A MOST DANGEROUS PROFESSION: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina

Spielrein

By John Kerr

Sinclair-Stevenson, #25 (pp 607)

WHEN Freud described psychoanalysis in terms of a seduction he was

flirting with an insinuation that still persists today. The symbol of

the couch would be given only slightly more notorious associations by

movie casting directors as the century progressed. Sexual intrusion was

an allegation made often enough by patients of the pioneer practitioners

of the movement, and if Freud often chose not to regard these as

incriminating, he was confronted with some pretty embarrassing evidence.

The schizophrenic and morphine-addicted Otto Gross's practical

exploits confirmed that his war against monogomy was not entirely

theoretical. Wilhelm Stekel was a legendary ''seducer''. Ernest Jones

was paying blackmail money to a former patient. Sandor Ferenczi had

agreed to take as a patient the daughter of a woman with whom he was

having an affair, and then promtly fell in love with the girl.

The woman who is at the narrative core of this remarkable study was

Sabina Spielrein. That she had a deep sexual affair with Carl Gustav

Jung, first as his 19-year-old patient at the Burgholzli Clinic at the

University of Zurich, later as his collaborator and unofficial research

assistant, there can be little doubt, although Kerr insists on referring

to it as a ''dalliance'', and speculates that it may not have been fully

consummated. Of a less scrupulous and intelligent biographer we might be

entitled to suspect disingenuousness on this point, and surely

Spielrein's repeated references in her diaries to ''having poetry'' with

Jung are less than impenetrable. ''Poetry'', it need hardly astound us,

was the synonym she used in her university dissertation for sex.

More to the point, when the affair was suspended for a few years both

parties felt guilty as hell. Jung was also afraid of a scandal, and lied

through his teeth about his professional dealings with Spielrein when

her parents remonstrated in correspondence. Even so, it was not revenge

that motivated the now qualified Spielrein to write to Freud about the

whole business, requesting an appointment in Vienna, but an opportunity

for her to further a career as one of the world's first female

psychoanalysts. She had been Jung's first case study. Now he was hers,

and she was interested to know what the father of the new movement would

make of it all.

Fiction could not better this. It would be difficult to imagine a more

fascinating device to tell the story of Freud's acrimonious break-up

with Jung, his hitherto ''son and heir'', than the introduction of the

character of Spielrein. Her papers only surfaced in three separate finds

in Zurich since 1974, and whatever suspicions we might temporarily

entertain over her historical authenticity, there is the sobering

thought that if she were a fictional creation a less teasing name than

Spielrein might have been invented for her. From the German it

translates as ''pure story''.

She was actually Russian, a point that Jung made to Freud when he was

still at the stage of attempting to suggest that the woman's tale was a

product of a neurotic relapse. Russian, in this instance, was intended

to mean ''odd''. Freud thought she was odd all right, but for different

reasons. Sexual improprieties among his acolytes he could live with.

Sexual improprieties mixed up with quasi-religious mysticism he found

intolerable. Spielrein and Jung had concocted this thing about a

''Siegfried'' child she would have, based on some Aryan mythical stuff

derived from Wagner. Freud was not terribly enamoured and Jung was under

a religio-libidinous cloud.

What happened next was a campaign of psychological blackmail. Freud

would drop hints about his protegee's relationship under the guise of

unsubtle allegory about Adam and Eve. Jung tried to retaliate with hints

that he knew all about Freud's alleged triangular relationship with his

wife Martha and her sister Minna. These dangerous psycho-strategies

represented an escalating power struggle. The winner would play the role

of analyst, the loser patient. Beyond that it was a contest for

authority and possession of an ideology. The putsch was as synonomous to

the early history of Freudianism as it would be to the growth of the

Nazi Party in pre-war Germany. It gives a slant to Freud's (apocryphal)

testimonial, given as a propaganda condition of his emigration, ''I can

heartily recommend the Gestapo to anybody.''

In the end Freud and Jung stalemated themselves into silence and

enmity. Spielrein was denied her due recognition for the work she

contributed. Freud relegated her to a footnote. Jung fail to attribute

his debt to her research in his published work. This might be a bigger

scandal than the one that occupied all three in 1909. Spielrein returned

to Russia, her career virtually abandoned, and she was murdered with her

two daughters by the Nazis in the synagogue at Rostov-on-Don in 1941.

With tremendous skill Kerr has not only rescued her from obscurity, he

has told an amazing story, and simultaneously given an authorititive

history which deserves to be regarded as the unexpurgated rise of

psychoanalysis.