Pamela Moore Dionne's poem about Sabina Spielrein in The Psychoanalytic Experience: Analysands Speak

SABINA BREAKING SILENCE

The way these women manage to charm us with every

conceivable psychic perfection until they have attained their

purpose is one of nature's greatest spectacles.

Sigmund Freud in a letter to C.G. Jung

My Rostov on Don girlhood was troubled. My family, under siege,

sent me to Zurich for therapy where you say I began your siege.

I am loved, even by my landlady. I cannot fathom why.

I don't face her with my truth, nor tolerate the details of her siege.

My only thoughts are of you. The way your white hands rest

against the chair arms. Would that they were my arms, your siege.

You write Freud that I have seduced you, yet it is I who am seduced.

You conspire together for godhood, entire schools of thought under siege.

I take my cure in your arms, couched, client number tattooed on my heart.

You call me a woman patient say a complex mothers this siege.

One day I will be purged from my skin by a bullet that delivers me from you.

Until that day I embrace dreams dreamt under my father and grandfather's siege.

I am called Sabina in slow convolutions. Spielrein is pure play

in medical school where cadavers and students alike are under siege.

First published by Floating Bridge Press in Pontoon Anthology #4, 2000.

Currently online as part of a series on Sabina Spielrein in the Avatar Review, Summer 2001.

Pamela Moore Dionne has been a recipient of a residency at Centrum and an Artist Trust GAP Grant. She is the founding editor for the online journal LITERARY SALT.

She was a 1999 Jack Straw Writer with her novel-in- progress titled Pearl. She received one of Jack Straw's 2001 Artist Awards for her ghazal series about Sabina Spielrein, a contemporary of Jung and Freud and one of the first women physician/psychiatrists.

Sabina is credited as the driving force behind Jung's concept of the anima and Freud's death instinct theories. Pamela's work appears in numerous publications.