Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon

Tatjana Aleinikowa (1931-2020)

Tatjana Veniaminovna Aleinikova was born in Rostov-on-Don. She graduated in 1954 from the Faculty of Biology and Soil Science of Rostov State University [Ростовском госуниверситете (РГУ)], specialising in human and animal physiology. From 1954 to 1960, she was a lecturer in normal physiology at the Rostov Medical School. In 1958, she earned her PhD with a dissertation on the restoration of the cortical visual system following its impairment in early life.
From 1960 on, Tatjana Aleinikova had worked at Rostov State University as a psychophysiologist and neurophysiologist. She was head of the laboratory for the study of visual information processing and taught at the Department of Human and Animal Physiology — initially as an assistant, later as an associate professor, and, after receiving her habilitation in 1983 with a dissertation on visual information processing in frogs, as a full professor from 1984. Since 1995, she had been a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Starting in 1960, she additionally offered introductory lectures on psychoanalysis at Rostov State University. As long as Freud's teachings were not officially permitted in Russia, she conveyed psychoanalytic content under the guise of the physiology of higher nervous activity. Since 1985, she offered a seminar on the basics of classic psychoanalysis for psychologists, philosophers, and biologists. In 1996, Tatjana Aleinikova began to practice as a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist. She became a member of the Rostov Psychoanalytic Society in 1997, serving as its honorary president from 2002, and a member of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in 2004. Since 2007, she had also been a member of the European Association for Psychotherapy.
Aleinikova authored around 300 scientific publications on topics ranging from neurophysiology, psychophysiology, and neurocybernetics to psychoanalysis and "psychocorrection". She developed her own interdisciplinary psychotherapeutic approach based on neurophysiology, psychophysiology, and psychoanalysis, becoming the founder of the Rostov school of psychoanalysis. According to her approach, not only the analysand's psychodynamics (in the Freudian sense) and his social circumstances must be taken into account, but also his neurophysiological functions and psychophysiological personality type.
Tatjana Aleinikova was married to the Russian biologist Gennady Ivannikov (*1930), though the marriage lasted only a few years. She had a son, Alexander Gennadyevich Ivannikov (*1955), who became known as a poet, and a daughter, Anna Yuryevna Aleinikova (*1964). (Top of the article)

Rosa Awerbuch (1883-1940)

Rosa Abramovna Averbuch (also: Roza Averbukh) was born in Kazan, in the Russian Republic of Tatarstan. Her younger sister Rebekka Abramovna Averbuch was a well-known historian. Rosa Averbuch attended the girls’ gymnasium in Kazan until 1899 and studied medicine from 1901 to 1909 in Bern and Zurich, where she earned her doctorate in 1909. She might have come into contact with the circle around C.G. Jung during this time and got to know psychoanalysis. Back in Kazan, she completed her studies at the medical faculty of Kazan University in 1911. From 1912 to 1917, she was involved in the elected regional administration, which was responsible for the development of the healthcare system. In 1917, she started working at the university clinic of Kazan and taught at the clinical institute from 1921 to 1923.
In 1921, her Russian translation of Sigmund Freud’s Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse was published. In 1922, she became a member of the Kazan Psychoanalytical Society, founded that same year by Alexander Luria. In September 1922, she delivered a lecture there on the psychosexual motives of an intellectual who had protested the confiscation of church treasures, an action being taken by the Soviet government to save the Russian population from starvation. Her colleague Nikolai Ossipov sharply criticised her case analysis, viewing it as a violation of the principle of political neutrality. Rosa Averbuch, like Luria, belonged to a group of Kazan analysts who advocated the compatibility of psychoanalysis and Marxism.
In 1923, she moved to Moscow and joined the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, remaining a member until its dissolution in 1930. She worked at the State Psychoanalytic Institute, where she led a seminar on the psychoanalysis of religious systems, and served as an assistant physician at the psychoanalytic polyclinic directed by Moshe Wulff. She also collaborated in Vera Schmidt's psychoanalytic children's home laboratory. From 1925 onward, she was additionally employed at the Institute for Experimental Psychology and was part of the circle around Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. One of her main interests was the psychoanalytic interpretation of the works of Vasily Rozanov, whose philosophical studies, in her view, closely align with Sigmund Freud's theories, especially Rozanov's writings on religion and sexuality. (Top of the article)

Lia Geschelina (1892-1972?)

