Psychodrama - Jung and Freud

It was a marriage made in heaven: two of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Then they met a beautiful, brilliant and deeply disturbed 18-year-old. AC Grayling tells the strange story of Sabina Spielrein

History always seems, at first blush, to have room only for great individuals and crucial events. But a closer look always reveals other essentials hiding in the shadows. In the saga of two 20th-century giants, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung – founders of different schools of psychotherapy, who were at first respectively father figure and heir but later tormented rivals – there is just such a shadow: an 18-year-old girl called Sabina Spielrein. In August 1904, Spielrein became Jung's patient at the famous Burghölzli Hospital in Zurich, was later his lover and within 10 years had become implicated in the traumatic split between the two men.

Few hard facts are known about Spielrein, who went on to become a successful analyst in her own right, but there have always been tantalising hints of her importance in the lives of Jung and Freud. In 1977 part of a diary and some of her letters were discovered, and they, together with Jung's clinical notes about her case, put a little flesh on the bones. But it is only now that we are seeing a new fascination with this woman among academics and writers. Works include a forthcoming book, Tribute to Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis; a newly released Italian-made film, My Name Was Sabina Spielrein starring Eva Osterberg; and now at the National Theatre a new play about her, The Talking Cure by Christopher Hampton.

Hampton first became interested in Spielrein in the 1970s when he wrote a screenplay, not yet filmed, about her role in the Jung-Freud story. In his play Hampton makes skilful use of the fragmentary material in her letters and Jung's notes, creating a compelling story of torment, love and survival. It is Spielrein's unlocking of the human element in the struggle between two geniuses, as well as the increasing prominence given to the lost women of history, that explains the surge of interest in her story.

Sabina Spielrein was a Russian Jew, born in Rostov-on-Don in 1887 to wealthy bourgeois parents. Her father was a bully who flew into rages and used beatings and threats of suicide to control his wife and children. In the hysterical atmosphere of the Spielrein home, Sabina became increasingly disturbed until, in her mid-teens, she had to be admitted to an asylum.

She was a difficult patient; a number of institutions found themselves unable to control her, still less help her. She was alternately depressed and hysterical, obsessed with defecation and sexually fixated on her father's hands, which she and her brothers had to kiss after he had beaten them. She responded violently to all efforts at help, howling and contorting herself when disturbed.

In the end she was taken to the Burghölzli and placed under Jung's care. He saw immediately that she was a highly intelligent and articulate young woman, and because he had just fallen under the spell of Sigmund Freud's theories he decided to try the Freudian "talking cure" on her. In 10 months she was cured; the central problem had been guilt over the sexual arousal she felt in response to her father's beatings. Either during her treatment, or very soon afterwards, she and Jung became lovers.

Her effect on Jung's thinking was profound, and her presence in the relationship between Jung and Freud was, though now shadowy, a crucial one. As the first example Jung encountered of a patient amenable to the "talking cure" she influenced the direction of his psychological theories. She helped him with his research into word associations, and suggested to him the concept of the "anima", the female principle which, he believed, subconsciously influences every man. Theirs was therefore not just an emotional affair; it was an intellectual one too.

But because he had violated the ethical prohibition against sex between doctor and patient, Jung was nervous of discovery, and eventually ended the relationship. By that time Spielrein had qualified in medicine at Zurich University. Their breach was a stormy one – at one point she slashed Jung's face with a knife – and it ended only with her departure for Vienna to study with Freud. To Jung that seemed like a defection, for he and Freud had by then begun to quarrel.

Jung eventually had a nervous breakdown because of his split from Freud. When it happened Spielrein, in a reversal of roles, was on an upward trend, heading for a successful career as a child psychoanalyst. Credited as the first women member of Freud's circle, she practised and taught at Geneva's Rousseau Institute, and later at the Department of Child Psychology at Moscow University.

In the psychotherapeutic world it is not unusual for patients to turn healers. The early patients, particularly the women patients, of Jung and especially Freud were immensely important to the development of psychotherapy. Freud said that psychoanalysis began when his colleague Josef Breuer treated Bertha Pappenheim, known as "Anna O", by means of a therapy which she herself created, substituting it for Breuer's usual treatment of hypnosis. It was she who gave it the name "the talking cure". (Freud more soberly called it "free association".) Freud's experience with the patient he called his "teacher", Anna von Lieben, confirmed the talking cure's value. These women helped to create psychoanalysis; other women, on becoming analysts in their own right, spread it beyond Vienna. Chief among them were Helene Deutsch in America, Princess Marie Bonaparte in France, and of course Freud's daughter Anna in England. Sabina Spielrein was its advocate in Switzerland and Russia.

