La Pensee de Enfant.
RARE SIGNED OFFPRINT
BY ONE OF THE FIRST FEMALE ANALYSTS
Spielrein, Sabine. “Quelques analogies entre la pensée de l’enfant, celle de l’ aphasique et la pensée subconsciente.” Archives de psychologie, vol. 17, no. 72. Geneva: 1923
8vo.; 18pp; original printed wrappers; margins have been cropped with a small loss of text; overall age toning, with holes to spine from prior binding and several light pencil notations.
Offprint of “Quelques analogies entre la pensée de l’enfant, celle de l’ aphasique et la pensée subconsciente” (“Some Analogies Between the Thought of the Child, that of the Aphasic, and the Subconscious Mind”), from the Archives de Psychologie, one of the first psychoanalytic journals, which was founded in 1902 by Théodore Flournoy and Édouard Claparède, and printed articles on all aspects of psychology, with principal interests in psychic phenomena, the psychology of normal and abnormal children, and psychopathology.
A presentation copy, inscribed to Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Hans Christoffel and his wife: Herzliche Grüsse — S. Spielrein-Schef[tel] / Herren & Frau Dr. Christoffel / 17.VII. 192[3] (Best wishes — S. Spielrein-Schef[tel] / Dr. and Mrs. Christoffel / 17.July.192[3]).
Sabine Spielrein is primarily remembered now for the romantic relationship she entered into with her married analyst, Carl Jung, yet during her lifetime she was a well-regarded doctor who developed pioneering theories in child psychiatry and general psychoanalytic practice. Born into a wealthy Jewish family from the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, she endured a strict and, at times, abusive childhood. Her parents placed a heavy emphasis on education and languages, and Sabine grew up speaking Russian, German, French, and English. She initially met Jung in 1904, after she was admitted to the Burghölzli mental hospital near Zürich, Switzerland, for treatment of hysteria, and subsequently became his first patient; it was her case which apparently initiated the famous correspondence between Jung and Sigmund Freud. While officially released from the hospital in 1905, Spielrein remained Jung’s patient for several more years, and it was during this period that the intense affair with Jung began, which he ended in 1909 after determining it was detrimental to his career (Loewenberg, p. 76). She married a Russian physician named Pavel Scheftel in 1912, and later had two daughters.
Spielrein had first come to Zürich to attend medical school, and in 1906 she reentered the university to continue her studies, finally obtaining her doctorate in 1911; her dissertation, “Concerning the Psychological Content of a Case of Schizophrenia,” was the first one written by a woman that was psychoanalytically oriented. At the meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1911, she was elected to membership as only the second female doctor, and in 1912 she published her seminal work, “Destruction as the Cause of Being,” which is thought to have influenced Freud’s later theory of the death instinct (Covington, p. 71). Shortly after World War I broke out, Spielrein moved to Geneva to work at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, where she lectured and did clinical work, and was Jean Piaget’s analyst for eight months. She also continued publishing her writings, including this short paper for the Archives de Psychologie, which at that time was edited by both Piaget and her Swiss colleague, journal co-founder Édouard Claparède.
In 1923, following the publication of this paper, she returned to Russia after an absence of nine years, first to Moscow, and then to her hometown of Rostov, where she introduced psychoanalysis to the country, further developed her theories on child psychiatric development, and opened an esteemed nursery. However, Stalin’s 1936 edict banning psychoanalysis limited her ability to work, and following the invasion of Russia by Germany during World War II, Spielrein and her two daughters were executed in 1942 by a German death squad in Rostov.
In all, Spielrein wrote over thirty psychoanalytic papers, primarily in French and German, and many have not yet been translated. However, this is the only Spielrein autograph we have ever encountered. OCLC turns up only five copies of this particular edition of the journal, all in French-speaking European libraries, and there have been no inscriptions by Spielrein tracked by Book Prices Current since 1975.
References: Covington, Coline. Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis. London: Psychology Press, 2003; Loewenberg, Peter. “The Creation of a Scientific Community: The Burghölzli, 1902-1914,” in Fantasy and Reality in History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
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