Dear Professor Freud, 8 May 1911
It is bad of me to have kept you waiting again so long.
The reason is that I came down last week with an atrocious attack of influenza, caught from my children, so that I could do only the most urgent
work with a fearful effort.
I hadn't the strength for anything else.
Today I am sufficiently recovered to give you at least a sign of life.
First I must tell you about Stuttgart.
It wasn't all that important.
Still, it was interesting to observe how psychiatry is beginning to cast sidelong glances at causation-the physical 'side, of course.
Bonhoeffer' (Dresden) reported on psychogenic disturbances.
Naturally he didn't say a word about WA, but in an unguarded moment he dropped a remark about wish-fulfilment, and in conversation afterwards I took
the greatest pleasure in rubbing his nose in it.
Kraepelin's lecture was utterly sterile and dull and antiquated.
His appearance is incredibly plebian.
In the evening he gave a very waggish address which started off with "complexes," etc.
He toasted the speakers, with the exception of himself, of course, for which he deserves the diagnosis "autoerotic megalomania."
I almost called out "Hear, hear."
I mention as a curiosity a privatdocent of psychiatry from Giessen who has never set eyes on anything from the Freudian school.
All unsuspecting he fell into my hands, and this provided some fun for a couple of hours.
I was no longer annoyed by anything but simply had to laugh an awful lot.
I was in good company-Seif, Binswanger, Stockmayer.
The New York group has now come into being, and Seif has successfully founded one in Munich.
Pleasant news!
My Australian article is finished too.
It's about "The Doctrine of Complexes,"! a stupid thing you had better not see.
It will interest you to hear that Stockmayer is taking up a post in Binswanger's sanatorium.
I think I have already told you that Frau Prof. 1--is coming to me for treatment.
As to my intellectual activities, I am at the moment working up some popular small talk on 'itA 'which a literary magazine, the Zurcher
Jahrbuch, has wrung out of me." I am trying to be popular again-not
to my advantage, as you will see.
Then I am plagued by all those poor devils who have "pissed out" excruciating dissertations on me (to speak in the basic language").
Besides the psychology of religion and mythology, the "manifest forms of unconscious fantasies" are eating me alive.
I have made remarkable discoveries some of which I am thinking of using at the Meeting of Swiss Psychiatrists on June 16, and also at Weimar. (Concerning the date of the Congress, or suggestions for it, see the forthcoming Bulletin.)
The meeting in Munich is still very much on my mind.
Occultism is another field we shall have to conquer' with the aid of the libido theory, it seems to me.
At the moment I am looking into astrology, which seems indispensable for a proper understanding of mythology.
There are strange and wondrous things in these lands of darkness.
Please don't worry about my wanderings in these infinitudes.
I shall return laden with rich booty for our knowledge of the human psyche.
For a while longer I must intoxicate myself on magic perfumes in order to fathom the secrets that lie hidden in the abysses of the unconscious.
Finally and in confidence: Pfister is now in analysis with Riklin.
He has obviously had enough of being roasted over a slow fire by his complexes.
Kindest regards,
Most sincerely yours,
Jung ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Pages 424-425
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