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Sabina Spielrein had absolutely disappeared from official historiography until she was rediscovered in 1980 by Aldo Carotenuto and Carlo Trombetta. In his book A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud, Carotenuto showed the importance of her role in the relationship between Jung and Freud. Since then Spielrein has been the object of many studies and has acquired the status of a novel character in the psychoanalytic legend. John Launer's book Sex Versus Survival - The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein is however the first biography of Sabina Spielrein written in English.
Born in Rostov-on-Don in Russia in 1885, Sabina Spielrein was brought up in a well-off and educated Jewish family. At the age of nineteen she had a psychotic episode and her parents decided to send her to Zurich to be cured at Eugen Bleuler's famous clinic: the Burghölzli. There she met Jung, and in 1911 she graduated as a psychiatrist thanks to a thesis on schizophrenia. She became a privileged witness of the ‘break-up’ between Freud and Jung, being the patient and the lover of the latter and a disciple of the former. In 1924 she settled back in Rostov-on-Don where under the cover of pedology she treated children psychoanalytically. In 1942 Nazi troops occupied Rostov. On 27 July 1942, the SS murdered Sabina Spielrein and her two daughters.
John Launer is not a historian by profession but a doctor and a family therapist who worked for many years as a senior staff member at the Tavistock Clinic. His interest in Sabina Spielrein was at first theoretical. He read Spielrein's most famous paper, written in 1912, ‘Destruction as the cause of coming into being’ and felt ‘astonished’ to find in it an early attempt to understand the mind in terms of both its evolution and the reproductive drive. Launer is also engaged in the theoretical endeavour to bridge the gap between evolutionary thought and psychoanalysis, and he perceives Spielrein as a precursor of this avenue of research.
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