Destruction, creation, inertia, revolution

Sabina Spielrein's ‘Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being’

In the 2011 David Cronenberg film A Dangerous Method, the Russian psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942) is played by Keira Knightley. The film depicts her affair with her doctor Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich where she is being treated for hysteria and their respective relationships with Freud (Viggo Mortensen). A Dangerous Method is one of those weird films about psychoanalysis that doesn’t seem remotely psychoanalytic in form. It’s not especially clear in the film that Spielrein went on to become a psychoanalyst herself but she did. She went on to analyse and collaborated with the psychologist Jean Piaget in Geneva and was a member of the International Psychoanalytic Society.

In a footnote towards the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud acknowledges the ‘instructive and interesting’ though ultimately ‘unclear’ contribution of Spielrein to his understanding of primary masochism and the destructive impulses inherent in sexuality. Although both Freud and Jung were rather churlish in their public acknowledgment of Spielrein’s work, emphasising the ‘neurotic’ content of her writing over its theoretical merits, the influence of her work on Freud’s essay, in which he introduced the concept of the death drive, is palpable. Spielrein recorded in her diary in September 1910 that Jung had 'listened...with rapture' to her ideas for a 'new study on the death instinct', encouraging her to develop her theories. These theoretical discussions between Spielrein and Jung took place in an erotically-charged atmosphere; her narration of their intensely intellectual romance, which she described as a 'savage passion', constantly frames sex in relation to death: 'I do believe I am capable of destroying myself with cyanide in the presence of my idol'. After finishing the paper she wrote to Jung that it seemed clear to her 'why coitus so often appears in dreams as dying.'

‘Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being’ (first published in German in 1912) introduces some of the concepts that Freud eventually went on to elaborate eight years later. Spielrein imagined the essay as her and Jung's son, 'the product of our love'. In it, she asks why the most intensely pleasurable experiences are often accompanied by ‘a feeling of resistance, of anxiety, or disgust’.

For Spielrein, creation is always accompanied by destruction; sex is always accompanied by death. Not only is birth a violent and painful experience, but the act of conception is also a moment of self-annihilation. Although she accepts Freud’s understanding of pleasure and the necessary avoidance of unpleasure, she ventures beyond in her suggestion that ‘the personal psyche is governed by unconscious impulses that lie deeper and, in their demands, are unconcerned with our feeling reactions... In our depths, there is something that, as paradoxical as it may sound, wills self-injury.’ The essay conceives of a tension between collective and personal psyches, two antagonistic tendencies, the former of which desires transformation, while the latter ‘strives for self-preservation in its present form (inertia)’. Despite its name, what Spielrein calls the collective psyche has less in common with Jung's conception of the collective unconscious as a trove of ancient archetypes, than it does with Freud’s reality principle: it is the outward-facing, social form of the psyche which keeps in check personal urges and impulses.

According to Jacques Derrida, Freud's conception of the death drive, 'coincides almost literally with several Nietzschean propositions,'  a proximity so close that Freud refuses to acknowledge the debt. By contrast, Spielrein's essay explicitly invokes Nietzsche, discussing his use of images of destruction in relation to love and knowledge – 'The Will to Love: that is to be willing to die!' Her reading of Nietzsche's conception of the superman is tied to the destruction necessitated by procreation. His proclamation: 'Man is something to be overcome... in order for the superman to appear', she reads as the necessity to destroy the self (conceive) in order to create something new (give birth). The superman, she contends, can only attain its 'greatest vitality' through violent destruction; it is born of a struggle. She acknowledges that for Nietzsche eternal recurrence demands the return not only of the highest form of life, the superman, but also of the lowest, the 'smallest man'. Although Nietzsche's thought is preoccupied with the 'highest affirmation of life', his thought bears within it a 'simultaneous contradiction'; the superman can never rid itself of this 'dreaded element', the 'abysmal thought' of the low. The ambivalence, tension and contradictory qualities that Spielrein identifies in Nietzsche's work have obvious parallels with the death drive as Freud went on to conceive of it. Advancement for both Freud and Nietzsche is always accompanied, indeed paradoxically propelled by, an eternal compulsion to go backwards.

Two months after the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1917, Spielrein wrote to her former analyst and lover Jung from Moscow, where she had briefly returned from Vienna, outlining the difficulties involved in organising Russian psychoanalytic activities and translations: 'because of political events in Russia the ground is not ready for scientific matters.’ Spielrein eventually returned to Soviet Russia in 1923. She and Alexander Luria - who co-wrote an introduction to the Russian translation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle with Lev Vygotsky in 1925 - joined the Psychoanalytic Society in Moscow at the same time. She worked at the experimental ‘Detski Dom’ (Children’s Home) run by Vera Schmidt, which was housed in a grand art nouveau mansion that had been confiscated from a wealthy industrialist. Today it houses the Maxim Gorky museum.

Psychoanalysis came under increasing attack from the mid-1920s and was effectively banned in 1930 but she continued to work with children after moving back to her hometown Rostov-on-Don in the mid 1920s where she worked at a psychiatric polyclinic. In 1927 she wrote to Max Eitingon:

in Russia we face a completely unjustified resistance that is totally unknown abroad; it is the fear that psychoanalysis, ‘product of the capitalist system’, goes against the interests of the working classes. Psychoanalysis is accused of tracing everything back to sexuality and thereby denying the achievements of Marx, who, as is known, derives everything from socio-economic conditions. There is a great mistake here that cannot be clarified in a couple of lines: the teachings of Freud and Marx do not need to exclude each other and can co-exist perfectly well.

She went on to ask Eitingon to send her examples of dreams featuring specific objects - cars, aeroplanes, suns, stars, needles, spiders, shoes, telephones. An earlier essay on dreams of clocks explored similar themes to her essay on destruction: ‘The leaking clock symbolizes the threat of dying. Imagining the beginning is impossible without imagining the end.’ Spielrein presented papers on psychoanalytic themes as late as 1928, including one analysing children’s drawings.

Her brother Isaak Spielrein was a Bolshevik and a key figure in industrial psychology. A proponent of the scientific organisation of labour, he worked in a ‘psycho-technical’ laboratory in Alexei Gastev’s Central Institute of Labour in Moscow. Despite protesting his continued loyalty to the revolutionary cause, Isaak and two other Spielrein brothers were killed in the Stalinist purges in 1937-8. In July 1942 Wehrmacht troops occupied Rostov. In August, Spielrein and her two daughters Renata and Eva were killed by an SS death squad, along with 27,000 other Jews from the city. They were buried in a mass grave in Zmievskaya Balka or Snake Ravine.