The Russian physician Liya Solomonovna Geshelina was, during the first half of the 1920s, among the staff of the State Psychoanalytic Institute and Vera Schmidt's psychoanalytic Children's Home Laboratory in Moscow. From 1924, she was a member of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society [Русское психоаналитическое общество] until its dissolution in 1930 during the Stalinist cultural revolution.
In the second half of the 1920s, Liya Geshelina worked as a pedologist in Moscow. From this period dates her study on the modern preschool child, published in the journal Pedologija. Based on a 1925/1926 research she conducted with Moscow kindergarten children from working-class and white-collar families, she described the influence of social and economic conditions on the children’s physical development. In the 1930s, like Vera Schmidt and Rosa Averbuch, she was part of the research team led by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, founder of the sociocultural theory. Geshelina’s records of Vygotsky’s research protocols on disabled children were lost after her death.
She became particularly known for an experimental study on the structure and development of perception, which she conducted around 1930 as a collaborator of Vygotsky (Vygotski 1930). In this study, she compared normal children with deaf-mute or mentaly retarded children, demonstrating that language, at an early age, influences and alters the development of visual thinking and perception. In 1949, she co-authored a study on the application of sleep therapy in schizophrenic patients. with Roman Y. Lyusternik. In the Soviet Union, she was among the psychiatrists who, during the 1960s, advocated for the psychotherapeutic treatment of schizophrenia. (Top of the article)

Tatjana Ignatjewna Goldowskaja (1898-1978)

The Russian psychiatrist Tatiana Ignatyevna Goldovskaya was an associate member of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (RPS) [Русское психоаналитическое общество] from 1927 to 1930. Founded in 1922 by Ivan Ermakov and Moshe Wulff, the RPS was officially dissolved in 1930. In the 1920s and 1930s, T. I. Goldovskaya worked as an assistant physician at the Institute for Neuropsychiatric Prophylaxis [Институт невропсихиатрической профилактики] in Moscow, which was headed by the leading Soviet psychiatrist Lev Markovich Rosenstein. Formerly a polyclinic, the institute consisted of an outpatient clinic, several laboratories, and a psychohygiene department that conducted studies in factories and workplaces.
As a collaborator of Lev Rosenstein, Goldovskaya contributed to the development of the theoretical foundations for a psychohygienic reorientation of Soviet psychiatry. Their approach, which combined medical prevention with psychohygiene and pedology, Bechterev’s reflexology, and Freud’s psychoanalysis, was intended to be applied not only in psychiatric contexts but also in the field of education. However, in 1936, both psychohygiene and pedology were condemned by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and in the same year, Stalin banned the teachings of Freud.
Since the 1940s, Tatiana Ignatyevna Goldovskaya worked as a research associate at the Moscow State Research Institute of Psychiatry. In 1964, she completed her habilitation at the Pavlov State Medical University in Ryazan. She authored numerous works on clinical, social, and organisational aspects of psychiatric care in the Soviet Union.
It is possible that she was related to E. D. Goldovsky, a member of a psychoanalytic group in Kyiv, who was also an associate member of the RPS between 1927 and 1930. (Top of the article)

Ekaterina Goltz (1889/1892-1944)

