Sabina Spielrein‪:‬

Sabina Spielrein is perhaps best known for her love affair with her doctor, Carl Gustav Jung. Their intense therapeutic relationship led to a mutual fascination that lasted, for Spielrein, for the rest of her life. It is debatable whether Spielrein and Jung’s relationship was consummated, but it did give birth to some of the most important ideas within psychoanalysis and analytical psychology today, the most notable being that of the death instinct. But what happened to Spielrein and why have her story and work remained in the dark for so many years?

This second edition of Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis complements the first edition by retaining many of the most important documents about her life and work. Included in this edition are Jung’s hospital records of his treatment of Spielrein, Jung’s letters to Spielrein following her discharge in 1905, extracts from her personal diary, and her ground breaking paper on the development of language, "The origin of the child’s words Papa and Mama." New material includes Spielrein’s famous paper, "Destruction as a cause of coming into being", in which she formulates her theory of the death drive, a paper describing her place and contribution within Freud’s Vienna Circle, commentaries on the mutual erotic transference between Spielrein and Jung, and a theoretical discussion of her seminal ideas on aggression.

This new edition compiles the essential writings of Spielrein along with commentaries by prominent psychoanalytic and Jungian scholars. It is the definitive source book on Spielrein for clinicians, scholars and historians of psychoanalysis.


Coline Covington, Ph.D. is a training analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology and the British Psychotherapy Foundation. She is former editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology and former chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council. She is in private practice in London.