The image, ideas, and method of Sabina Spielrein

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of the key ideas and features of the scientific method of the outstanding Soviet psychiatrist, pioneer of child and female psychoanalysis S.N. Spielrein. The author pays attention to the analysis of the prevailing stereotypes of perception of Spielrein in scientific literature. The reasons why Spielrein’s legacy was not properly claimed for a long time in the West and in Russia, despite the popularity of psychoanalysis after the October Revolution, are revealed. The hypothesis of why a one-sided view of Spielrein’s role in the history of psychology, characterized by hypertrophied attention to her personal relationship with C. G. Jung, has been put forward. The author shows how Spielrein influenced the development of key concepts of analytical psychology and how Jung assessed this influence, and analyzes her empirical justification of Jung’s theory of complexes. In addition, the author considers in the context of the later discoveries of analytical psychology Spielrein’s ideas about the psychogenesis of schizophrenia, the phylogenesis and ontogenesis of the psyche, the species-psyche (a notion, which became the prototype of the collective unconscious), destruction as a striving for transformation, the inheritance of psychic structures, arising from the species-psyche. Spielrein’s approaches to the study of the psyche are analyzed. Particular emphasis is placed on the way Spielrein interprets the symbolic contents of the psyche, which resembles Jung’s approach and contrasts strongly with what was common among orthodox psychoanalysts. It is also shown how Spielrein became one of the first in psychology to successfully implement an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the psyche.