Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth

About this book

Gold Medalist 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Psychology category Explores the life and work of psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein through a feminist and mytho-poetic lens. Long stigmatized as Carl Jungs hysterical mistress Sabina Spielrein (18851942) was in fact a key figure in the history of psychoanalytic thought. Born into a Russian Jewish family she was institutionalized at nineteen in Zurich and became Jungs patient. Spielrein went on to earn a doctorate in psychiatry practiced for over thirty years and published numerous papers until her untimely death in the Holocaust. She developed innovative theories of female sexuality child development mythic archetypes in the human unconscious and the death instinct. In Sabina Spielrein Angela M. Sells examines Spielreins life and work from a feminist and mytho-poetic perspective. Drawing on newly translated diaries papers and correspondence with Jung and Sigmund Freud Sells challenges the suppression of Spielreins ideas and shows her to be a significant thinker in her own right.