The Lady Shrink,
Two C.G.'s and a View
Gone Forever
This really did
start out as one of those "six degrees of
separation" chains by which I have tried in this series of
entries to "relate everything to Naples." (See #1 in the series.) They're fun
to write, and this one pretty much wrote itself, teaching
me a few things along the way. That's hard to beat.
Out of the blue, friend Warren asked me if I knew
anything about Sabrina Spielrein. I knew nothing (my motto
for most of the rest of this entry!). She was Russian,
born in 1885 and is now viewed as one of the early
practitioners of psychotherapy. She was a student of Carl
Gustav Jung, apparently had an intimate relationship with
him, and she knew Sigmund Freud. She influenced both of
them or, in the words of friend Warren: "In a way it's the
psychoanalytic equivalent of the DNA story. Watson and
Crick get all the credit, and Rosalind Franklin is all but
forgotten."
I did know about Jung (chalk one up for me!); he
and Freud discovered the unconscious! Then one particular
passage in his The
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
reminded me of my motto (but I don't remember what it is).
Further, James Hillman
(bibliography, below) says this:
Although
various philosophers, among them Leibniz, Kant, and
Schelling, had already pointed very clearly to the
problem of the dark side of the psyche, it was a
physician who felt impelled, from his scientific and
medical experience, to point to the unconscious as the
essential basis of the psyche. This was C. G. Carus...
We may recognize Carus
as a precursor of Jung. They are alike not only in their
interest in the unconscious psyche...Both are medical
psychologists, empiricists, observers of phenomena and
in relationship with the living psyche from which they
make inductions. At the same time, they are both
holists, attempting to penetrate with their vision
through the phenomena to the archetypal background of
life.
So, there was
the second C.G. and I had never heard of him! He was born in
Leipzig in 1789 and died in 1869. He not only belonged to
the Age of Goethe in Germany, but was even his friend, and
like Goethe, Carus was a polymath, one of those "universal
scholars," whose interests and abilities ranged across a
stunning array of disciplines. He was a philosopher,
physiologist, doctor, naturalist, psychologist and
respected painter. His many written works range from Foundations of Comparative
Anatomy and Physiology, to Psyche—On the Development of
the Soul, and Letters
on Landscape Painting, the last of which was very
influential in the development of German Romantic
painting.
Carus, like Goethe, was also a Grand Tourist. A Trip through Germany,
Italy and Switzerland in the Year 1828 is of
particular interest to me since it has descriptions of the
Gulf of Naples. His most intriguing comments, however,
about Naples are not in writing. They're on canvas. Carus'
paintings are generally landscapes and show his
fascination with moonlight and the night sky. He has one,
for example —Italian
Fishermen in the Bay of Naples (image, top of
page)—in which the figures in the foreground are almost
secondary; your eye is drawn first not to them but to the
moon, the light on the water and to Vesuvius in the
background.
The
most interesting painting to me, though, is the one
entitled Balcony in
Naples (image, right). It never occurred to me
that you could —or would want to —combine landscape
painting and still life, but I guess you can, because life
doesn't get much stiller than the inside of this room. The
scene is painted not from the balcony, but from within a
room, bare except for a guitar leaning against the wall
near the balcony. The shutter is half-closed on the right;
the scene through the semi-open door is of the balcony and
only then the outside world. The scene is narrowed down,
framed, as it is, by the room itself and the entrance onto
the balcony. The view is along the old Santa Lucia section
of Naples, looking due south to the Egg Castle in the
background. The room is at sea-level and there is a boat
with the triangular "Latin sail" moored prominently at the
rocks at sea-side. The eye is drawn first to the inside of
the room and not the outside view. I don't know why the
shutter is half-closed. I want to say that it has
something to do with the unconscious, sublimation,
suppressed memories and the "archetypal background of
life," but maybe that's just me. If you could open that
shutter all the way, you would see that the outside view
is almost identical to that in a painting
by Oswald Achenbach from 1875. In that painting,
however, Ozzie was obviously down on the street having a
good time with the folks while he painted. (I think there
is a neat computer trick to flip open that shutter, but
unfortunately I don't know what it is. I tried my index
finder. That doesn't work.)
