Mapped out the human psyche for the 20th century
Both friends and rival
Their partnership lasted a short time 1907 - 1913 - bitterly divided.
Jung - paid a visit to Freud in Vienna - talking for 13 hours without interruption "tremendously interesting"
They had been corresponding since 1906. Jung sent a diagnostic assopciation studies - psychoanalysis and association experiments - argue the strength of Freuds views of discipline.
Nearing 50 Freud was established and head of psychoanalytic movement - studies on histeria, interpretation of dreams and psychopathology.
Jung - 30 - Pioneering hospital just outside Zurich - Burgholzli clinic.
Deidre Bear - Jung's biographer.
Father a country parson in Swiss reformed church - limited environment. Coupled with religiong emphasis on spiritism - communicating with the dead. His family known for this - seances.
After educated at Uni of Basle - went to work at Burgholzli - very poor.
Pretended he was utterly engrossed so couldn't go out for the simple reason he had no money nor clothing to go out socialising with the other young men.
Jung worked under the hospital director Eugen Bleuler - lived and worked with the students.
Jung lived with Emma his wife within the clinic.
Jung was interested in the scientifics of humans. He wanted to know what was going on with schizophrencs. These people were not available with private patients. People with this diagnosis were out of the general society.
These hospitals were whole citied or towns - ha everything needed for a whole life. The doctors were like masters of their Universe.
1904 - troubled young Russian woman. Relationship that went far beyond what would be ethically tolerated today.
Puberty started at 13 - fantasises developed of a perverse nature that pursued her obsessively.
She could not sit at a table without thinking about these fantasies. There was some link with her father according to Jung.
Her family brought her to Zurich. She had a history of being analysed. Blueler passed her onto Jung.
Her father beat her when she was a young child. She spoke of feelings of orgasm and induced masturbation. Highly charged sexualised child.
Her mother made certain that any school she went to there was never any teachings about sex. Sabrina was ill-educated sexually which may have led to confusions. Tabelra rasa - she knew nothing
She could not feel her fathers hands without feeling sexual excitement.
She would convulsively laugh or gestures of horror if she was reproached for any reason which would become blatant mastrubation.
She would eat with the doctor and spend time with him. She would act out but was told she needed to behave if she wanted to spend time with Jung.
He spent time sailing on the lake and spending time talking. Her euphermism for sex was poetry . There was no evidence that there were lovers but poems suggest that there might have been something between them.
(Oh I see there is a film to be released in January called a Dangerous Method based on this relationship between Jung and Sabrina Spielrein)
This article was in the Telegraph - Aug2011. It's so interesting finding out all these little sub plots behind the greater stories we hear about generally.
Jung Love: Sabina Spielrein, a forgotten pioneer of psychoanalysis
A new film starring Keira Knightley documents the torrid and ultimately tragic life of Sabina Spielrein, patient, pupil, rumoured lover of Carl Jung, and one of the forgotten pioneers of psychoanalysis.
Sabina Spielrein, a pioneer of psychoanalysis Photo: MIA OVERGAARD
7:00AM BST 28 Aug 2011
Think of the last time you described someone as having a 'complex’. Or as an 'introvert’. Or as having 'subconsciously’ let something slip. This time last century these words – these concepts – were entirely new.
They’ve become common parlance only thanks to Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, champions of what was then the mysterious and fashionable new science of psychoanalysis.
Their game-changing theories and turbulent friendship is the stuff of great drama. But David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method, which premieres at the Venice Film Festival next week, encompasses a third figure: a young woman whom Jung first analysed then became passionately involved with, whom the two men wrote to and about for years, and who inspired some of their most important ideas.
Sabina Spielrein (played by Keira Knightley) was dropped off at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich by her uncle and a medical police officer at 10.30pm on 17 August 1904.
The wealthy Jewish-Russian 18-year-old was in Switzerland for a restorative sojourn that had failed to ease her troubled state of mind. She made a terrible scene – presumably not the first – at the luxury hotel where she was staying and her relatives gave up.
