By John Launer
Duckworth £20
A biographer must untangle the web of another's life. And given the maxim, "physician, heal thyself", what a tangled web that is when the other is an early practitioner of psychoanalysis and, furthermore, a woman.
Marked during her Russian childhood in the late 19th century by a depressive and dominating father, Sabina Speilrein began her psychoanalytical path in Zurich possibly as one of Carl Jung's own analysands, certainly under his thrall. The pretty girl - Keira Knightley played her in A Dangerous Method - fell in love with him and they shared an erotic attachment that Jung and Freud conspired together to keep discreet.
Despite Jung's antisemitism - or perhaps because of it? - he was attracted sexually to Jewish women such as Speilrein and he chose Jewish men as father figures with whom he could fall out bitterly, as he quickly did with Freud. In his book about Speilrein, John Launer manages to make Jung and Freud neither villains nor heroes, simply background characters in the odyssey of his peripatetic and intellectual heroine.
Speilrein became a medical doctor and in time developed a philosophy and therapeutic style of her own. Her theories gave biology its due, which both Jung and Freud tended to overlook, Jung due partly to his attraction to the occult while Freud focused on the early experiences of the individual.
Hence the title of Launer's book: sex is a driving force towards survival, but destroys what has gone before and, of course, contains its own climax and end; sex is creative and also destructive, and we are all caught in the middle.
Despite Speilrein's crush on the philandering Jung, she married a nice Jewish doctor and moved with him to Berlin. She maintained a correspondence with Jung, increasingly cerebral rather than lovey-dovey, and tried hopelessly to heal the rift that opened between him and Freud. And she published many papers, including one of neglected importance on the role of mothers-in-law.
Launer allows Speilrein her own words as much as extant papers supply them. An early advocate of treating children psychoanalytically, in 1913 Speilrein gave birth to her first daughter, Renata. It was hardly surprising that the conventional marriage of an independently thinking woman in that time could not endure; far more surprising was it that she and her husband were reunited after years of separation. And Speilrein, now with two daughters, both musically gifted, returned to her original home in Rostov-on-Don, which all too soon became a suburb of hell under Nazi invasion.
Speilrein did not flee, unable to believe that invaders from the land of a culture she so admired were capable of mindless murder. Although Launer as a biographer keeps emotional reactions to himself, he must have felt pain in his heart, as his reader does, to report that Doctor Sabina Nikolayevna Speilrein-Sheftel along with her daughters, Renata and Eva, died in the Nazis' massacre of Jews at the Zmeyevsky - "Snake" - Ravine.
John Launer is not just Speilrein's biographer, he is her champion; he gives the neglected female at last the place she deserves in the development of talking therapies.
