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The following, preceded by a commentary, is the English translation of a paper, ‘Quelques analogies entre la pensée de l'enfant, celle de l'aphasique et la pensée subconsciente’, given in French by Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942) to the Psychoanalytic Society of Zurich and published in the Swiss Journal, Archives de Psychologie, in 1923.
Sabina Spielrein's remarkable insights into the child's psyche have, in the English-speaking world, largely slumbered in obscurity until recent years. Spielrein (1885-1942), a Russian psychoanalyst, was an innovative thinker and an important figure in early psychoanalysis. She was an early believer in child analysis and refined her theory and technique through observation of her own daughter. John Launer (2015) points out that Spielrein may well have been the first person to develop play therapy, referring to her 1921 paper, ‘A brief analysis of child phobia’, to make the case for the revolutionary nature of Spielrein's work. In her 1929 paper ‘Dr Skalkovskiy's report’, Spielrein asserts that ‘playing out is the basis of the analytic method for children of pre-school age’ (Spielrein 1929/2015, p. 323), contrasting her own view with that of Klein and Hug-Hellmuth, in that she found interpretation to be of secondary importance.
This paper dates from her most prolific period, in the 1920's, when she published a number of papers on child development and linguistics, in a distinctively clear and unaffected style. Spielrein presented her ideas on the origins of child language at the 6th Annual International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) Conference at the Hague in 1920, attended by Ferenczi (president), Piaget, Anna Freud, Klein and Heg-Hellmuth. Spielrein analyzed
Piaget in 1921. In her 1922 paper ‘On the origin of the words “Papa” and “Mama”’, she explored the child's early psycholinguistic development through relationship to the mother and feeding. In her work, we can see ideas presaging not only those of her contemporarie