Ambitious and eager to join the race to uncover the mysteries of the mind, Jung decided to try out a new technique on her, one he’d read about in a book by a Viennese neurologist called Sigmund Freud. This was psychoanalysis, later dubbed the 'talking cure’ – the dangerous method of the film’s title.
Jung was particularly keen on the 'word-association experiment’: a series of random words were fired at the patient, who had to respond with the first thing that came to mind. Jung noticed that mentions of the girl’s father provoked 'grimaces and gestures of abhorrence’.
Gradually, an extraordinary family portrait emerged. Spielrein’s mother, Jung discovered, 'has the odd habit of buying everything she sees’. She then 'has to borrow from relatives’ and 'there is constant anxiety that the father might find out about this’.
According to John Kerr, the author of A Most Dangerous Method, on which Cronenberg’s film is based, she also 'competed with her adolescent daughter for the attentions of various men’. Spielrein’s father, meanwhile 'insults and tyrannises’ the family, frequently going 'wild and threatening suicide’. Spielrein is 'always afraid that he will kill himself’.
Moreover, he frequently beat Sabina 'on her bare buttocks’ in a 'special room’ away from the family. Sabina, the eldest of five terrorised children (the youngest died of typhoid aged six), eventually confessed to Jung that she felt sexual excitement when her father beat her.
Kerr reveals that Spielrein’s mother had raised Sabina 'in complete sexual ignorance’, which may explain her confused reaction to these oddly intimate episodes with her father. Either way, she came to conflate suffering – both physical and emotional – with love.
Jung achieved amazing success with Spielrein. Within the year this exceptionally bright girl was living independently in Zurich and studying medicine at the university. Jung later claimed (in a letter to Freud, with whom he’d started corresponding during Spielrein’s treatment) that he maintained contact with her only because he 'feared a relapse’. Whatever the truth, five years of increasingly intense relations followed.
'I love you too much,’ she wrote to him in 1906. A year later Jung rather lewdly told Freud, 'she admits that her greatest wish is to have a child by me. For that purpose I would naturally have to “let the bird out” first.’
It’s clear from Jung’s letters that they were meeting every few days, in her flat 'so you are less inhibited’ or taking boat rides 'so we can be alone’. In 1908, when she went to Russia for the summer, Jung wrote, 'I realise how much more attached I am to you than I ever thought.’
By spring people were whispering about an affair. Spielrein’s mother received an anonymous letter (probably from Jung’s wife), which prompted her to write to Jung asking him not to 'ruin’ the girl he had saved.
His reply is startlingly callous: 'You do understand that a man and a girl cannot possibly continue indefinitely to have friendly dealings with one another without the likelihood that something more may enter the relationship.’
Until then, Jung and Spielrein’s meetings had been social. If she wanted him to remain strictly professional, he suggested, she should resume paying him : 'My fee is 10 francs per consultation.’
The rumour was widespread enough to reach Freud in Vienna. Jung, terrified for his reputation, wrote to him that 'a woman patient’ had 'kicked up a vile scandal’. He went on to say that he offered her friendship only to realise 'she was of course systematically planning my seduction’.
He admitted, however that, 'during the whole business Gross’s notions [he was referring to Otto Gross, an analyst, morphine addict and enthusiastic advocate of free love] flitted about a bit too much in my head.’
Spielrein was furious to be cast in the role of temptress and wrote to Freud to defend herself. He apologised for jumping to conclusions, commenting to Jung that she was 'very bright. There is meaning in everything she says.’ Freud continued to correspond with her for years, even after he and Jung had ceased all contact.
Despite this upset, Spielrein and Jung were back in touch within months – 'We both loved each other fervently again,’ she says in her diary – and remained so for most of the next decade.
It’s amazing to think that until 1977, when the first cache of Spielrein’s papers was discovered in the former Psychological Institute in Geneva (these letters formed the basis of an acclaimed 2003 documentary, My Name Was Sabina Spielrein), Spielrein existed only as four footnotes in the works of Sigmund Freud.
Jung was married with two children, and it is clear that his relationship with Spielrein was inappropriately intimate (whether it was sexual or not is the subject of debate). He was also Freud’s declared 'son and heir’; as the father of psychoanalysis, Freud certainly didn’t want to bring his baby into disrepute. But there was more to it than that.
