Sabina Spielrein

Sabina Nikolayevna Spielrein was a Russian physician and one of the first female psychoanalysts. She was in succession the patient, then student, then colleague of Carl Gustav Jung, with whom she had an intimate relationship during 1908–1910, as is documented in their correspondence from the time and her diaries. She also met, corresponded, and had a collegial relationship with Sigmund Freud. She worked with and psychoanalysed Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. She worked as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, teacher and paediatrician in Switzerland and Russia. In a thirty-year professional career, she published over 35 papers in three languages, covering psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics and educational psychology. Among her works in the field of psychoanalysis is the essay titled "Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being", written in German in 1912.