Erotic instinct

Sabina Speilrein hardly gets a footnote in the history of psychoanalysis. But the pioneering Russian psychoanalyst who studied under Carl Gustav Jung and saw his mentor, Sigmund Freud in Vienna, formulated a novel view of the sex drive which anticipates both Freud’s ‘death instinct’ and Jung ‘transformation’.

Thus, she may have inspired both men’s most creative ideas. But her life was cut short by a Nazi Death Squad in 1942. Her husband, a pioneer of labour psychology, and her brother too perished in Stalin’s Great Terror.

Earlier, her innovative kindergartenThe White nursery was closed by Soviet authorities under trumpedup charges (although Stalin himself had enrolled his own son under a false name in the institute!).

The early life of this tormented genius along with the allegedly oedipal relationship between Jung and Freud has now been brought into limelight by David Cronenberg’s new film, Dangerous Method. By focusing on the clandestine love affair between Jung who was married and Sabina, who was his patient as well as student, Cronenberg seems to highlight Spielrein’s own conception of the sexual drive as containing both an instinct of destruction and an instinct of transformation.

This echoes a fundamental insight of the Bhagvadgita, which describes knowledge as being enveloped by Desire or Kama (Eros), which therefore becomes the ‘constant enemy of the wise’. Only by mastering the self by the self can one hope to sequester Desire. For only when Desire melts is the Brahman felt, says Sri Jnandev in his commentary.