Jung and Spielrein’s letters discussed theory at length. Just as Jung and Freud became increasingly distrustful of each other and possessive of their ideas, so too did Jung and Spielrein.
When he read her university dissertation on schizophrenia Jung told her, 'I am surprised by the abundance of excellent thoughts, which anticipate various ideas of my own. But it is good that others see things the same way as I do.’
He hung on to her next paper, 'Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being’ (written immediately after she graduated with top honours), for six months before commenting, 'As I read your paper I find uncanny parallels with my own new work.’ Somewhat improbably he explained, 'I had read your title incorrectly: “distinction” instead of “destruction”.’
Spielrein clearly exploded, for his next letter exclaims, 'You are upsetting yourself unnecessarily again!’ His reassurance that, 'your study is extraordinarily intelligent and contains splendid ideas whose priority I am happy to acknowledge as yours,’ is undercut by his assertion that, 'I express myself so differently from you in my work that no one could imagine you had borrowed from me.’
Jung – and Freud, too – were dismissive of her work even as they appropriated it. Eight years after reading Spielrein’s 'Destruction’ paper, Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Spielrein’s 'destructive drive’ – which Freud had told Jung 'was not much to my liking’ – forms the basis for his 'death instinct’. (He duly credited her in a footnote.)
Ten years later he remembered his 'defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged’, and wondered at 'how long it took before I became receptive to it’.
According to Coline Covington, who found more of Spielrein’s papers in 1995 and eventually published them in her book Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis in 2003, they couldn’t get past the fact that she was a former patient and a woman; they call her 'the little girl’ and 'the little authoress’ in their letters to each other.
But it was also because, as the two men’s relationship soured, each came to resent the other’s influence on Spielrein; they belittled her work as a means of disparaging each other.
When she presented her paper at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1912 – a bold move in view of the city’s rivalry with Jungian Zurich – Freud’s disciples were cool towards her, opining that 'the presentation provides the opportunity for a critique of Jung’.
Freud became sarcastic about her attachment to 'her Germanic hero’, while Jung smarted at her 'Freudian’ notions. She was at once the colleague of both men and neither.
That same year Spielrein suddenly married a Russian doctor, Paul Sheftel, and in 1913 they had a daughter. It seems it was a desperate attempt to forget Jung.
As Covington notes, Jung’s bouts of coldness and passionate despair contained more than an echo of her father’s temperament. Whether the parallels went as far as the film claims – Knightley and Fassbender (as Jung) plunge into a sado-masochistic affair – we simply can’t know.
For years Spielrein moved endlessly, seemingly incapable of settling anywhere or with anyone. She was lauded everywhere she went ( training analysts at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva, becoming the director of child psychology at the First Moscow University), but she always moved on before she became established.
Meanwhile, says Kerr, 'Jung was busy making her immortal.’ In the years following the First World War, Jung developed a means of categorising the mind. The 'persona’ was the outward personality. The 'anima’ was the soul.
He invested the anima with all sorts of qualities, some exhilarating and some dangerous which, Jung wrote, he’d recognised in 'a woman… a patient, a talented psychopath who had become a living figure in my mind’. Jung’s anima is Sabina Spielrein.
In 1924 she returned to her home town, Rostov-on-Don, where she reunited with her husband and gave birth to a second daughter. Biographical detail from then on is sketchy. What we do know is that on 27 July 1942 Hitler’s troops occupied Rostov-on-Don, herded Spielrein and her daughters through the streets and shot them.
A Dangerous Method goes on general release in February
So she became fixated on Jung as we have already read - she wanted his child. He let her become a student.
(Back to the programme) - Jung used word association to lead to the complexes underneath -
She went to medical school - he would meet with her and have conversations. No direct evidence that they were lovers. Her euphemism for sex was poetry and in her writings she mentions poetry in association with Jung. So it's possible they were lovers.
Sabrina brought Jung and Freud together.
First patient using Freudian methods of free talk - tics and offensive gestures were dissolved, Dreams were analysed and linked with masochist experiences as a child at the hands of her father.
