Sabina Spielrein Quotes

This passion because it is so strong, must destroy in order to be contained within the limits of self-preservation.

In young women, I find that a feeling of anxiety is normal and moves to the forefront of repressed feelings when the possibility of fulfilment of the wish first appears. It is a well-defined form of anxiety: You feel that the enemy is within; its characteristic ardour compels you, with inflexible urgency, to do what you do not want to do; you feel the end, the transient, before which you vainly may attempt to flee to an uncertain future. You might ask: Is this all? Is this the high point with nothing more beyond?

For psychic life, activation of the experience has only a negative significance, removing both the image-content and the accompanying stimulation. If the desired union with the love object approaches and word becomes deed, the corresponding cluster of images fades, producing a pleasurable feeling of released tension. At this moment, one is psychically wholly unproductive. Every image attains its peak in life as it intensely awaits transition into reality; with realization, it immediately is destroyed.

The collective psyche denies the present ego and, directly through this denial, creates anew. The floundering ego-particle, inundated with new, more richly adorned images, begins to re-emerge. We see this most beautifully in artistic productions.

[W]artime events are associated strongly with the outbreak of neurosis, which is certainly based on a derangement of sexual life. Destructive images accompany war. Since an image once evoked transforms into another, images associated with the destructive component of the reproductive instinct will stir up deadly images of war.