Sex vs. Survival

The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein

John Launer

• Publisher: ABRAMS Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781468311587
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

"An impressively researched, documented, and readable biography" of a woman who played a key role in the history of psychology ( Library Journal, starred review). Who was Sabina Spielrein? She is probably best known for her notorious affair with Carl Jung, which was dramatized in the film A Dangerous Method, starring Keira Knightley. Yet her life story is much more compelling than just one famous relationship. Spielrein overcame family and psychological abuse to become a profoundly original thinker in her own right. Sex vs. Survival is the first biography to put her life and ideas at the center of the story and examine Spielrein's key role in the development of psychoanalysis. Drawing on fresh research into Spielrein's diaries, papers, and correspondence, John Launer shows how Spielrein's overlooked ideas?rejected by Freud and Jung but substantially vindicated by later developments in psychology and evolutionary biology—may represent the last and most important stage in the rediscovery of an extraordinary life. "An invaluable resource for understanding Spielrein's significance, her progressive thinking, and her groundbreaking contributions to the history of psychoanalysis." — Publishers Weekly "By the end of Launer's account, there's no mistaking what the founding fathers of analysis did to this particular founding mother—and probably to many other women. At least this biography offers Spielrein some retrospective justice." — Jewish Book World

1

Childhood 1885-1904

18 October, 1910. Instead of working – writing my diary!¹

IT IS a week before her twenty-fifth birthday. Sabina Spielrein has barely slept during the night. A comment from the previous day kept running around her head. It was made by her former psychiatrist, now teacher and lover, Carl Jung. His comment called into question her most cherished conviction: that she had a ‘higher calling’, of divine origin. Now, in the morning, she cannot manage to study, even though her final exams at medical school are due in only two months. Instead, she is writing in her diary, and trying to come to terms with Jung’s remark:

For that is what robbed me of my night’s rest: the thought that I might be only one of the many, my achievements might not rise above the average, and my ‘higher calling’ might be a ridiculous dream that I now have to pay for. The question is: how did this need to believe in a higher calling ever become so strong within me?

From childhood, Sabina Spielrein felt called to an extraordinary destiny. Her belief drew her to some of the greatest men of her age. It governed her career. At the time she wrote those words, it was the main source of energy in her life. She once thought this destiny meant that she would have an enduring relationship with Jung, and that they would inspire each other to great achievements. At other times she realised such a relationship would never happen, but she might still bear his child: a son named Siegfried, who would himself have a heroic destiny. Now, she was beginning to accept this too would never happen. Jung was, after all, a married man with three children, a successful career and many other girlfriends. She had persuaded herself that her ‘higher calling’ would take the form of a new theory instead: a ground-breaking idea about sex and death that would transform people’s understanding of the human mind. One way or another, only one thing really mattered to her. She must do something exceptional with her life. She could not be ‘only one of the many’ – whether that meant sharing Jung with his other mistresses, or turning out to have only a mediocre talent.

To strengthen her resolve, she decided to take a new approach in her diary. Instead of writing obsessively about her relationship, as she had often done, she started to set down the facts of her childhood and the history of her family. Much of what we know of Sabina Spielrein’s origins comes from those pages of self-analysis, written after that turbulent night. Her family story anticipates, to an uncanny degree, many of the themes of Spielrein’s own life: passion, prophetic abilities, forbidden liaisons, religious divisions, disappointment, transformation, and the risk of oblivion.

*

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Sabina Spielrein’s family on both sides were traditional, orthodox Jews. They all lived within the Pale of Settlement – the area on the western edge of the vast Russian empire where Jews were legally permitted to live. Her father’s family lived in Warsaw, formerly the capital of the Polish kingdom, but absorbed into Russia in 1815 after Napoleon’s defeat. Her mother’s family lived in the eastern part of the Pale, in the province of Yekaterinoslav in the Ukraine, near the Black Sea. Their family name – Lublinksy – suggests that they probably originated from Poland too, and the city of Lublin. In spite of the geographical distance between the Spielreins and the Lublinskys, the two families led similar lives. They observed traditional Jewish practices of living and worship. As Jews, they were restricted to a small number of occupations. They were excluded from universities and most social institutions. They were subject to periodic outbreaks of violence by local Poles or Ukrainians. However, they also saw what the historian Martin Gilbert has described as taking place during the middle and late nineteenth century: ‘a great flourishing of Jewish literary, cultural, political, educational, journalistic, religious and spiritual activity’.²

The lives of the Spielrein family reflected this in every way. By the time Sabina was born, the family had experienced huge social advancement. They become highly educated. Her father went to university in Berlin. Her mother’s family moved to the port of Rostov-on-Don, near the Black Sea. They joined the ‘merchant guild’ class. This entitled them to property, the right to trade abroad,³ and exemption from conscription – a crucial privilege in a country where young Jewish men, unlike ethnic Russians, were subject to conscription for up to twenty-five years. They mixed freely among their Russian contemporaries and intellectual society. They travelled widely. As we shall see, their views about women, religion and sex were as liberal as those of anyone in Vienna or Paris.

