The Untold Story of Sabina Spielrein

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The unpublished Russian diary and letters of Sabina Spielrein represent a milestone for academics, scholars, historians, and psychoanalysts whose interest in the most enigmatic woman to have pioneered psychoanalysis and developmental psychology in the first part of the 20th century has never ceased to grow after she was rediscovered in the mid-1980s. These primary sources, which include unreleased drawings and notes, were patiently exhumed by Lothane in Switzerland and translated with the collaboration of Spielrein's grandnephew, Vladimir Shpilrain. Thoroughly presented and commented on by Lothane, this book will also fascinate a public increasingly drawn to the legacy of a feminist figure whose intimate correspondence provides an invaluable testimony from her childhood to the most ignored episodes of an extraordinary life between passions, strokes of genius, and tragedies. A life prematurely engulfed in times of atrocities, when Sabina Spielrein was last seen with her daughters, in 1942, in a column of 27,000 Jews marched by the Nazis to be murdered in Zmiyevskaia ravine, Rostov's Babi Yar.