A new series from Why Be Happy: Women & Queer Psychoanalysts. Each entry introduces a psychoanalyst you may never have heard of — someone whose theory and fate are inseparable.
The first is Sabina Spielrein (1885–1942), a Russian psychoanalyst.
At eighteen, her family committed her to the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich. Her attending physician was the young Carl Jung. On paper she was a case. But she became a doctor and psychoanalyst, and wrote one of the most underrated papers in the history of the field: "Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being" (1912). The paper argued that the sexual drive contains destruction at its core — eight full years before Freud developed his death drive theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Freud publicly rejected her paper at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Years later, he conceded in a footnote: "Her speculations anticipated a considerable part of my own thinking." A footnote.
At nineteen, still in the hospital, she wrote a will: Plant an oak tree over my ashes, and carve on it: "I, too, was a human being. My name was Sabina Spielrein."
In August 1942, the Nazis occupied Rostov-on-Don. She refused to evacuate. She and her two daughters were shot at Zmievskaya Balka — a mass grave of 27,000. No oak tree. No inscription.