by Pamela Cooper-White (USA)
Sabina Spielrein’s life and works are currently undergoing a serious and necessary critical reclamation. Spielrein stands as both an important and tragic figure, misunderstood or underestimated by her fellow analysts (including Jung and Freud) and often erased in the annals of psychoanalytic history. Her story has not only been largely forgotten but also actively, though unconsciously, repressed as the figure who represented a trauma buried in the early history of psychoanalysis.
Pamela Cooper-White’s Sabina Spielrein and the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis, co-edited with Felicity Brock Kelcourse and published this year in Routledge’s Relational Psychoanalysis Series, joins the growing field of scholarship on Spielrein’s distinctive and significant theoretical innovations at the foundations of psychoanalysis and serves as a new English language source of some of Spielrein’s key works.
Cooper-White’s book includes:
- Four chapters by Felicity Brock Kelcourse, Pamela Cooper-White, Klara Naszkowska and Adrienne Harris spanning Spielrein’s life and exploring her works in depth, with new insights about her influence not only on Jung and Freud, but also Piaget in Geneva and Vygotsky and Luria in Moscow.
- A timeline providing readers with important historical context including Spielrein, Freud, Jung, other theorists, and historical events in Europe (1850-1950).
- Twelve new translations of works by Spielrein, ten of which are the first translations into English from the original French, German, or Russian.
Pamela Cooper-White, PhD is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and Religion, Union Theological Seminary, New York, and 2013-2014 Fulbright-Freud Scholar of Psychoanalysis, Vienna, Austria. She has authored six previous books including Braided Selves: Collected Essays on Multiplicity, God, and Persons; Schoenberg and the God Idea: The Opera Moses und Aron; and Old and Dirty Gods: Religion, Antisemitism, and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2017).
The Rev. Pamela Cooper-White, PhD
Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and Religion
Union Theological Seminary
3041 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
Email Pamela Cooper-White
