Sabina Spielrein (1885–1942) was a first-generation psychoanalytic pioneer whose collected works, available in German since 1987, have only recently been rediscovered by English-speaking scholars. Spielrein’s original contributions at the dawn of psychoanalytic thinking, as typified by her papers “Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being” (1912/1987) and “The Origins of the Words Mama and Papa” (1922/1987), deserve to reemerge from the heavy shadows of the Freud/Jung legacy to be studied and appreciated in their own right. Spielrein published over 30 papers during her lifetime, served as Piaget’s analyst, and helped to establish psychoanalysis in her native Russia. The origins of Freud’s “death instinct,” Jung’s “anima,” and Klein’s theories about the infant’s experience of the breast have all been linked to Spielrein’s prior contributions. The correlations Spielrein identified between evolutionary biology and psychoanalytic thinking, resisted by her contemporaries, prefigure the...
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Kelcourse, F.B. (2020). Spielrein, Sabina. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_9340
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