Collected Psychoanalytic Works of Sabina Spielrein, Volume 1: Early Works from Zürich, Vienna and Berlin
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : July 2026
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 254
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98534
- ISBN 13 : 9781041210894
- ISBN 10 : 1041210892
Also by Michael Gerard Plastow
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This is the first of two volumes of totally new English translations of all the known published psychoanalytic works of Sabina Spielrein, an important early proponent of psychoanalysis—and in particular of child psychoanalysis—who anticipated much of its later development.
This volume includes translations of Spielrein’s early work from Zürich, Vienna, and Berlin. The second volume presents her later publications from Lausanne, Geneva, and Rostov-on-Don. This collection brings together all of Spielrein’s published writing in a consistent and clear style for an English-speaking audience. Dedicated to retaining the cadence and expression of Spielrein’s original writings, these translations convey the complexity and richness of her work, situating these texts in the times and places in which they were written. It includes a critical preface, as well as a critical and historical introduction to each chapter. The editors and translators also highlight significant terms and expressions, and provide critical and historical annotations throughout, allowing scholars to trace the development of Spielrein’s thought, in order to gain a fuller understanding of her work and contribution to psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Essential for the serious study of Spielrein’s own theoretical elaboration, this book is for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, and scholars in related fields, as well as those interested in the writings of influential women.
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
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Editors’ and Translators’ Introductory Remarks on the Translation (Volume 1)
1. The Psychological Content of a Case of Schizophrenia (Dementia Praecox).
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Paper
2. Destruction as Cause of Becoming
2.1. Introduction
2.2. Paper
3. Contributions to the Knowledge of the Infantile Soul
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Paper
4. Masturbation in Foot Symbolism
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Paper
5. Dream of “Father Freudenreich”
5.1. Introduction
5.2. Paper
6. Mother Love
6.1. Introduction
6.2. Paper: Mother Love
6.3. Paper: The Unconscious Fantasy in “The Duel” by Kuprin
7. The Mother-in-Law
7.1. Introduction
7.2. Paper
8. Three Clinical Papers from Berlin, 1914
8.1. Introduction
8.2. Two Menstrual Dreams
8.3. Animal Symbolism and Phobia in a Boy
8.4. The Forgotten Name
Bibliography
Index
About the Author(s)
Michael Gerard Plastow is a psychoanalyst working in private practice in Melbourne. He is an analyst of the Freudian School of Melbourne School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. He also practises in the public sector as a child psychiatrist at the Alfred Child and Youth Mental Health Service where he leads a multi-disciplinary team. Over a number of years he has convened a seminar on Psychoanalysis and the Child with Tine Nørregaard, also a psychoanalyst in The Freudian School of Melbourne. This collaboration has given rise to the writing of the book entitled What is a Child?: Childhood, Psychoanalysis, and Discourse.
Michael has published extensively in the psychoanalytic, psychiatric, and academic literature, and frequently presents his work at colloquia and conferences in Australia, Europe, and Latin America. He has a particular interest in the question of translation in psychoanalysis and has translated a number of papers into English from French, Spanish, and Portuguese. His translation into English of Jacques Lacan’s seminar The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst was published in 2013 as a bilingual edition by the Association Lacanienne Internationale.
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Christiane Weller is Associate Professor in European Languages (German) at Monash University, Australia. She has published extensively on German literature and in the medical humanities (psychoanalytic theory, psychiatric art collections, psychosis and writing). She is a member of The Freudian School of Melbourne, School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
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