Rostov-on-Don was a thriving industrial city, with a population of around 120,000 by the end of the nineteenth century. Look at it on a map and you will get a sense of its importance. It lies thirty kilometres upstream from the Sea of Azov, a huge sheltered bay at the north-east corner of the Black Sea, diagonally opposite Istanbul. Just as Istanbul was the gateway to the Mediterranean and the west, Rostov was the point of entry to the vast hinterland of Russia, stretching thousands of miles to the Pacific Ocean. Positioned south of Moscow, and just across the Caucasus from Georgia, Armenia and Iran, Rostov was a trading centre for fish, wheat, tobacco, wool and oil. It was a meeting place for dozens of cultures, and connected by a growing railway system with Western Europe. One Jew born in Rostov at the turn of the century wrote about his memories of the city as a child as follows:

I always pictured my city as a river city; I always surveyed her from the river shore … In my time, if a traveller came to Rostov by steamer from the north or south, he could see the city at her decorative best. She made a pretty scene dominating the Don and the flat steppes beyond. The domes of the two cathedrals, the old one and the new one, led to the smaller churches and older buildings in what I liked to imagine as a dishevelled procession.⁴

He described the wide avenues ascending from the port, and the bazaars where Cossacks from the steppes and peasants from Armenia and the Ukraine sold their wares. He wrote of the fisherwomen and tricksters, the pedlars, palm-readers and somnambulists, and the parades, fires, demonstrations, sensational murders and cholera outbreaks that he remembered from his youth. In his memory, Rostov-on-Don was a ‘young, naïve, enthusiastic, cruel city’.

Someone else who knew Rostov was Chaim Weizmann, later the first president of Israel, whose wife Vera Chatzmann originated from the city. He wrote:

Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia, is the gateway to the Caucasus; the Jewish community there was small, and though subject to all the disabilities which crippled Jewish life in the Pale, its material condition was on the whole easier. The district was wealthier, competition was less keen, and if a family belonged – as my wife’s did – to the class of so-called “guild merchants”, they enjoyed special privileges – for Jews, that is – and consequently a more comfortable existence.⁵

Weizmann observed that Jews from Rostov had relatively little contact with the poorer Jewish masses in western Russia and Poland. He also noticed how levels of anti-semitism were lower in Rostov than elsewhere. Jewish and Russian doctors and lawyers mingled with little difficulty.⁶ In spite of this, it is important not to romanticise the situation. There were periodic waves of pogroms in nearby Ukraine, including in Yekaterinoslav in 1883.⁷ Massacres of Jews and lootings of Jewish property were to affect Rostov itself during the revolution of 1905, and again during the Bolshevik revolution and civil war. The fear of sudden eruptions of anti-Jewish violence was always present in times of political instability.

Between 1885 and 1915, the Jewish population of Rostov increased tenfold.⁸ Although most Jews were traders and craft workers, the community included many doctors, lawyers, teachers, mining engineers and wealthy merchants like Sabina’s father. The main Choral Synagogue included a house of prayer, a library and a school. There was a Soldier’s Synagogue for retired soldiers from the Tsar’s army, and later a Handcraftsmen’s Synagogue as well. From 1881 there was a Jewish hospital.⁹ Many of the Jewish children attended secular schools. At the time of Sabina’s birth, around a third of the children in the girls ‘gymnasium’ or high school were Jewish. Moisei Aisenstadt, the main rabbi of the town from 1889 to 1910, was an advocate of Zionism, unusual for a religious figure of the time. An edict of 1888 placed Rostov outside the Pale of Settlement and closed it officially to further Jewish settlement. This does not seem to have prevented immigration into the town. In a census in 1897, there were around 12,000 members of the community.

Sabina’s mother was the daughter and grand-daughter of rabbis. She was born in 1863, as Khave Mordekhayevna Lublinskaya. As the family rose socially, she Russianised her name to Eva Markovna. When Sabina set down her family history in her diary, she wrote first of all about Eva’s grandfather, Rabbi Lublinsky the elder:

I knew my great-grandfather until I was 3 or 4 years old. In my memory he was a large friendly man dressed in black, nothing more. What was far more important was what I heard about him. He was a much loved rabbi in Yekaterinoslav. People would carry him around our town on their shoulders. There were stories about his prophetic abilities. I particularly remembered one that was told about his death: he quite calmly predicted the moment of his death, even the exact time. He did not really die, but rather made his farewell and went to God, who was calling him.¹⁰

His son, Rabbi Mordekhai Lublinsky, inherited his character (see plate section no. 1). He was still alive at the time Spielrein was writing her family history. By then he was senile, but still ‘cheerful and loving’:

My grandfather loved people. His house was always open to all comers … Numerous relatives lived there and were allowed to take as much money as they needed. There was none left for the dowry for his daughter, but that did not trouble him. He firmly believed that God would provide for his daughter and he was right.