Ekaterina Pavlovna Goltz was born in Moscow, the daughter of an engineer. Her brother, Georgy Pavlovich Goltz, was a well-known Soviet architect. She graduated in medicine and practiced as a specialist in physiology. In 1927, she became an associate member and in 1930 a full member of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (RPS). At the end of 1927, she presented her paper on “Observations during the earthquake in Crimea” at the RPS. She described the psychological reactions of earthquake survivors, such as regressive behavior, disturbances in time perception, and a weakening of superego control. In the case of individuals who showed no reaction to the danger at all, she inferred the presence of an unconscious death wish.
During the Stalinist cultural revolution, the Russian Psychoanalytic Society was dissolved in 1930. Ekaterina Goltz, who lived with her brother’s family in Moscow, worked during the 1930s as a physiologist at the All-Union Institute for Experimental Medicine.
In 1939, she was arrested, presumably because she belonged to the circle of friends around Yevgenia Khayutina, the wife of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the Soviet secret police NKVD, who himself fell victim of the Stalinist purges. In 1940, Ekaterina Goltz was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp for “counterrevolutionary agitation and anti-Soviet connections.” During her imprisonment, she worked as a doctor at the prison hospital of Sevzheldorlag and, in 1941, gave a presentation at a pellagra conference in Knyazhpogost on “Avitaminosis of the eye.” She was released early in April 1944 for health reasons. However, on her way home, she died suddenly, presumably of a stroke. (Top of the article)

Natalia Iljina née Vokach (1882-1963)

Natalia Nikolayevna Vokach-Iljina was born into a noble family in Moscow, the daughter of the jurist Nikolai Antonovich Vokach and his wife Maria Andreyevna Muromtseva. In 1906, after graduating from the literature department of Vladimir Guerrier's Higher Courses for Women in Moscow, Natalia Vokach married the Russian philosopher Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin (1883–1954), who also came from an aristocratic family.
Ivan Ilyin underwent analysis with Hanns Sachs and, in 1914, he was about six weeks in analysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna. During this stay in Vienna, Natalia Iljina-Vokach also met Freud. Whether she herself underwent analysis is unknown. In any case, in 1922 she was, like her husband, a founding member of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in Moscow.
In the same year, Ivan Ilyin was sentenced to exile for anti-communist activities. Following the 1917 Revolution, Natalia Iljina and her husband were among the opponents of the Bolshevik regime and were exiled in 1922 along with other scientists, philosophers, and writers on one of the so-called “philosophers' ships.” They settled in Berlin, where Ivan Ilyin taught philosophy of law at the Russian Academic Institute. Despite his sympathies for fascism, Ilyin lost his professorship in 1934 after Hitler came to power. The Ilyins emigrated to Switzerland in 1938 and lived in Zollikon until the end of their lives.
Natalia Iljina wrote philosophical and historical studies and translated books and essays into Russian together with her husband. Her most important work is considered to be Izgnanie Normannov [The Expulsion of the Normans], in which she criticised the so-called Normanist theory of a Scandinavian origin of Russia as a Russophobic distortion of history and advocated the hypothesis of East Slavic roots of the Rus. With this "anti-Normanist" position, she was in line with Soviet historiography. (Top of the article)

Sophia Liosner-Kannabich (1876-1968)

Sophia Abramovna Liosner, born in Vitebsk, Belarus, was one of the first female psychiatrists in Russia. In 1894, she began studying natural sciences at the Sorbonne in Paris but later transferred to the Faculty of Medicine in Montpellier, where she earned her doctorate in 1903 with a dissertation on the use of protective masks during surgery.
She declined a job offer in Algeria and returned to Russia. Around this time, she married her first husband, who was a well-known psychiatrist at the time. Sophia Liosner worked as a rural doctor in the Zvenigorod district and, after further medical training in St. Petersburg, passed the examination to obtain her medical license in 1907. She then worked at the private psychiatric clinic of Yuri Loewenstein [Лечебница Юрия Левенштейна] and participated in the First Congress of the Russian Union of Psychiatrists and Neurologists in 1911.
In 1917, Sophia Liosner purchased a manor house in Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo, northwest of Moscow, and established a private psychiatric sanatorium there. Two years later, the Streshnevo Sanatorium was municipalised by the Soviet of Workers’ and Red Army Deputies. The psychiatric clinic, known as ПКБ №12, was named after psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Yuri Vladimirovich Kannabikh (1872–1939), Liosner's second husband, who practiced there from 1921 to 1938.
Yuri Kannabikh was a co-founder of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (RPS) in 1922 and served as its last president from 1928 to 1930. Sophia Liosner-Kannabich was a member of the RPS until it was dissolved in 1930 in the course of the Stalinist Cultural Revolution. From 1936 to 1941, she was a research associate at the Moscow polyclinic of the Central Psychiatric Institute of the RSFSR People’s Commissariat for Health. Starting in 1942, she worked in the field of medical assessment of work incapacity.
In 1934, Sophia Liosner and Yuri Kannabikh described a pseudo-hallucination that became known as the Kannabikh-Liosner Symptom [Каннабиха–Лиознера симптом]. It takes the form of soundless calls from completely unfamiliar individuals and addresses to the patients using diminutive forms of their names and is characteristic of early-stage or rudimentary schizophrenia. (Top of the article)

