Spilrein-Sheftel Sabina Nikolaevna is known to the world as a Soviet psychoanalyst and student of Carl Gustave Jung, a member of three psychoanalytic societies and the author of the theory of destructive attraction. But no less interesting than the results of her professional activities are her biography and the path to science.
Intriguing facts contain her diaries and correspondence between Jung and Freud, published in the early 80s, which made a splash in the world of psychoanalysis. The secrets of this woman's life still raise more questions than answers.
Sabina's parents
Spielrein Sabina Nikolaevna, whose real name is Sheive, was the eldest of the children. She was born on October 25 (November 7, according to the old style) in 1885 in a fairly we althy Jewish family. At that time they lived in Rostov-on-Don. The father insisted that the daughter be able to attend a prestigious kindergarten in Warsaw, in the homeland of her parents. Therefore, in the period from 1890 to 1894, the familywas there.
Father and head of the family - Nikolai Arkadievich Shpilrein (Naftael, or Naftuliy Movshevich, or Moshkovich) - was an entomologist by education, but did not work by profession and succeeded in trade. He was a manufacturer and seller of cattle feed. Later, Nikolai Arkadevich became a merchant of the first, and after the second guild.
Mom, Evva Markovna Lyublinskaya (after the marriage of Spielrein), was a dentist by education. She had her apartment building on three floors in the city center, where apartments were rented out. She practiced dentistry until 1903, after which she devoted herself to the family and the upbringing of children. There were many respected rabbis in her family, including Evva Markovna's father.
Despite the severity of orders and traditions, the family led a secular lifestyle.
In 1917 the property of the Spielrein couple was confiscated.
The fate of brothers and sisters
The eldest of the brothers, Jan, was born in 1887. Subsequently, he became a well-known Soviet mathematician and engineer, a specialist in theoretical mechanics and electrical engineering. By 1921 he was already a professor, in 1933 he became a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1934 he received his doctorate in technical sciences. He was married to Sylvia Borisovna Ryss.
The second brother, Isaac, was born in 1891. He chose psychology as a profession and studied at the Universities of Heidelberg and Leipzig. Achieved notable success in this field of knowledge, because he rememberedto the domestic and world scientific community as the author of psychotechnics. He was engaged in the study of the psychology of labor, methods of its rationalization, etc., took an active part in the work of its scientific organization in the Soviet Union. In addition, he headed the All-Russian Society of Psychotechnics and Applied Psychophysiology and the International Psychotechnical Association.
Third brother, Emil, born in 1899. After graduating from the Don University, he became an assistant professor and dean of the Rostov University at the Faculty of Biology. Emil is better known to the scientific world under the surname Spielrein.
All three, despite their position in the scientific world, were shot as a result of political repression: Isaac in 1937, and Jan and Emil in 1938. All three were later rehabilitated posthumously.
More than anyone in the world Spielrein Sabina Nikolaevna loved her younger sister Emilia. But in 1901, a six-year-old girl contracted typhoid fever and died soon after.
The tragedy of Sabina and other causes of mental disorders
The main cause of Sabina's neurosis is the death of her beloved sister. However, some experts, in particular Renate Höfer, Ph. D., who works in psychotherapy and supervision, have a different opinion. In Renata's book "Psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein", the biography of the heroine is studied in detail and framed in a psychological portrait, taking into account all the joyful love experiences and heavy mental anguish. According to the author, the death of her sister was far from the only and not the main reason for the illness of this woman.
Renata writes that from the veryIn her early years, Sabina Spielrein experienced the physical punishment of her father and, very likely, sexual abuse from adults. By the age of three, she already had serious mental disorders that did not leave her even at a young age. The sight of her father's right hand regularly punishing her made her aroused, which led to excessively frequent acts of self-gratification.
From time to time she fantasized about having unlimited power, and this helped her calm down for a while. However, from the age of sixteen, she began to be overcome by night terrors and hallucinations, and by the age of eighteen, mental attacks began to occur more often, after which she fell into depression.
Psychiatric clinic for Sabina
Sabina Spielrein was a capable student, and nervous breakdowns did not prevent her from graduating from high school with a gold medal in 1903. Her passion was medicine, but due to an unstable mental state, her studies at the University of Zurich had to be postponed.
First, Evva Markovna made an unsuccessful attempt to improve her daughter's well-being in the Swiss sanatorium of Dr. Geller in the spring of 1904. After that, Sabina was sent to the Burghölzli clinic, which at that time was in charge of Professor Eigen Bleuler (Eugen Bleuler).
This is where Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein first met. At first, the director himself was involved in the treatment of hysteria in the girl, and then Jung was the senior doctor of the clinic and subsequently the deputy chief physician. Therapy in the clinic lasted about 10 months, from August 1904 to June 1905, after whichtreatment became outpatient and continued until 1909
Sabina was the first patient that Jung tried to cure with the help of psychoanalytic techniques based on the theories of Freud. And although there were some skirmishes between the patient and the staff, accompanied by suicidal manifestations, the treatment turned out to be very successful, which allowed Sabina to realize her plans for studying at the university and enter it as early as April 1905.
Professional activities
During the treatment at the clinic, Sabina Spielrein took part in various experiments, including the associative one. There she got acquainted with the subject of Jung's dissertation, which de alt with the stratification of the conscious and the unconscious - schizophrenia. Therefore, it is absolutely natural that during her studies Sabina became interested in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and pedology.
