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.
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