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Hélène Cixous's 1985 play Portrait of Dora (Cixous, 2004) stages Freud's 1905 case history from the perspective of its pseudonymous analysand-protagonist. Reorienting the narrative from armchair to couch and from writing man to speaking woman, the play's closing scenes include a climactic filmed sequence in which the various figures from the case history take guns and shower Dora in a hail of pearl bullets (in reference to the pearl earrings that took on symbolic significance in the consulting room). Dora withstands the barrage of gemstones and gathers the spent pearls in her apron, an indication, Cixous notes in the stage directions, of her strength. Despite a violent patriarchal onslaught, Dora ultimately triumphs. Angela M. Sells's new book Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth recalls and sometimes explicitly draws on feminist work from the 1980s and 1990s that reappraised the position of women — both analysts and analysands — in the history of psychoanalysis. Unlike in Cixous's play, however, the figures she imagines wielding the weapons are not Spielrein's contemporaries but those who have written secondary accounts of her work.
In Sabina Spielrein Sells is intent on correcting a narrative she claims is prevalent in the existing secondary literature that focuses primarily on Spielrein's sexual relationship with Carl Jung, while diminishing her theoretical contributions to psychoanalysis. Sells identifies the pathologizing tendencies in extant analyses of Spielrein, who was briefly Jung's patient at the Burghölzli mental hospital in Zurich (from 1904-5) before going on to complete a PhD dissertation at medical school and embarking on a career that took her to Vienna, Geneva and Soviet Russia. Sells cautions against ‘assigning retroactive diagnoses’ (p. 16) and argues