Raped By Carl Jung, Then Murdered by the Nazis
But the theft and erasure of Sabina Spielrein’s intellectual legacy by the psychoanalytic establishment may be an even more troubling crime
By Phyllis Chesler
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At the time, in 1970, I laughed in disbelief at the accusation/diagnosis from the audience—and began writing
Women and Madness on the plane home from Miami. It would become a best seller. It even had a chapter that was hailed by other feminists as a “pioneering” exposé of sex between patient and therapist.
Yet I had no idea that Spielrein’s analyst, Carl Gustav Jung, had deflowered her when she was one of his hospitalized patients and most needed his help.
This “affair”—this crime—was wrongfully immortalized on screen in David Cronenberg’s 2011 film
A Dangerous Method. Keira Knightley plays Spielrein, Michael Fassbender plays Jung, and Viggo Mortensen plays Freud. The film does not convey the fact that Spielrein is a lot more than a “crazy” patient, nor do a number of plays about her, nor do ever so many learned treatises that all reduce the then-19-year-old to a permanent 19-year-old—or, as Sells phrases it, to an “ever-patient,” an “uber” patient, one who is continually and retroactively diagnosed, demonized, and diminished as “schizophrenic.”
According to Sells—and I agree with her analysis—in addition to her sister’s death, Spielrein was most probably a victim of childhood sexual abuse at her father’s hands. In Sells’ view, Sabina was hospitalized because of this abuse. According to Sells (and Spielrein), her breakdown was a“reaction to her father’s abuse which began at age 4.”
“In a 1909 letter to her mother [Spelrein writes]:
‘I fell in love with a psychopath [Jung], and is it necessary to explain why? I have never seen my father as normal.’ Spielrein further says to her mother that she and Jung ‘acted’ at times as caretakers for each other and that Jung’s behavior of raging, weeping, and jubilant prostration mimicked her own experience of her parents: ‘Remember how dear daddy was apologizing to you exactly in the same manner!’ Her equation of Jung to her father perhaps belies a subtle allusion to her experience of the affair as a form of continued abuse.”
According to Sells, in a private interview, Spielrein described what Jung, her treating physician, did to her as “rape.” In 1910, Spielrein writes: “
Good God, if only he [Jung] had an inkling of how much I have suffered on his account and still suffer! … I am ashamed that I have wasted so much time. Courage. Ah, yes—courage.”
In 1972, I published
Women and Madness. It had one chapter about sex between patient and therapist. Both clinicians and reviewers challenged the information I presented: “These women are making it up. They are mentally ill. How can you believe them?” And: “If anything happened they themselves wanted it to happen, they seduced their therapists and now when things have not turned out their way, they are crying ‘Foul.’ ”
This is exactly what clinicians used to say when female patients alleged incest; exactly what everyone used to say when women alleged rape or sexual harassment. Although I had done interviews and tried to research this subject, I am struck by how little I really knew about the history of this sordid subject among psychoanalysts and their patients.
I did not know how hard Spielrein fought against concepts such as penis envy back in 1912 and that
she — not Jung, not Freud — was the one who first proposed the existence of mythic archetypes in the human unconscious and the existence of a death wish which, as she understood it, was about death and rebirth. Spielrein also began to chart the psychological relationship between mothers and daughters, the nature of female sexuality, and the origin of human speech.
Imagine if such work had never been disappeared. Imagine if Spielrein’s brief stint as a patient had not been used forever after to denigrate her as a “crazy” woman who fell in love with her psychoanalyst and “forced” him to cure her via a dangerous method known as the “love cure.”
Sounds shady, doesn’t it?
There she was, a 19-year-old probable incest victim, (who was therefore often retroactively diagnosed as a “borderline personality” or as “schizophrenic”), who had experienced a “breakdown” of some kind in response to years of childhood abuse coupled with the recent death of her younger sister—and there he was, at the famed Burgholzli Clinic, the Aryan God-in-formation, who abused his power over Sabina when she was at her most vulnerable. (Granted, Jung himself was only 27 at the time but the power difference between them was real and significant.)
Jung’s was a criminal and extremely unethical act; perhaps it was the act of a selfish sociopath, who took advantage of what psychoanalysts have termed “transference.” Who but a sociopath would propose an openly polygamous union and living arrangement that would include his wife? Sabina wisely, sanely, turned him down. However, this in-patient’s (mis)treatment ended in eight months.
Sells stresses that Spielrein was pronounced “cured,” by none other than Eugen Bleuler. Although her on-and-off-again relationship with Jung continued for some time, both on an outpatient basis and then as a doctoral student, Spielrein put this “love cure”/affair/victimization entirely behind her and went on to obtain a doctorate in psychiatry. Her dissertation adviser was Jung, of course.
Apparently, Jung had a “thing” for Jewish girls. In 1910, Spielrein writes in her diary that “he [Jung] would love a black-complexioned Jewish girl,” and that as much as he wished to remain “close to his religion and culture,” he desired “liberation from his paternal responsibilities in an unbelieving Jewess.”
As Spielrein suspected and as Jung admitted to Freud, “The Jewess [has] popped up in another form, in the shape of my patient [Spielrein].”
According to Sells, Jung had had a previous relationship with another Jewish woman. Spielrein intuited that she may be Jung’s “psycho-sexual replacement.”
Taking his eroticized anti-Semitism to a whole new level, Jung confronts Spielrein about why the Jews are marginalized: “… (the Jew) is the murderer of his own prophets, even of his Messiah.”
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Jung’s contemporaries refused to blame him, although Freud did. As recently as 2010,
John Haule excused Jung’s transgression by invoking
John Kerr to normalize it: “Jung was scarcely the only person to become involved with a patient. Gross’ exploits were legendary, Stekel had long enjoyed a reputation as a ‘seducer.’ Jones was paying blackmail money to a former patient, while noted colleague Otto Rank famously began an affair with his patient, Anaïs Nin.” Sells cites my own work on this issue to bolster her argument and I am grateful to her.
Yet Spielrein’s importance is hardly that of a patient, or an “Ever Patient.” She is a psychoanalytic pioneer, whose original ideas were “borrowed” by Jung and Freud, both with and without credit; and whose original ideas about female sexuality, death-and-rebirth, child psychology, and the importance of the mother-daughter relationship were utterly forgotten. As Sells ably demonstrates, Spielrein shifted rapidly away from Jung as a “love interest” as she began to worry about the possibility that he will “steal ideas from the research he has been reading.” Her fears were well-founded.
Spielrein writes:
I must admit that I greatly fear that my friend [Jung], who planned to mention my idea (of archetypes in our collective unconscious, about death-rebirth) in his article in July, saying that I have rights of priority, may simply borrow the whole development of the idea, because he now wants to refer to it as early as January. … How could I esteem a person who stole my ideas, who was not my friend but a petty, scheming rival? … I love him and I hate him.
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