ABSTRACT
Sabina Spielrein was admitted to membership in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on December 11, 1911. This happened during the same meeting at which Sigmund Freud expelled Adler and five of the latter's supporters. Sabina Spielrein played a vital role in the history of the Jung-Freud relationship. Sabina's letters to Freud and Carl Jung are distinguished by a subtle understanding of the situation and a level of reserve that appear to have been lacking in her correspondents. At the beginning of World War I, Pavel Scheftel had left Sabina behind in Geneva and returned to Russia. He settled in Rostov-on-the-Don, and lived there in common-law marriage with a Russian woman, a physician, who bore him a child in 1924. Spielrein's withdrawal from the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society can be interpreted as indirect proof that as early as the 1920s, the activities and relationships within the society were far from the atmosphere that reigned in European centers of psychoanalysis.