I don't know that Carus lived in that room when he
was in Naples, but I suspect he must have. He would be
unhappy to know that the view is totally obscured today;
the entire area in front of his room and balcony was built
over in the 1890s during the splurge of urbanization known
as the risanamento. Today he
would be looking at the backs of a long string of
high-rise hotels. Warren said —when I asked him for help
in finding a message in all this— that "maybe looking at
the backs of a long string of high-rise hotels is the message." The
guitar? It's smaller than the modern guitar and seems
typical of Italian guitars of
that period. I don't know if Carl Gustav Carus was a
musician, but it wouldn't surprise me.
bibliography:
Hillman, James (1992). "An Introductory note: C.G,
Carus—C.J. Jung" in Carl
Gustav Jung: critical assessments. Editor, Renos
K. Papadopoulos. London. Routledge.
Jung, C.G. ([1959] 1969). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious,
Collected Works, Volume 9i, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press.
Kerr, J. (1993). A Most
Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina
Spielrein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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Sabrina
Spielrein
A bit more
attention is due this amazing woman, one of the founders
of psychoanalysis. Little by little, women scientists,
long overlooked, may be getting the recognition they
deserve. I refer you to my friend Warren's comment (above)
that "In a way it's the psychoanalytic equivalent of
the DNA story. Watson and Crick get all the credit, and
Rosalind Franklin is all but forgotten."
Sabina Nikolayevna Spielrein (1885–1942) was born into a
wealthy Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don, Russian Empire.
She travelled —thus
her friendship with Jung, Freud, and others. She was in
Rostov-on-Don in 1942, however, when the German army
occupied the city. She and her two daughters, aged 29 and
16, were shot dead.
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 documented in
their letters and diaries from the time. She also met,
corresponded with, and had a collegial relationship with
Sigmund Freud. One of her more famous analysands was the
Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget. She worked
as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, teacher and pediatrician
in Switzerland and Russia. In a thirty-year professional
career, she published over 35 papers in three languages
(German, French and Russian), covering psychoanalysis,
developmental psychology, psycholinguistics and
educational psychology. Her best known and perhaps most
influential published work in the field of psychoanalysis
is the essay titled "Destruction as the Cause of Coming
Into Being", written in German in 1912. Sabina was also
known as a pioneer of psychoanalysis and one of the first
people to introduce the death instinct. She was one of the
first people to conduct a case study on schizophrenia.
Spielrein has been remembered from her relationship with
Jung, but she is now increasingly recognized as an
important and innovative thinker who was marginalized in
history because of her unusual eclecticism, refusal to
join factions, feminist approach to psychology, and her
death in the Holocaust.
Despite her closeness to the central figures of both
psychoanalysis and developmental psychology in the first
part of the twentieth century, Spielrein was more or less
forgotten in Western Europe after her return to Moscow in
1923. The publication in 1974, of letters between
Freud and Jung, followed by the discovery of Sabrina's
personal papers and publication of some of them in the
1980s, made her name known again. Unfortunately, that led
to her identification in popular culture as an erotic
footnote in the lives of Jung and Freud. That is a
misconception. From papers and letters, we note that she
anticipated both Freud's "death drive" and Jung's views on
"transformation." However questionable or inappropriate
her relationship with Jung may have been, it was useful to
psychotherapy! Jung's letters to Freud about his (Jung's)
relationship with Spielrein inspired Freud's concepts of
transference and countertransference.
In recent years, Spielrein has been increasingly
recognized as a significant thinker in her own right,
influencing not only Jung and Freud, but also later
psychologists including Jean Piaget, Alexander Luria and
Vygotsky. Spielrein has influential work in several
topics: gender roles, love, the importance of intuition in
women, the unconscious, dream interpretation, sexuality
and sexual urges, libido, sublimation, transference,
linguistics and language development in children.
In the last few years, there have books, plays and
films about Sabrina Spielrein. A Dangerous
Method is a 2011 German-Canadian historical
film directed by David Cronenberg (film poster
image, right). The screenplay was adapted by
writer Christopher Hampton from his own 2002 stage
play The Talking Cure, which itself
was based on the 1993 non-fiction book by John
Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method. There is
also a 2002 Italian-French-British
"romance-drama" film, Prendimi l'Anima
by Italian director, Roberto
Faenza.
The English-language release is entitled The
Soul Keeper.