After her marriage to Hans Bürgner in 1929 (divorced 1938) was complicated by an affair with psychoanalyst Gerhard Adler (whom she later married), Dodo underwent Jungian analysis in Zurich in 1933. The resulting outpouring of hallucinatory images explore guilt, alienation and separation. In this self-portrait the artist portrays herself spotlighted in a shaft of light associated with the Christian Annunciation in which the angel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she will conceive a son by the power of the Holy Spirit, although her tears denote anxiety, confusion and her troubled state of mind. Her stylised features relate both to her work as a fashion illustrator and to her awareness of German Expressionism as she depicts herself against a backdrop of contemporary European modernist architecture.