In the spring of 1909, Sabina passed her final exams and joined the Burghölzli clinic as an intern. During this time, she continued to work on her doctoral dissertation, which was supervised by Jung. Despite the ups and downs in her personal life, in the spring of 1911 she successfully defended it and published it in a magazine edited by her mentor.
From the autumn of 1911 to the spring of 1912, Sabina was in Austria, where she was able to personally get to know Sigmund Freud (Freud) and was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Then she visited Russia with lectures and there she met her future husband, Pavel Naumovich (FaivelNotovich) Sheftel.
In 1913, Sabina Nikolaevna left for Europe. There she was engaged in publications, performances; worked in various medical institutions, including Eugen Bleuler, Karl Bonhoeffer, Eduard Claparede; studied psychoanalysis with Freud and Jung, became the psychoanalyst of Jean Piaget.
In 1923 she returned to Russia and joined the Russian psychoanalytic society. She was engaged in professional activities in this field, created a psychotherapeutic orphanage and managed it, gave lectures.
In 1925, she spoke for the last time at a congress of psychoanalysts. Then she continued to work in the chosen field, published articles.
Since 1936, psychoanalysis was banned in the USSR.
It is worth noting that Sabina Spielrein had high hopes for working in Russia. The quotes about this are quite famous, she returned "to work with pleasure" - doing science gave her real pleasure. However, in these last 20 years of her life, the Soviet regime left her with nothing to do for her life.
Scientific work
Sabina Spielrein's theory speaks of the duality of sexual attraction. On the one hand, sexual intercourse should carry positive emotions, especially since this process is associated with procreation. On the other hand, it acts destructively on the inner world of a person.
In addition, Spielrein argued, during the act, a certain disintegration of the main extracts occurs - the masculine takes on the features of the feminine, and vice versa. And pleasure and fearare destructive to the sex drive itself.
This is where the intrapersonal conflict comes in. Sabina Spielrein noticed that many of her patients, when they have the opportunity to realize their desire, have fear and a desire to run away, fear that this is the pinnacle of everything, and nothing like this will happen after.
In addition, Spielrein for the first time raises the question of the death drive as the primary instinct of human existence, of masochism, designating the sadistic component as a destructive drive.
Sabina Spielrein: personal life
About Sabina's love for her attending physician, her parents became aware in the fall of 1905. The girl's mother even wanted Freud to continue the treatment, but everything remained the same due to other circumstances.
Sabina Spielrein herself never hid her feelings for Jung, and, as the diary entries testify, she even wanted a child from him. In the summer of 1908, Jung admitted that the girl was extremely attractive to him, and that he was no longer able to restrain his desire for her (despite the presence of a wife). From that moment on, they were united not only by psychoanalysis.
While working in the clinic, their relationship had a conflict, and subsequently, in the spring of 1909, Jung left his job. Then Sabina began to correspond with Freud. Jung, after the scandal and the details of their relationship open to the public, said that he was a supporter of polygamy.
In 1909, Sabina resumed her relationship with Jung to work on her dissertation. In 1912, she married Sheftel, andat the end of 1913, their first daughter, Renata (Irma Renata), was born to them, and in the summer of 1926, a second girl named Eva.
In the period from 1913 to 1925-1926. Sabina did not live with her husband. He was in Rostov, she was in Europe and since 1924 in Moscow, but after the couple resumed relations. During this time, Sheftel met with another woman who gave birth to a daughter from him.
In the summer of 1937, Sheftel died of a heart attack, although there were suggestions that he committed suicide due to fear of reprisals. In 1941, Sabina Spielrein-Sheftel refused to believe in the brutality of the German soldiers and did not evacuate from Rostov. In July 1942, the house where Sabina lived with her daughters burned down.
On August 11-12, 1942, tens of thousands of Jews, among whom were Sabina Spielrein-Sheftel and both of her daughters, were shot in the Zmievskaya gully.
Epilogue. Jung - Sabina - Freud
In the late 70s, a suitcase with Sabina's personal materials was found in the archive of Edouard Claparede. It turned out that before leaving for Russia, she left her diaries there, correspondence with Jung and Freud (which she kept until 1923), some articles and research materials. These documents, in particular diaries and letters, produced the effect of an exploding bomb on the world scientific community.
It turned out that from the very beginning of Jung's treatment of Sabina and the manifestation of her feelings for him, Freud was aware of this. However, he did not condemn his colleague, because he did not consider this something immoral or wrong, and even sympathized with him to some extent. Considering Freud's position,analysts began to talk about a "collusion" between Jung and Freud, in which Sabina became a bargaining chip.
Jung then needed material for writing a dissertation, and Sabina was not only a suitable option, including in terms of financial security, but also a very interesting person who pushed the scientist to new ideas. There is no doubt about this, since both Jung and Freud used the ideas voiced by Sabina in their further work. Therefore, the continuation of work with her for Jung was much more necessary than the observance of morality, especially, according to Freud himself, for the world of psychoanalysis, the connection between a doctor and a patient is not new.
On the other hand, in addition to the mental anguish of unrequited feelings, meeting these two men gave her the world of psychoanalysis and her life's work.
Sabina Spielrein became the first woman in Europe to receive a doctorate in psychology. She was among the "pioneers" of psychoanalysis, but was forgotten for half a century. And only the opening of the archive gave both her and her works a second life. Based on the documents, several films have been shot, books have been written. And in fact, this interest is quite justified.
Normal 0 false false false RU X-NONE X-NONE
