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Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942) qualified in Zürich as a psychiatrist in January 1911. The majority of her 35 publications in German, French and Russian, as well as her extant journals and correspondence, are not yet available in
English. Spielrein's substantive contributions to the early development of psychoanalysis have been documented by relational analyst Adrienne Harris (2015). Fátima Caropreso is a Brazilian scholar teaching the history and philosophy of psychology at the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora in São Pedro. Caropreso identifies historically novel ideas in Spielrein's 1922 paper, ‘The origin of the child's words ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’: some observations on the different stages of language development', ideas further developed in her 1923 paper ‘Some Analogies between Thinking in Children, Aphasia, and the Subconscious Mind’. Caropreso's paper is available on the Spielrein Association website (spielreinassociation.org), where Spielrein's oeuvre is listed.
Spielrein's interest in the unconscious roots of language development can be traced to her first publication ‘On the psychological content of a case of schizophrenia’ , in which she deciphered the apparent ‘word salad’ in a schizophrenic woman's speech by linking life history to recurring words. The word ‘poetry’, subsequently used as a synonym for amorous feelings in Spielrein's diaries, appears in this case. Further reflections on subconscious mental functioning as it relates to language can be found in her 1912 paper ‘Destruction as the cause of becoming’ (newly translated by Cooper-White in 2019) that Spielrein read at the November 29, 1911 meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
Prior to the publication of the 1922 and 1923 papers reviewed in Caropreso's article, Spielrein gave a 1920 presentation on the origins of children's language at the 6th International Psychoanalytic Association Congress at the Hague, where Jean Piaget (1896-1980), Anna Freud (1895-1982) and Melanie Klein