This post was originally published on this site
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung — and Sabina Spielrein. As the field of psychoanalysis was emerging in the early 1900s, those scientists were linked in a triangular dialogue that included letters, scholarly articles and debates. Yet for decades, Spielrein’s contributions were overshadowed by the two men. Only recently has her role begun to be fully acknowledged.
In 1911, Spielrein presented a bold theory before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society at an event hosted by Freud.
During her talk, she proposed that the same inner forces that drive people to love, desire and create can also make them want to destroy — even themselves — a notion that became the focus of her 1912 paper “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming.”
When Freud published his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), he gave a label to the urge — Thanatos, or the death drive — that acted in opposition to the sex drive, which he called Eros.
He cited Spielrein in a footnote and, for many decades since, she remained just that, despite publishing more than 35 papers in three languages and making significant contributions to the fields of psychoanalysis and child psychology.