Militsa Nechkina (1901-1985)

The Soviet historian Militsa Vassilyevna Nechkina was born in Nizhyn, Ukraine. Her father, a technical engineer, was the director of the Nizhyn Technical School. In 1918, she became a student in the History and Philology Faculty of Kazan University, where she graduated in 1921. In 1922, like Rosa Averbuch, she was among the first members of the Kazan Psychoanalytical Society, founded that same year by Alexander Luria. The Kazan group was presumably the first in Russia to hold discussions on the compatibility of psychoanalysis and Marxism. In 1923, Nechkina gave a lecture at the Kazan Society on psychoanalytic mechanisms in Gustav Meyrink’s Golem.
In 1924, Militsa Nechkina moved to Moscow and taught political economy and history in the Workers’ Faculty of the First Moscow State University, as well as the history of the USSR in the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. At the same time, from 1924 to 1927, she worked as a senior research fellow at the Historical Institute of the Russian Association of Research Institutes of Social Sciences. In 1925, she married the chemist and pedagogue David Arkadyevich Epstein (1898–1985), whom she had met at the Workers’ Faculty.
In 1936, she earned her doctorate under Mikhail Pokrovsky on "A. S. Griboyedov and the Decembrists". That year, Nechkina began her long-standing work at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, where she taught and conducted research on Russian history for almost 50 years. Her work, which was awarded three Orders of Lenin and the Stalin Prize, is primarily devoted to the history of the Decembrists and the revolutionary movements in 19th-century Russia. (Top of the article)

Sara Neiditsch (1875-1966)

Sara Adolfowna Neiditsch* was born into a Jewish family in Pinsk, then in the Russian Empire. She was one of ten children of the merchant Yehuda-Adolf Neiditsch and Bracha-Bertha Neiditsch. After the death of their parents, she cared for her youngest sister Olga until they moved to St. Petersburg to join their brother Isak Neiditsch; then they moved with him to Moscow. In 1901, she began her medical studies in Halle, continued in Bern, and from 1905 to 1907 in Zurich, where she became friends with her co-student Tatiana Rosenthal.
In 1907, Sara Neiditsch returned to Russia, where she explored the early stirrings of psychoanalysis and wrote her pioneering paper on the subject. In 1910, she completed her MD in Berlin with a thesis on the question of cancer contagion. From summer 1909 at least through winter 1912/13, she was registered as a (presumably postdoctoral) medical student at the University of Geneva. She continued working through 1914 at the University of Geneva’s ophthalmology clinic. It is unlikely that she was in Russia at the time of the October Revolution, as her siblings had to flee from the Bolsheviks.
By the end of 1920, Sara Neiditsch was back in Berlin and worked at Max Eitingon's newly founded Psycho-Analytical Policlinic, conducting analyses with patients. When Tatiana Rosenthal committed suicide in Petrograd in 1921, Neiditsch wrote an obituary for her friend and colleague and published a report on the state of psychoanalysis in Russia after 1917.
Presumably Sara Neiditsch did not return to Russia, her name was missing in the membership list of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, founded in 1922. She eventually joined her brother Isak in Paris, who had established himself in France as an alcohol and sugar industrialist. During the 1920s and 1930s, she practiced as a psychoanalyst in Paris, but was never listed as a member of any psychoanalytic association. In 1925, she attended as a “membre adhérent" the 29th Congress of the "Médecins Aliénistes et Neurologistes de France et des Pays de Langue Française" in Paris.
After the German invasion of France in 1940, most of the Neiditsch clan managed to get out and to reach the United States. Sara Neiditsch remained in Paris and survived the German occupation alongside her sister Fania, hiding in a secret location. She lived for another 20 years until she died in Paris. (Top of the article)

