THE LETTER 49 (Spring 2012) pages 81-94

No ashes, no coal can burn with such glow as a secretive love of which no one must know Sabina Spielrein

…  To be slandered and scorched by the love with which we operate – such are the perils of our trade, which we are certainly not going to abandon in their account. Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.”  Sigmund Freud

Borges: Yes, a lover is like a god …Uchida: Yet there must be a recipient to contain that god. The centre is always empty and that is where God is present.Borges: Yes, empty. That is what is important … Empty. That is exactly what the gushi in the sanctuary of Meiji said.     Mic Uchida

Arguably  the disavowal of Sabina Spielrein  is perhaps one of the most tragic events involving the very problematic reciprocal  hateloving structure  in the transference. This paper highlights the rather questionable concept  of the saintly sterilised transference-love. The hateloving in the transference was a triangle that engaged Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein. It entailed repression and in a way disavowal of  the discovery of Sabina Spielrein. Although Spielrein’s propositions were at the foreground of a momentous theoretical psychoanalytical innovation, the personal enmities between Freud and Jung endangered their potential discovery, thus  running the risk of being disregarded in the history of ideas within the psychoanalytic movement.

This paper attempts to clarify the scope of this situation as well as to underscore how much Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis owe to the by and large almost forgotten importance of Sabina Spielrein. This is particularly so, concerning her new formulations proposed for the sexual and  destructive drives – none of which were ever acknowledged either by Freud or by other psychoanalysts. However by introducing Lacan’s innovations, regarding the unconscious the paper goes much further with new propositions.

Keywords: hateloving, death drive, Freud, Jung, Spielrein.