My Name Was Sabina Spielrein

The film reconstructs Sabina Spielrein's life from her diaries and her letters to Freud and Jung, papers found in a Geneva cellar decades after her death. It follows her arrival at the Burgholzli as a young patient, her analysis with Jung and their entanglement, and her paper on destruction as a cause of coming into being. It closes with her return to Russia, where an SS unit killed her in 1942.

Reviewers noted the restraint of Elisabeth Marton's method: she stages no melodrama and lets the archive carry the account, actors reading the correspondence over period images. Commentators read the result as a corrective that returns a serious thinker to a record that had reduced her to an episode in another's biography.

For a clinician, it restores authorship to a woman written out of the early analytic record. It lays bare the transference and countertransference at the root of the Freud and Jung rupture, showing how a treatment relationship fed a theoretical split. And it returns attention to Spielrein's originality: her claim that the sexual instinct carries a destructive current, formulated before the idea attached to other names.