Gradually she was cured.
Jung writes about Sabina to Freud.
Freud - was pleased Sabina was a student and therefore educated aiding research. He wrote
Stories suggest numerous analogies - even infants derive pleasure from their attention of feaces.
Anal auto eroticism - often typical characteristics or traits - often neat, stingy - sublimations of anal eroticism.
Freud guesses Jungs predicament and refers to the pscyhoanalytic cure through love - he urges Jung to dominate his counter-transference.
Ah ha mention of the film A Dangerous Method. The film is from the stage play by Christopher Hamption The Talking Cure. I hope some day I might be able to see that somewhere.
He ventriloquises Freud and his crown prince Jung.
Christopher Hampton says - the relationship as a very emotional relationship. Fredu the father figure.
The talking cure effected a miraculous cure for Sabina so Freud was very impressed with Jung.
He was embattled in Vienna at the time - his ideas being contested. But also Jews were subject to anti-semitism movements.
Freud was prone to enthusiasm by others as a result of this and when his works and ideas were being supporting.
He was conscious not to get involved in the arguement between the two of them. He wanted to stay true to the historical circumstances and not take a position. His lean was towards Freudian interpretation though as was Sabina's.
Freud and Jung travel to America in August 1909 - Freud delivers his lectures at Clark Uni
Things between them not OK
Jung recounts a dream and Freud interprets that Jung wants him dead. Wants to kill off the father.
Freud isn't ready to die. He pretends to faint a second time.
Over the years disagreements escalated between them
- the incest taboo, over sex and over religion.
Freud knew Jung was religious - where there is a religious transference apostasy will follow (a total desertion of or departure from one's religion, principles, party, cause, etc. )
Jung was jealous of his rivals' to Freuds attention
Freud jealous of conceptual unity and his own authority in the field.
Jungs heated outburst of Dec1912
He critiscised his finite analysis of father son relationships - treating his followers like patients.
Freud called for the ending of their relationship as a result of the outburst and malinguering disappointments. He accused him of having difficulties of having a relaitonship with a man.
6Jan1913 - Jung agreed to the split.
1938 Freud cam to London - seriously ill.
Jung was particularly keen on the 'word-association experiment’: a series of random words were fired at the patient, who had to respond with the first thing that came to mind. Jung noticed that mentions of the girl’s father provoked 'grimaces and gestures of abhorrence’.
Gradually, an extraordinary family portrait emerged. Spielrein’s mother, Jung discovered, 'has the odd habit of buying everything she sees’. She then 'has to borrow from relatives’ and 'there is constant anxiety that the father might find out about this’.
According to John Kerr, the author of A Most Dangerous Method, on which Cronenberg’s film is based, she also 'competed with her adolescent daughter for the attentions of various men’. Spielrein’s father, meanwhile 'insults and tyrannises’ the family, frequently going 'wild and threatening suicide’. Spielrein is 'always afraid that he will kill himself’.
Moreover, he frequently beat Sabina 'on her bare buttocks’ in a 'special room’ away from the family. Sabina, the eldest of five terrorised children (the youngest died of typhoid aged six), eventually confessed to Jung that she felt sexual excitement when her father beat her.
Kerr reveals that Spielrein’s mother had raised Sabina 'in complete sexual ignorance’, which may explain her confused reaction to these oddly intimate episodes with her father. Either way, she came to conflate suffering – both physical and emotional – with love.
Jung achieved amazing success with Spielrein. Within the year this exceptionally bright girl was living independently in Zurich and studying medicine at the university. Jung later claimed (in a letter to Freud, with whom he’d started corresponding during Spielrein’s treatment) that he maintained contact with her only because he 'feared a relapse’. Whatever the truth, five years of increasingly intense relations followed.
'I love you too much,’ she wrote to him in 1906. A year later Jung rather lewdly told Freud, 'she admits that her greatest wish is to have a child by me. For that purpose I would naturally have to “let the bird out” first.’
It’s clear from Jung’s letters that they were meeting every few days, in her flat 'so you are less inhibited’ or taking boat rides 'so we can be alone’. In 1908, when she went to Russia for the summer, Jung wrote, 'I realise how much more attached I am to you than I ever thought.’
