New Books In Psychoanalysis

John Launer's Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein (Henry N. Abrams, 2017) manages to supplant (and given the power of the visual image, this is no mean feat) the picture you may have in your mind of Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender in flagrante delicto. If this reference does not ring a bell, perhaps you can just consider yourself lucky. What follows are some head spinning facts: Sabina Spielrein was the first female member of Freudʼs inner circle. As a young Russian woman from a prominent, educated and chaotic Jewish family, she fell ill and was treated at the Burghozli Hospital for psychiatric illnesses in Zurich. There she began to recover and to do research into the psyche. On regaining her emotional balance, she attended medical school. She wrote a paper that argued for the existence of a death instinct in 1912, pre-empting Freudʼs work in that area by 8 years. She developed ways of working with children that also preceded the thinking of Anna Freud or Melanie Klein. Her dis