• *For the different spellings of her name, see Ginor und Remez 2020
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Angela Rohr née Müllner (1890-1985)

Angela Rohr was born as Angela Helene Müllner in Znaim, Austria-Hungary. Her father was a railway conductor and a supporter of German nationalism. She attended the girls' lyceum run by Eugenie Schwarzwald in Vienna but left school before the Matura and married Leopold Hubermann (1888–1928), a Polish expressionist writer and the father of her daughter Ligeia. After the marriage failed, Angela Hubermann began studying medicine as an autodidact in Paris in 1914.
That same year, she moved to Switzerland to recover from TBC and continue her medical studies. In Zurich, she moved in Dadaist circles, where she met the German publicist Simon Guttmann (1891–1990), with whom she entered into a two-year marriage of convenience in 1916. Starting in 1914, she published literary texts, most of them in the expressionist magazine Die Aktion. In 1919, she befriended Rainer Maria Rilke in Locarno.
In the early 1920s, Angela Hubermann settled in Berlin and, in 1921, became a candidate at the newly founded Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (BPI). She joined the circle around Otto Fenichel and was particularly interested in ethnopsychoanalysis. At the BPI, she presented papers about subjects such as sexual symbolism in East African languages and concepts of illness among so-called "primitive" peoples. The institute’s director, Karl Abraham, praised her exceptional understanding of psychoanalysis to Sigmund Freud.
At the BPI, she met the medical and sociology student Wilhelm Rohr (1899–1942), a member of the KPD and the Berliner Psychoanalytische Vereinigung. They married in 1924 and she followed him to the Soviet Union. Both became full members of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (RPS): Wilhelm Rohr from 1924 to 1930, and Angela Rohr from 1927 to 1930. She worked at the State Psychoanalytic Institute in Moscow, founded in 1923, and lectured on topics such as the analysis of hysteria and psychoanalysis and religion. After the psychoanalytic institute was closed in 1925 and the RPS dissolved in 1930, Angela Rohr mainly worked as a journalist for German and Swiss newspapers, especially the Frankfurter Zeitung.
When the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Angela and Wilhelm Rohr, like many other foreigners, were arrested under false suspicion of espionage. Wilhelm Rohr presumably died in prison in Saratov in 1942. Angela Rohr was sentenced to five years in a labor camp, followed by eleven years of exile in Siberia. Throughout this time, she worked as a physician, which enabled her to survive the Gulag. In 1957, she was rehabilitated and returned to Moscow. (Top of the article)

Tatiana Rosenthal (1884-1921)

