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"clean play" in German.) Spielrein masturbated compulsively and
expressed wildly ambivalent feelings for the people in her life. She
was periodically depressed; her suicidal thoughts alternated with un–
controllable bouts of laughing, weeping, and screaming. In 1904, at
age 20, she was brought by her parents to the Burgholzli mental
hospital in Zurich - an institution known for its treatment of severe
psychic disorders. Her physician was Jung. Jung apparently treated
her according to Freud's methods. He diagnosed her illness as severe
hysteria, or as he put it to Freud, "psychotic hysteria." (Bruno Bet–
telheim, in a recent essay in the
New York Review ofBooks,
argues that
she was schizoid and probably experienced one or more schizo–
phrenic episodes.) In 1905, Spielrein had recovered sufficiently to
enter the University of Zurich to study medicine. In 1911, after
writing her thesis on "The Psychological Content of a Case of
Schizophrenia," she became a doctor with a specialty in psychiatry .
In 1912, Spielrein published a seminal paper entitled "Destruc–
tion as a Cause of Coming into Being." Written in German, it ap–
peared in the
Yearbook for Psychoanalysis and Psychopathological Research.
The paper was a daring inquiry into the death instinct, anticipating
by eight years Freud's discussion of the same subject in
Beyond the
Pleasure Principle.
Several of Spielrein's insights anticipated the find–
ings of existential psychoanalysis in the 1930s and 1940s. From
October 1911 to November 1912 she was in Vienna and became
closely associated with Freud's circle and the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society . For a time she lived in Berlin . In 1913 she married Dr. Paul
Scheftel. While little is recorded about the marriage, we do know
that her daughter, Renate , was born in September 1913.
From 1914 until 1923, Spielrein became the proverbial wander–
ing Jew, practicing psychoanalysis in Swiss cities such as Lausanne,
Chateaux d'Oex, and Geneva. For eight months in 1921 she analyzed
the great cognitive psychologist, Jean Piaget. Possibly under his in–
fluence, she published a paper in 1922 called "Consideration of Vari–
ous Stages of Linguistic Development: The Origins of the Childish
Words Papa and Mama." Here she attempted to integrate semantic
and perceptual approaches to the mind within a psychoanalytic con–
ceptual frame . Passages from her papers reveal her incisive grasp of
issues - the breast and the baby's activity of sucking at the mother's
breast, the centrality of language in the psychoanalytic dialogue,
and the role of otherness in the unconscious - which Melanie Klein
and Jacques Lacan would subsequently highlight in their theoretical
projects. Spielrein was a forerunner, a powerful , germinal thinker.
