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PARTISAN REVIEW
Freud to Spielrein, and two letters (or drafts) from Spielrein to
Freud.
In
A Secret Symmetry,
Carotenuto presents the documents in
superb translations and then narrates Spielrein's life and times,
weaving in her theoretical writings with a linear account of her
psychoanalytic and cultural milieu. Carotenuto writes from the
perspective of analytic psychology. While much of his exposition is
valuable, I find his interpretative passages unconvincing, tenden–
tious, and regrettably off target. When his language is not plainly
presumptuous, it is often apologetic for Jung and his transparently
indecent behavior. For me, the primary documents are more com–
pelling than the accompanying essay.
The great discovery in this text is Spielrein herself. And what a
magnificent person she was! On first encounter, one is struck by her
versatility and her ecumenical interests, her probing doubt and poi–
gnant self-doubt. I was impressed by her self-consciousness and self–
reflexiveness, her capacity for continuous emotional and intellectual
growth. This sensitive soul with slightly mystical and neoromantic
tendencies transcended her own, quite deep-seated, psychological
disturbances in an imaginative, altogether singular fashion. A
vibrant personality who possessed a rare blend of artistic intuition,
scientific rigor, and theoretical originality, Spielrein belongs to that
generation of brilliant and willful women who were committed to
psychoanalysis because it sprang from the depths of their own being.
Psychoanalysis became her life, her calling, her bridge to the past
and to the future . Her scientific work complemented her scholarly
investigations of folklore, mythology, the psychology of religion,
music, art history, and that frontier region where language and
psychoanalysis intersect. Her inventiveness, intellectual audacity,
devotion to research, psychological perspicacity, and ability to sur–
vive a tumultuous ordeal and to generate fertile ideas, all seem
exceptional.
But she was not a character in a novel. Born in 1885 in Rostov–
on-Don, the eldest child and only surviving daughter in a family with
three brothers (a younger sister had died), Spielrein came from the
cultivated, Russian Jewish bourgeoisie - a bourgeoisie educationally
conscious and oriented toward Europe. Her grandfather and great–
grandfather had been rabbis. Spielrein's early childhood was marked
by painful, extended episodes of feces retention, often lasting two
weeks . She recurrently fantasized about defecating on her father,
and she feared soiling herself. (Curiously, her name translates as
