MY NAME WAS SABINA SPIELREIN
Director: Elisabeth Márton.
Written by: Elisabeth Márton, Signe Mahler, Yolande Knobel, based on the original script by Kristina Hjerten von Gedda.
Director of Photography: Robert Nordstrom & Sergej Jurisdizki.
Edited by: Yolande Knobel.
Music by: Vladimir Dikanski.
Released by: Facets Multi-Media.
Language: English & German with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: Sweden. 90 min. Not Rated.
With: Eva Osterberg, Lasse Almeback, Mercedez Csampai.

The opening scene reveals the stark silhouette of a woman scribbling behind a desk. "I, too, was a human being," she recites softly, revealing her wishes to be cremated and her ashes spread upon the earth. My Name was Sabina Spielrein is filmmaker Elisabeth Márton’s revealing biographical documentary on this much forgotten but influential Russian psychoanalyst, whose correspondences with Carl Jung (Lasse Almeback) and Sigmund Freud changed the history of psychoanalysis when discovered in 1977.

Voice-overs narrating the letters dominate much of the film, as Spielrein (Eva Osterberg), Jung and Freud form a strange triangular relationship. Jung’s initial diagnosis of Spielrein - with whom he soon falls in love - is submitted to Freud, who finds her case of hysteria particularly intriguing. Over black-and-white photographs of the psychoanalyst, Freud’s stern voice-overs vehemently opposes the impending relationship between Spielrein and Jung, and subsequent letters between Freud and Spielrein point to a possible infatuation that Freud himself might have felt for the young Jewish woman.

But the precise depth of Jung and Spielrein’s relationship is difficult to fathom, especially because Almeback’s performance is highly rigid and austere - likely as Jung was himself. It is Osterberg’s fervor and passion for her doctor that stirs the relationship, though the whole of her performance is somewhat hard to swallow; her transition from a hysterical woman to an accomplished psychoanalyst is rather abrupt, and the film somehow reveals Spielrein’s recovery to be instantaneous, her hysteria cured the moment she falls in love Jung.

Still, Márton’s film is a revelation; she brings to life the long forgotten memory of a generally unacknowledged female intellectual; Spielrein’s work was incorporated into much of Freud’s writing and is speculated to have been "stolen" by Jung. Though the soap-operatic relationship between the three psychoanalysts is highly intriguing, it is the memory of Spielrein’s incredible evolution from patient to genius that steals the limelight. Parisa Vaziri
December 28, 2005