Sabina Spielrein and the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis: Image, Thought, and Language

by Pamela Cooper-White (Editor), Felicity Brock Kelcourse (Editor)

Sabina Spielrein stands as both an important and tragic figure—misunderstood or underestimated by her fellow analysts (including Jung and Freud) and often erased in the annals of psychoanalytic history. Her story has not only been largely forgotten, but actively (though unconsciously) repressed as the figure who represented a trauma buried in the early history of psychoanalysis.

Sabina Spielrein and the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis joins the growing field of scholarship on Spielrein’s distinctive and significant theoretical innovations at the foundations of psychoanalysis and serves as a new English language source of some of Spielrein’s key works. The book



Four chapters by Felicity Brock Kelcourse, Pamela Cooper-White, Klara Naszkowska, and Adrienne Harris spanning Spielrein’s life and exploring her works in depth, with new insights about her influence not only on Jung and Freud, but also Piaget in Geneva and Vygotsky and Luria in Moscow.



A timeline providing readers with important historical context including Spielrein, Freud, Jung, other theorists, and historical events in Europe (1850-1950).



Twelve new translations of works by Spielrein, ten of which are the first ever translations into English from the original French, German, or Russian.

Spielrein’s life and works are currently undergoing a serious and necessary critical reclamation, as the fascinating chapters in this book attest. Sabina Spielrein and the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis will be of great significance to all psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, analytical psychologists, and scholars of psychoanalysis interested in Spielrein and the early development of the field.

393 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 25, 2019

About the author

Pamela Cooper-White began her education as an art and music major at Boston University, graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree Magna cum Laude. She went on to earn both a PhD at Harvard University in historical musicology with a dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron, and a Master of Divinity with Honors at Harvard Divinity School. Music was a bridge to ministry—she discerned a call to ordained ministry while serving as a church music director. During her MDiv program, inspired by the Catholic Worker movement, she founded and directed a ministry for men and women living on the streets in Salem, MA, and first became involved in working with battered women and their children. While seeking her first call to ministry, she taught musicology from 1982-1983 at UCLA and served as a shelter and hotline volunteer at Sojourn Services for Battered Women in Santa Monica, CA. In 1994 she was ordained to the ministry in the United Church of Christ and was called as Director of San Francisco Partnership Ministry—a coalition of 6 urban churches—overseeing a multi-service agency for Southeast Asian refugees and leading a ministry of accompaniment for Salvadoran pastors who had received death threats.