Spielrein's part in the Freud-Jung split was a significant one. When Freud first met Jung he proclaimed him his heir; six years later he was attacking Jung as brutal, anti-Semitic, paranoid, "emotionally stupid" and a sufferer from "repressed anal eroticism". Freud was always incontinent in his hostility to people he saw as traitors to his cause, but with Jung his vehemence was unbounded, because Jung's treachery was that of the Adopted Heir.

Freud and Jung had at last met in Vienna in the spring of 1907, two years after Jung had cured Spielrein by Freud's methods. They talked into the early hours of the morning, an episode beautifully captured in Hampton's play. Freud was anxious to attach Jung to his cause, for the latter already had a standing in medical psychology; and he was not Jewish. These were two important attractions for Freud, who wished to make psychoanalysis respectable beyond his own circle.

And to begin with, Jung was happy to play Paul to Freud's Jesus. All during the time that Jung and Spielrein were lovers, Jung's energy drove psychoanalysis towards international respectability. He and Freud visited America in 1909 on a lecture tour, and Jung organised grand-sounding International Congresses of Psychoanalysis in various European cities.

But Jung had too independent a mind to rest content as second fiddle. Driven by his own demons, he began to disagree with aspects of Freud's views. As with Adler, a chief difference concerned Freud's insistence on the fundamental importance of sex. The disagreements began on the American trip, but it was not until 1913 that the rift became final. In the immediately following years Jung had his nervous breakdown, while Freud attacked him at every opportunity.

This story would be compelling enough without Sabina Spielrein. Before the discovery of her diary and letters she had only a walk-on part in the tale. But as she comes more clearly into focus it appears that she was, at very least, the pivot of an unstated mutual blackmail between Freud and Jung, and possibly an important creative influence on the development of their respective theories.

The "mutual blackmail" point is an intriguing one. Jung was afraid that Freud would use his knowledge of the affair with Spielrein to damage him. But Freud's knowledge of the affair was balanced by Jung's knowledge, in return, of Freud's incestuous relationship with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays.

Some have argued that the mutual-blackmail hypothesis is implausible, on the grounds that many of the early psychoanalysts slept with their patients – apparently setting a precedent for Christopher Allison, the psychotherapist jailed this week in Winchester. Why therefore should Jung have worried about exposure? Moreover, Minna Bernays was Freud's sister-in-law, so the relationship was incest only in a technical sense. But it is hard to imagine how exposure of either relationship could have been a matter of indifference to the principals. Nor is it necessary to suppose that Jung and Freud ever explicitly threatened one another with exposure. The mutuality of their secrets would have been enough.

Spielrein's central position in this uncomfortable balance would be enough to demonstrate her importance. But Christopher Hampton makes large claims for her: that she inspired not only Jung's concept of the anima, but also his idea of the collective unconscious; and that she is the source of Freud's theory of the connection between sex and the death wish. These are fundamental notions in each man's theory, and if she is their source she becomes a major creative figure in the development of psychotherapy.

Evidently Freud tried to detach Spielrein's loyalties from Jung, but failed. Even though she became a Freudian analyst she never forgot her cure and her start in medicine under Jung, and hoped that the two men might be reconciled.

Spielrein's later life and its ending were tragic. She had been torn between Freud and Jung; she was to be crushed between Stalin and Hitler. She returned to Russia in the 1920s to teach and practise, but psychotherapy was banned by Stalin, so she went home to her native Rostov to work as a doctor. There in 1942 she and her two daughters were among the Jewish victims massacred by Hitler's invading army.

Hampton's play ends at the point when Spielrein, pregnant and just beginning her independent career, meets Jung for the last time, on the shores of Lake Zurich. It was 1913. He tells her that she was the greatest love of his life, and that without her he would not have developed his theories. Whether or not Hampton is right on the first point, the second probably contains much truth.

'The Talking Cure' is at the Cottesloe Theatre until 5 February. There will be a platform on Sabina Spielrein before the performance on 29 January at 6pm (020 7452 3020)