Sabina Spielrein and the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis

This fascinating book fills a large gap, and provides an important corrective, showing Sabina Spielrein as an original and innovative psychoanalytic thinker in her own right, not as a minor or romantic character between Jung and Freud, nor as one who primarily borrowed from them and Piaget, for example. Cooper-White and Kelcourse, along with Harris and Naszkowska, give us Spielrein as one of the truly influential women in early psychoanalysis, despite erasure and non-citation. Accessible translations of her writings allow us to hear her own extraordinary voice. -Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D., New York Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York, USA Felicity Kelcourse and Pamela Cooper-White have edited an important collection of essays on the life and psychoanalytic contributions of Sabina Spielrein. The literature on Spielrein has come a long way since Aldo Carotenuto's 1982 A secret symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Freud and Jung. Subsequent literature has moved away from a focus on the triangular relationship between these famous figures to a critical assessment of Spielrein's original work. Kelcourse focuses on Spielrein's 1911 psychiatric dissertation, On the Psychological Content of a Case of Schizophrenia. Cooper-White analyses Spielrein's important 1912 article, Destruction as a Cause of Becoming. Two additional contributors. Klara Naszkowska and Adrienne Harris cover Spielrein's return to Russia in 1923, assessing her contributions to the development of psychoanalysis in Russia, with a specific focus on child language development. -Brian Skea, IAAP, Ph.D., Jungian psychoanalyst, private practice, Brewster, Massachusetts, USA; teaching faculty, past President and current Curriculum Coordinator, Boston Jung Institute