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To be overshadowed by men who take all the credit – that is a fate that the Russian-Jewish psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein shared with many other exceptionally talented and capable women. Wilkins’s theft, and Watson and Crick’s disregard of Rosalind Franklin’s ground-breaking discovery of DNA structure, is one example. Another is the downplaying by Otto Hahn, and the denial by the Swedish Nobel Committee, of research on the nuclear fission process by Lise Meitner (who had taken refuge in Sweden from the Nazis during the war), for which Hahn alone was awarded the Prize in 1944 – of all years!
In the case of Spielrein, the image is further obscured and distorted. Stalinism and Nazism destroyed her and her European context, in the East as in the West. Facilitated by these double holocausts, an extensive mythologizing of her deep love of CG Jung has been given free rein, ranging between renditions like DM Thomas’s novel The White Hotel, which has generally been perceived to refer to Jung and Spielrein, and the recently produced film A Dangerous Method. Various more or less tendentious and peculiar dramatizations and documentaries, dramas and movies have for some decades cemented this “out-of-joint” image of Sabina Spielrein. Even as a story about a passion, the Spielrein–Jung affair has suffered distortions, as the Jungian movement with its sectarian features has had a vested interest to veil what morally and medically/ethically hardly can be described as anything but a gross exploitation by Jung of Spielrein – both emotionally and intellectually.
Twenty-five years ago in the basement of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva a box of letters, diaries, scientific texts/essays by Sabina Spielrein was discovered. She had left them behind when she moved to Moscow in 1923, not suspecting that she would never return. Since then, a few Russian and German researchers have made significant further discoveries, as well as the Swedish professor of Slavic languages Magnus Ljunggren, who fo