Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology and the link between Darwinism and psychoanalytic theory. She was a pioneer of play therapy for children, and the first hospitalised psychiatric patient to progress to practising psycho-analysis.
She worked with, among others, Freud, Jung and Piaget; she was regarded as Freud’s standard-bearer. Yet she is remembered, if at all, as Jung’s mistress, a hysteric with a taste for spanking; David Cronenburg’s film A Dangerous Method, with Keira Knightley as Spielrein, has provided the only readily available version of her. John Launer’s aim is ‘to promote her recognition as one of the most original and underestimated thinkers of the last century’.
Spielrein grew up in Rostov, gateway to Tsarist Russia, in a ‘sugarcake’ rococo palace. Her father, a rich Jewish businessman, was a polyglot vegetarian, musical and politically aware.
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