ABSTRACT
This essay, written as Spielrein was leaving Geneva for Moscow, represents Spielrein’s emphasis in the 1920s on observational research (similar to Piaget and others at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva at the time). It is one of her last writings on explicitly existential, religious, and moral themes. She asked students to generate the three questions they would like to ask “God, Fate, or whatever you would like to call it,” first with eyes open, and again with eyes closed. Analyzing and categorizing her data much as an ethnographer would today, the questions with eyes closed represented a much more narrow, self-conscious and social perspective, while with eyes open, students produced more consciously philosophical and intellectual questions.