By spring people were whispering about an affair. Spielrein’s mother received an anonymous letter (probably from Jung’s wife), which prompted her to write to Jung asking him not to 'ruin’ the girl he had saved.
His reply is startlingly callous: 'You do understand that a man and a girl cannot possibly continue indefinitely to have friendly dealings with one another without the likelihood that something more may enter the relationship.’
Until then, Jung and Spielrein’s meetings had been social. If she wanted him to remain strictly professional, he suggested, she should resume paying him : 'My fee is 10 francs per consultation.’
The rumour was widespread enough to reach Freud in Vienna. Jung, terrified for his reputation, wrote to him that 'a woman patient’ had 'kicked up a vile scandal’. He went on to say that he offered her friendship only to realise 'she was of course systematically planning my seduction’.
He admitted, however that, 'during the whole business Gross’s notions [he was referring to Otto Gross, an analyst, morphine addict and enthusiastic advocate of free love] flitted about a bit too much in my head.’
Spielrein was furious to be cast in the role of temptress and wrote to Freud to defend herself. He apologised for jumping to conclusions, commenting to Jung that she was 'very bright. There is meaning in everything she says.’ Freud continued to correspond with her for years, even after he and Jung had ceased all contact.
Despite this upset, Spielrein and Jung were back in touch within months – 'We both loved each other fervently again,’ she says in her diary – and remained so for most of the next decade.
It’s amazing to think that until 1977, when the first cache of Spielrein’s papers was discovered in the former Psychological Institute in Geneva (these letters formed the basis of an acclaimed 2003 documentary, My Name Was Sabina Spielrein), Spielrein existed only as four footnotes in the works of Sigmund Freud.
Jung was married with two children, and it is clear that his relationship with Spielrein was inappropriately intimate (whether it was sexual or not is the subject of debate). He was also Freud’s declared 'son and heir’; as the father of psychoanalysis, Freud certainly didn’t want to bring his baby into disrepute. But there was more to it than that.
Jung and Spielrein’s letters discussed theory at length. Just as Jung and Freud became increasingly distrustful of each other and possessive of their ideas, so too did Jung and Spielrein.
When he read her university dissertation on schizophrenia Jung told her, 'I am surprised by the abundance of excellent thoughts, which anticipate various ideas of my own. But it is good that others see things the same way as I do.’
He hung on to her next paper, 'Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being’ (written immediately after she graduated with top honours), for six months before commenting, 'As I read your paper I find uncanny parallels with my own new work.’ Somewhat improbably he explained, 'I had read your title incorrectly: “distinction” instead of “destruction”.’
Spielrein clearly exploded, for his next letter exclaims, 'You are upsetting yourself unnecessarily again!’ His reassurance that, 'your study is extraordinarily intelligent and contains splendid ideas whose priority I am happy to acknowledge as yours,’ is undercut by his assertion that, 'I express myself so differently from you in my work that no one could imagine you had borrowed from me.’
Jung – and Freud, too – were dismissive of her work even as they appropriated it. Eight years after reading Spielrein’s 'Destruction’ paper, Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Spielrein’s 'destructive drive’ – which Freud had told Jung 'was not much to my liking’ – forms the basis for his 'death instinct’. (He duly credited her in a footnote.)
Ten years later he remembered his 'defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged’, and wondered at 'how long it took before I became receptive to it’.
According to Coline Covington, who found more of Spielrein’s papers in 1995 and eventually published them in her book Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis in 2003, they couldn’t get past the fact that she was a former patient and a woman; they call her 'the little girl’ and 'the little authoress’ in their letters to each other.
But it was also because, as the two men’s relationship soured, each came to resent the other’s influence on Spielrein; they belittled her work as a means of disparaging each other.
When she presented her paper at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1912 – a bold move in view of the city’s rivalry with Jungian Zurich – Freud’s disciples were cool towards her, opining that 'the presentation provides the opportunity for a critique of Jung’.
Freud became sarcastic about her attachment to 'her Germanic hero’, while Jung smarted at her 'Freudian’ notions. She was at once the colleague of both men and neither.
