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During her lifetime and for 40 years after her murder by the Nazis, the Russian psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein was largely unknown beyond a footnote in Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud acknowledged Spielrein's influence on his concept of the death instinct. After the Freud-Jung letters were published in 1974, followed by a selection of Spielrein's own diaries and letters, attention focused on her erotic relationship with Carl Gustav Jung, who had been one of her psychiatrists when she was hospitalized in her late teens, and then her mentor and supervisor at medical school in Zurich.
There has been debate about the extent to which Spielrein was either healed by her relationship with Jung or haunted by it for a long time afterwards, but her image as a femme fatale continues in popular culture in movies, drama, and on websites. Of far more interest, scholars in the past 20 years have claimed a different status for Spielrein: as an important figure in fields of psychoanalysis and child development, with contributions that influenced not only Freud and Jung but also others she worked with, including Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Alexander Luria. Her writings are now recognized as far ahead of their time, anticipating the work of Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Sándor Ferenczi, John Bowlby, Jean Laplanche, and contemporary psychoanalytic movements, including relational and feminist psychoanalysis.