MARTINEZ, Calif. — California housewife Susan Polk took the stand Wednesday and delivered a tearful narrative about her reluctant psychic predictions and the turning points in her life that led her to where she is today: Representing herself at trial against the charge of first-degree murder of her psychologist husband.

Polk painted a wide canvas, taking jurors through a series of photos, from infancy to the age of 17, when she was a patient of Dr. Felix Polk, her therapist. Next came wedding photos: Susan was 24 and Felix was 50.

"I had the thought that morning: 'Oh my gosh, I really don't want to do this,'" she said. A week later, Felix "completely overwhelmed me, physically and emotionally and verbally. It was just annihilating," Polk said.

Polk cried when she showed jurors a picture of her son Adam, 23, who testified that his mother was "evil" and "bonkers."

"I think he said what he said to survive, and that's what he had to do," Polk said. "I think you saw a different Adam. The real Adam, the one I knew, sent me poems [in prison], came to see me, and was extraordinarily loving."

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Adam, and Gabe, 19, testified for the prosecution that their mother is delusional and killed their father willfully. Eli, 20, testified that his father was emotionally and physically abusive, and that his mother has been falsely accused.

Polk, 48, admits she stabbed her 70-year-old husband with a paring knife in October 2002 during a nasty divorce. But says she acted in self-defense and that Felix died of a heart attack while he was attacking her.

Polk testified that one of the ways Felix controlled her during their 20-year marriage was to hypnotize her into psychic trances.

"I lost so much time," Polk said, crying. "It's the cruelest, cruelest thing to do."

'I'm not crazy'

Polk said she was her husband's "lifelong research project," trained to feed him valuable predictions, which he used to his own political advantage as a secret Israeli agent for the Mossad.

"I wanted a really normal life. I didn't want to be a medium, to be used this way," Polk said.

Her predictions about an assassination attempt on the Pope were shared with the Vatican to shore up Israel's relations with the Pope, she said, but her predictions about the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were withheld by her husband in order to wield Israel's power over the United States.

"Either I'm crazy or it happened," Polk said. "And I'm not crazy, so I can rule that out."

She apologized to jurors as she read an entire passage from her diary written days before the 2002 stabbing incident, in which she ponders bad news about her divorce case and makes inflammatory statements about Israel.

"I don't hate Jewish people," Polk said. "My kids are half-Jewish."

Polk anonymously mailed the excerpt to a judge in 2002, with the note: "thought you might be interested in this journal excerpt about a Mossad agent's failure to provide warning to U.S. intel re: terrorist attack on U.S. targets as well as judicial misconduct on the part of one of your fellow judges."

The letter was filed away.

Polk said Felix never told her outright that he was a spy, but he talked about his dual citizenship and his Israeli friends. The implication was clear, she said. She recalled that she once heard Felix and his cohorts discussing the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, and a week later, in 1978, Moscone was killed.