Tatiana Rosenthal, an early pioneer of psychoanalysis in Russia, was born in Minsk in a Jewish family. She was the first of five children of Chonel Gidelewitsch Rosenthal, a merchant, and Anna Abramovna Schabad. After attending lectures at the Universities of Halle, Berlin, and Freiburg, she enrolled in the Medical Faculty of the University of Zurich in 1902. Rosenthal interrupted her studies to participate in the revolutionary movement in Russia and became involved at the General Jewish Labor Bund. One of the early members of the Bund was the professional revolutionary Mikhail Markovich Rosen, whom she later married. Her son Adrian was born in 1915.
Between 1906 and 1908, Tatiana Rosenthal was enrolled at the Law School of the Higher Bestuzhev Courses for Women in St. Petersburg. However, inspired by reading Sigmund Freud, she resumed her medical studies in Zurich in 1907 and earned her doctorate in gynecology in 1909. In the same year, she returned to Russia and began working as a physician in St. Petersburg from 1910 onward. In addition to her private practice, she served for three years as a resident doctor at the Clinic for Mental and Nervous Diseases, which was headed by Vladimir Bekhterev.
Tatiana Rosenthal began her psychoanalytic training probably at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich and continued it with Karl Abraham in Berlin. She traveled to Berlin and Vienna in 1911 and 1912 and participated in meetings of the Berlin and Vienna Psychoanalytic Societies (BPV and WPV). In a lecture given at the BPV in 1911 on Karin Michaelis’s novel Das gefährliche Alter, she used Freudian and Jungian terminology. At the end of 1911, she became a member of both the BPV and the WPV.
After the Octobre Revolution, Tatiana Rosenthal worked from 1919 to 1921 in Petrograd at Bekhterev’s Institute for Brain Research, where she headed the Outpatient Clinic and the Psychotherapy Laboratory, and served as chief physician at the Educational and Clinical Institute, Bekhterev’s psychoneurological institute for children. She became a recognised specialist in psychoanalytic psychotherapy for both children and adults and contributed to the spread and professionalisation of psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union through courses and lectures. Convinced of the compatibility of Marxist and Freudian theories, she advocated for sex education based on psychoanalytic principles in socialist society.
In 1919, Rosenthal’s psychogenetic study on Dostoevsky was published. Her theses on Dostoevsky’s affective epilepsy, his pronounced ambivalence, and the role of traumatic childhood experiences were later taken up by Sigmund Freud in his essay Dostojewski und die Vatertötung, without mentioning Rosenthal. The second part of her Dostoevsky study, as well as two essays - "On the fear affect in war neurotics" and "On Adler’s Individual Psychology" - remained unpublished.
In 1920, Mikhail Rosen, by then head of the state consumer cooperative, was sentenced to 15 years in a labor camp for alleged corruption. Faced with the increasing political repression, Tatiana Rosenthal fell into a severe psychological crisis and committed suicide a year later. (Top of the article)

Vera Schmidt née Yanitskaja (1889-1937)

© ERGO, Izhevsk

Vera Fyodorovna Schmidt, born in Starokostiantyniv in Ukraine, her parents belonged to the Russian intelligentsia. Her mother, Elizaveta Yanitskaya née Grosman, was one of the first women doctors in Russia. Her father, Fedor Feodosevich Yanitsky, was a zemstvo physician, epidemiologist and military physician. Vera attended the girls' high school in Odessa, where she was involved in the revolutionary movement in 1905.
In 1908, Vera Yanitskaja enrolled in the Bestuzhev Higher Women’s Courses in St. Petersburg, graduating as a teacher in 1912. Subsequently she studied from 1913 to 1916 at the Froebelian Women's Pedagogical Institute in Kiev. In 1913, she married Otto Yulyevich Schmidt (1891–1956), a politician, mathematician, and geophysicist, and moved with him to Moscow in 1917. After the October Revolution, she worked from 1918 to 1920 in the preschool department of People's Commissariat for Education in Moscow. In the 1920s, she completed courses at the Communist Academy's Institute of Higher Nervous Activity in Moscow and held a doctoral degree from 1927.
In 1921, the Psychoanalytic Children's Home Laboratory (Detski Dom) was opened in Moscow, directed by Vera Schmidt. In this state-run kindergarten, children between the ages of one and five were raised according to Marxist and psychoanalytic principles. The residents included mostly children of Party functionaries, even Stalin's son, Vassili, was among them, as well as Schmidt's son, Vladimir, born in 1920. The Children's Home has been supported by a German miners' association since 1922 and was renamed "International Solidarity". Vera Schmidt's education goal was sublimation without compulsion. Instinctual impulses should initially be allowed to express themselves freely, without punishment or prohibition. Sublimation then occurs through the child's positive attachment to an educator, the corrective influence of the peer group, and through explanation and understanding.
Vera Schmidt’s ideas became known far beyond the Soviet Union and inspired the kibbutz education in Israel as well as the anti-authoritarian Kinderladen movement in Germany. In 1923, she traveled with her husband to Vienna to inform Sigmund Freud about the Children's Home and seek his support. Her concept was met with interest by Freud and other psychoanalysts, including Annie and Wilhelm Reich, but the leadership of the IPA, however, responded with rejection and even hostility. After internal conflicts and rumors of sexual excesses among the children, allegedly encouraged by the staff, the People's Commissariat for Education ordered the experimental home closed in 1925.
When the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (RPS) was founded in 1922, Vera and Otto Schmidt were among the founding members. Vera Schmidt served as the society’s secretary from 1927 to 1930. Following the dissolution of the RPS in 1930, she worked as a research associate at Lev Vygotsky’s Institute for Experimental Defectology at the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR. She died at the age of 48 from a thyroid tumor. (Top of the article)

Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942)

Sabina Spielrein was a forerunner of many concepts later recognised as fundamental to psychoanalysis. She was born as the eldest of five children in Rostov-on-Don. Her father, Nikolai Arkadyevich Spielrein, was a wealthy Jewish merchant, her mother, Eva Markovna Lyublinskaya, had studied dentistry but did not practice. Sabina Spielrein attended the girls' gymnasium in Rostov until 1904. During her school years, she was diagnosed with symptoms of "psychotic hysteria," and her parents sent her to the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich in 1904. There, Carl Gustav Jung became her physician and succeeded in alleviating most of her symptoms.
In 1905, Sabina Spielrein began medical studies at the University of Zurich, while continuing her analysis with C.G. Jung. Their therapeutic relationship evolved into a romance, which became the subject of a famous correspondence between C.G. Jung and Sigmund Freud. In 1909, Jung, who was married to Emma Jung, declared the relationship to be over. Under his supervision, Spielrein earned her doctorate in 1911 with the thesis Über den psychologischen Inhalt eines Falles von Schizophrenie, the first psychoanalytically oriented dissertation written by a woman. She then traveled to Vienna, where she met Freud and, in October 1911, became a member of the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (WPV).
In 1912, Sabina Spielrein published her most important theoretical work, Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens [Destruction as a cause of coming into being]. In this paper, she examined the function of the death instinct as a destructive component of the sexual instinct and anticipated ideas about the death drive that Freud would later referenced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She argued, that, corresponding to biological reproduction, in which male and female cells must each be destroyed in their union to create new life, the reproductive drive is also psychologically a destructive drive and a drive for coming into being: The destruction of the individual ego, accompanied by feelings of resistance, precedes the creative process, associated with joyful feelings.
In 1912, Spielrein married the Russian-Jewish physician Pavel Naumovich Scheftel (1881–1937), and a year later, their daughter Renata was born. From 1912 to 1914, she lived with her family in Berlin and published several psychoanalytic papers on child and trauma analysis. After the outbreak of World War I, she moved to Switzerland, while her husband returned to Russia. From 1915, Sabina Spielrein lived in Lausanne, where she founded the psychoanalytic study group Cercle Interne in 1919. In 1921, she moved to Geneva and became a member of the Genfer Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft, led by Edouard Claparède. She gave lectures at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute and published numerous works, including child-analytic observations based on records from her daughter’s early years. In 1922, her membership in the WPV was transferred to the Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse. Her most famous analysand during this time was Jean Piaget.
While in Geneva, she developed a linguistic approach to psychoanalysis with special attention to language development in early childhood and the relationship between speech and thought in children. She differentiated between an autistic, a magical, and a social stage in the language development of infants and young children, highlighting the analogy between children's thinking, aphasia, and unconscious thought.
In 1923, Spielrein returned with her daughter to Soviet Russia. She settled in Moscow and became a member and training analyst of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (RPS), founded in 1922. She lectured and held seminars on child analysis at the State Institute for Psychoanalysis and worked as a physician at its outpatient clinic. In addition, she was head of the department of child psychology at Moscow University and collaborated in Vera Schmidt’s Children's Home Laboratory.
In 1924, Sabina Spielrein moved back to her hometown of Rostov to join her husband, Pavel Scheftel, and in 1926 gave birth to their second daughter, Eva. She worked as a pedologist at the Rostov school outpatient clinic and treated children and adults at the psychiatric polyclinic. Although pedology and psychoanalysis were banned in 1936, she is believed to have continued her psychoanalytic practice into the early 1940s.
In July 1942, Rostov-on-Don was occupied by the German Wehrmacht. Sabina Spielrein and her two daughters died with thousands of other Rostov Jews in August 1942, murdered by a unit of the Einsatzgruppe D. (Top of the article)