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This book is a compilation of different papers by analytical psychologists, psychoanalysts and historians of science and is designed as a tribute to the life and work of Sabina Spielrein. It follows on from a special prize-winning issue of the Journal of Analytical Psychology brought out in January 2001, dedicated exclusively to Spielrein, and includes both the original papers and new papers which complement and expand the material already available.
It mixes unedited extracts from Spielrein's diary, the letters C. G. Jung wrote to Spielrein, the Burghölzli hospital records, the report Jung sent to Freud about Spielrein together with commentaries on the significance of these documents and on the new light they shed on the personality of Spielrein and on the nature and consequences of the analytical relationship between Jung and Spielrein. It also includes several papers by Spielrein which have never been published before in English.
Sabina Spielrein is probably one of the most complex and fascinating figures from the early days of psychoanalysis but she is also one of the most misunderstood. Until the fortuitous discovery in 1977 of personal papers that Sabina herself had entrusted to Edouard Claparède on the eve of her departure for Moscow, she was, as Zvi Lothane tells us in one of the papers, ‘but a citation in Freud's footnotes and a topic in the Freud/Jung Letters’. When these documents were published in 1980 by Aldo Carotenuto, an Italian analytical psychologist in his book, Diario di una segreta simmetria, it caused a furore in Freudian and Jungian circles and stimulated an enormous interest in the figure of Spielrein. Unfortunately much of this interest tended to be concentrated on the problem of Spielrein's psychiatric diagnosis or on the exact nature of her relationship with Carl Jung and once again the relevance of her scientific work was ignored. This was in part redressed by the publication in 1994 in the Journal of Analytical Psychology of her seminal pa