Russian and Soviet psychoanalyst, pedologist. In the history of psychoanalysis, Sabine Spielrein remained as the author of the world-famous work “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming”, which became the foundation for all further studies of the death drive. Sabine Spielrein was a psychoanalyst of the famous psychologist Jean Piaget (see Piaget, Jean (1896-1980) in Chapter 5: Famous Scientists, Their Scientific Schools and Organizations in Psychological Science).
Spielrein’s key ideas:
1) She contributed to the development of key ideas of analytical psychology: she owns the empirical substantiation of Jung’s theory of complexes (see Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961) in Chapter 5: Famous Scientists, Their Scientific Schools and Organizations in Psychological Science), Spielrein’s work influenced Jung’s ideas about the phylogenesis and ontogenesis of the psyche as a result of “complex accretion”.
2) She proposed an interpretation of the psychogenesis of schizophrenia as the process of replacing individual contents of the psyche with collective archaic contents.
3) She was the first to introduce the concept of the ancestral soul, which is an anticipation of the concept of the collective unconscious.
4) I studied various manifestations of the unconscious of children: I analyzed their dreams, sleep postures, speech and drawings.
5) She was one of the first psychoanalysts who studied the development of speech in young children and linked the development of speech with the development of thinking.