Sabina Spielrein

Sabina Spielrein (1885 to 1942) was a Russian physician and one of the first female psychoanalysts. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don, she first came to Carl Gustav Jung as a patient, then became his student and later his colleague, and she also corresponded with Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysed the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. She worked as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, teacher and paediatrician in Switzerland and Russia, and over a thirty-year career published more than thirty-five papers in German, French and Russian on psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics and educational psychology. Her 1912 essay on destruction as the cause of coming into being was an early statement of what Freud later called the death drive, and she conducted one of the first psychoanalytic case studies of early schizophrenia. She was killed in 1942 with other Jews of Rostov-on-Don by a Nazi SS death squad. She is now recognised as an innovative thinker who was marginalised in her own time.