There were many stories about him. He defended people in court. He overpowered two boys trying to beat up an old woman on the street. He gave his last three roubles to a poor woman. He was also allowed to deliver speeches in public places, in a way that was usually not tolerated in Russia.¹¹ Sabina described how her grandfather had suffered a big disappointment in his youth. Many women adored him because of his loving nature and his good looks, but he fell in love with the daughter of a Christian doctor. His father forbade the match. Instead, there was an arranged marriage to Sabina’s grandmother. ‘Nana’ was evidently ‘loving and long suffering but not very intelligent’. Rabbi Lublinsky moved with his family from the Ukraine to the community in Rostov – joining the more liberal Jews who now formed the backbone of the community. He was an advocate of secular learning and social assimilation. He sent his daughter Eva to the Russian high school. Sabina believed this had something to do with his thwarted love:

Apparently the image of his first love lived on in his unconscious, because he regarded study of the Christian sciences higher than anything else. His daughter had to study, always just study; she was not allowed to help with the housework.¹²

Eva was one of the first Jewish women in Russia to go to university. She had been brought up with two brothers that Sabina described in her diary as ‘stupid’ and ‘limited’, but her third and youngest brother Moishe or Mosya was highly intelligent and also went to university, training to be a doctor. (Eva’s mother evidently had many other children who died very young, but there is no further information about them.¹³) Eva herself trained as a dentist, although she did not practise for long. By adulthood, she had become an eligible match for any Jewish professional. She was first engaged to a physician, but the families were opposed. Her fiancé’s parents spread rumours about her, and their son believed them. They separated. Eva felt her life was ‘ruined’ by the rumours.¹⁴ She then turned down a Christian suitor, ‘a respected figure in St Petersburg’. She told him it would destroy her parents if they married. The next day he shot himself.

In due course, her father introduced her to a more suitable match: Naftul Aaronovich Spielrein. He had been born in 1861 and was already a successful businessman, a dealer in fertiliser and animal feed. He was one of five children – three boys and two girls. Like Eva’s family, his own family in Warsaw spoke Yiddish, the traditional language of eastern European Jews. The family name itself is Yiddish for ‘fair play’, or more strictly ‘pure play’. Like many educated Polish Jews of his time, his affinity was for western European and particularly German culture. By the time he met Eva he had acquired many other languages, including not only Polish and Russian but also Hebrew, French, German, English, and the classics. He developed an interest in music, a passion his daughter was to inherit. One of his brothers, Adolf, qualified as a doctor just as Eva’s brother Mosya had done. Naftul studied agricultural science in Berlin and appears to have been something of a polymath, with a lifelong interest in politics and philosophy. He was a vegetarian and refused to wear a hat or overcoat all year round, eccentricities that probably would have marked him out more then than nowadays.

After moving from Warsaw to Russia, Naftul changed his name to Nikolai Arkadyevich. This signified a shift of social class, and one of nationality as well. Eva’s parents were impressed by Nikolai’s intelligence and piety. However, Sabina described his piety as a double-edged sword: it took the form of ‘a vague belief in a destiny-like force’. In the eyes of believers, he was ‘a straightforward heretic’.¹⁵ Eva turned down the marriage three times. In the end, impressed by his intelligence, ‘his firm and noble character’, and his concern for her, she assented. Sabina wrote: ‘He knew how to wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Childhood 1885-1904
• 2. Asylum 1904-1905
• 3. Treatment 1904-1905
• 4. Medical Student 1905
• 5. Man’s Talk 1906-1907
• 6. Woman’s Talk 1907-1908
• 7. Poetry 1908
• 8. Crisis 1909
• 9. Free Associations 1909
• 10. Reconciliation 1909-1910
• 11. Separation 1910-1911
• 12. Munich 1911
• 13. Sex Versus Survival 1911
• 14. Aftermath 1912
• 15. Berlin 1912-1914
• 16. Switzerland Again 1914-1919
• 17. Your Best Pupil 1917-1919
• 18. Geneva 1920-1923
• 19. From Geneva to Moscow 1922-1923
• 20. Moscow 1923-1925
• 21. Back in Rostov 1925-1942
• 22. Deaths 1942
• 23. Legacy
• Spielrein Family Tree
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author