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Collected Psychoanalytic Works of Sabina Spielrein, Volume 2: Later Works from Lausanne, Geneva and Rostov-on-Don

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

Reviews and Endorsements

Volume 2 of Collected Psychoanalytic Works of Sabina Spielrein edited and translated by Michael Gerard Plastow and Christiane Weller continues a critically sensitive curation of the works of Spielrein in a manner which allows her to find her voice as a seminal thinker and theorist within the history of psychoanalysis. Covering the period from her time in Lausanne (1915-1920) through to her return to Rostov-on-Don where she died at the hands of the SS in 1942, Plastow and Weller’s translation and commentary of these works quite remarkably facilitate the transmission of a knowledge hitherto obscured by the fascinated thrall which has been witnessed in the reading of her work in the context of Spielrein’s transference to Jung. Both the first and second volumes of Collected Psychoanalytic Works of Sabina Spielrein will be of paramount interest to psychoanalysts and students of psychoanalysis seriously engaged with the question of what psychoanalysis contributes to a transmission of thought which shakes free of the repetitive, to become creative.
David Pereira, Director of The Freudian School of Melbourne, School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Australia

Volume 2 of the Collected Psychoanalytic Works of Sabina Spielrein provides psychoanalysts and scholars of the history of psychoanalysis the opportunity to appreciate this analyst’s real contribution to the clinical reflection and theoretical developments in her later writings. Her work was rather poorly received in her time, and has continued to be unacknowledged, if not further obscured, following the discovery of the personal writings that Spielrein left in Switzerland upon her return to Russia. This reception was not unconnected to her nature as a nonconformist woman: rather than remaining dazzled by her transference to her analyst Jung as well as his own transference-resistance to her, her novel approach to psychoanalysis took up the very issues that remained obscure and problematic in Freud, and in conflict with the advances of his students, Jung first and foremost. Plastow and Weller’s observations regarding these mature texts, which concern Sabina Spielrein’s writing style—which these translators strive to respect—emphasise the “feminine” nature of the transition from her transference-love towards the analyst, to the transference of work. Her phrases, imperfectly articulated, at times left hanging, at times obscure, resemble the progression of discourse through free association: they aim to embrace a knowledge that imposes itself. This is not a knowledge that is already given, but rather to be discovered, to be approached in small touches without claiming to encompass it all.
Renata Miletto, psychoanalyst, Association lacanienne internationale, Italy