That same year Spielrein suddenly married a Russian doctor, Paul Sheftel, and in 1913 they had a daughter. It seems it was a desperate attempt to forget Jung.
As Covington notes, Jung’s bouts of coldness and passionate despair contained more than an echo of her father’s temperament. Whether the parallels went as far as the film claims – Knightley and Fassbender (as Jung) plunge into a sado-masochistic affair – we simply can’t know.
For years Spielrein moved endlessly, seemingly incapable of settling anywhere or with anyone. She was lauded everywhere she went ( training analysts at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva, becoming the director of child psychology at the First Moscow University), but she always moved on before she became established.
Meanwhile, says Kerr, 'Jung was busy making her immortal.’ In the years following the First World War, Jung developed a means of categorising the mind. The 'persona’ was the outward personality. The 'anima’ was the soul.
He invested the anima with all sorts of qualities, some exhilarating and some dangerous which, Jung wrote, he’d recognised in 'a woman… a patient, a talented psychopath who had become a living figure in my mind’. Jung’s anima is Sabina Spielrein.
In 1924 she returned to her home town, Rostov-on-Don, where she reunited with her husband and gave birth to a second daughter. Biographical detail from then on is sketchy. What we do know is that on 27 July 1942 Hitler’s troops occupied Rostov-on-Don, herded Spielrein and her daughters through the streets and shot them.
A Dangerous Method goes on general release in February
So she became fixated on Jung as we have already read - she wanted his child. He let her become a student.
(Back to the programme) - Jung used word association to lead to the complexes underneath -
She went to medical school - he would meet with her and have conversations. No direct evidence that they were lovers. Her euphemism for sex was poetry and in her writings she mentions poetry in association with Jung. So it's possible they were lovers.
Sabrina brought Jung and Freud together.
First patient using Freudian methods of free talk - tics and offensive gestures were dissolved, Dreams were analysed and linked with masochist experiences as a child at the hands of her father.
Gradually she was cured.
Jung writes about Sabina to Freud.
Freud - was pleased Sabina was a student and therefore educated aiding research. He wrote
Stories suggest numerous analogies - even infants derive pleasure from their attention of feaces.
Anal auto eroticism - often typical characteristics or traits - often neat, stingy - sublimations of anal eroticism.
Freud guesses Jungs predicament and refers to the pscyhoanalytic cure through love - he urges Jung to dominate his counter-transference.
Ah ha mention of the film A Dangerous Method. The film is from the stage play by Christopher Hamption The Talking Cure. I hope some day I might be able to see that somewhere.
He ventriloquises Freud and his crown prince Jung.
Christopher Hampton says - the relationship as a very emotional relationship. Fredu the father figure.
The talking cure effected a miraculous cure for Sabina so Freud was very impressed with Jung.
He was embattled in Vienna at the time - his ideas being contested. But also Jews were subject to anti-semitism movements.
Freud was prone to enthusiasm by others as a result of this and when his works and ideas were being supporting.
He was conscious not to get involved in the arguement between the two of them. He wanted to stay true to the historical circumstances and not take a position. His lean was towards Freudian interpretation though as was Sabina's.
Freud and Jung travel to America in August 1909 - Freud delivers his lectures at Clark Uni
Things between them not OK
Jung recounts a dream and Freud interprets that Jung wants him dead. Wants to kill off the father.
Freud isn't ready to die. He pretends to faint a second time.
Over the years disagreements escalated between them
- the incest taboo, over sex and over religion.
Freud knew Jung was religious - where there is a religious transference apostasy will follow (a total desertion of or departure from one's religion, principles, party, cause, etc. )
Jung was jealous of his rivals' to Freuds attention
Freud jealous of conceptual unity and his own authority in the field.
Jungs heated outburst of Dec1912
He critiscised his finite analysis of father son relationships - treating his followers like patients.
Freud called for the ending of their relationship as a result of the outburst and malinguering disappointments. He accused him of having difficulties of having a relaitonship with a man.
6Jan1913 - Jung agreed to the split.
1938 Freud cam to London - seriously ill.
