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Collected Psychoanalytic Works of Sabina Spielrein, Volume 1: Early Works from Zürich, Vienna and Berlin

Author(s) : Michael Gerard Plastow, Author(s) : Christiane Weller

Reviews and Endorsements

With the publication of this first of two volumes, Michael Gerard Plastow and Christiane Weller reclaim the invaluable early writings of Sabina Spielrein from misrepresentation and reduction. By taking seriously the responsibilities of translation and the vicissitudes of the signifier as it acquires resonances and has effects in its circulation though different writers, by drawing out, as they put it, “the itinerary of particular words and terms that Spielrein uses throughout her texts”, Plastow and Weller attend closely to what Spielrein writes, a writing that is as relevant today as when she formulated her work in the first half of the twentieth century. The Collected Psychoanalytic Works of Sabina Spielrein provides essential access to material that should challenge any psychoanalytic practitioner very productively by allowing articulation of the difficulties, ambiguities and questions which occupy Spielrein in her writing and with which the psychoanalytic field should be concerned, if it is to follow its principles.
Barry O’Donnell, PhD, member of the Irish School for Lacanian Psychoanalysis

The importance of Sabina Spielrein remains largely unknown, hidden behind some putative love affair with her analyst (Jung), and a supposed position between Freud and Jung. But her papers reveal her own struggle with the most seminal material: instincts or drives. Long before Freud, and before Jung, she understood the stakes of the death drive for the process of creation involving the unconscious (Destruction as Cause of Becoming, 1912). Surely, it remains one of the most paramount issues in psychoanalysis.
In this first of two volumes of the Collected Psychoanalytic Works of Sabina Spielrein, Michael Gerard Plastow and Christiane Weller, the editors and translators, enable Spielrein’s struggle to emerge. They pay the greatest attention in allowing Sabina Spielrein’s singular style to be accurately transmitted as a truly psychoanalytic writing. With their critical introductions, these rigorous and scholarly translations make it possible to follow Spielrein’s own theoretical evolution throughout her work.
Indispensable for the scholarly study of Spielrein’s opus by psychoanalysts, and other practitioners and scholars in cognate fields, as well as for the broader public interested in Spielrein’s work.
Christian Fierens, PhD, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst based in Tervuren, Belgium

This first volume of the Collected Psychoanalytic Works of Sabina Spielrein is a pearl gifted to psychoanalysis at large. It dares to grant a long-overdue place to a thinker and clinician of remarkable talent, who has long been underestimated. It took a century to release her from her marginal status as an enfant terrible of the early days of psychoanalysis—the body of her work equally had to be kept at a safe distance. Her pioneering insights into destructiveness and the transformation drive, female sexuality and child analysis, were well ahead of her time. Her self-analysis and writing style remain volcanic, yet dangerously beautiful.
Bice Benvenuto, psychoanalyst, Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, UK