Jungian Reflections on Sabina Spielrein with Michael Vannoy Adams at NYPSI

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Wednesday
February 2, 2011
8:30 p.m.

Jungian Reflections on Sabina Spielrein

Michael Vannoy Adams, MSW   

Sabina Spielrein was Jung’s first psychoanalytic patient.  Admitted to the Burgholzli Hospital in Zurich in 1904 with a diagnosis of hysteria and discharged in 1905, she was also the first patient whom Jung consulted Freud about.  From 1906 to 1910, the professional doctor-patient relationship between Jung and Spielrein developed into a personal relationship that Spielrein described as a friendship involving what she called “poetry.”  Jung and Spielrein imagined that they were soul-mates.  The relationship was romantic and perhaps sexual.  Jung, who was Christian, and Spielrein, who was Jewish, fantasized about having what they called an Aryan-Semitic love child named Siegfried.  Freud advised Jung on how to avoid a scandal.  Spielrein eventually became a Freudian analyst and attempted to mediate reconciliation between Jung and Freud.  She was killed by the Nazis in Russia in 1942.  Michael Vannoy Adams will discuss Spielrein from a Jungian perspective with an emphasis on the question of what it means for a woman to be creative.          

 Michael Vannoy Adams is a Jungian analyst in New York City.  He is a clinical associate professor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and a faculty member at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association and the New School, where he was previously associate provost.  He is the author of three books – The Mythological Unconscious, which has just been published in a new revised second edition in 2010, The Fantasy Principle: Psychoanalysis of the Imagination, and The Multicultural Imagination: “Race,” Color, and the Unconscious.

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