the woman who changed the early history of psychoanalysis’, and scholars, writers, and playwrights have since structured their debate about her life and work within these broadly general terms.4