Dear Professor Freud, 27Apri11912
It was good of you to have your letter waiting for me on my return.
I spent some very pleasant days in Florence, Pisa, and Genoa and now feel quite rested.
With regard to Bleuler, even if the story of his appointment is true it is unlikely that he will go to Breslau.
This will be a hard dilemma for him, as he had always hoped to get to Germany.
I shall be glad if he stays on, because no successor would be any better, except possibly Dr. Ris in Rheinau.
I myself am out of the running, for I have no intention of giving up my scientific work for the sake of a professorship.
Professorships here mean the end of one scientific development.
You cannot be an official in a madhouse and a scientist at the same time.
I shall make my own way without a professorship.
Morton Prince is just a mudslinger.
Nothing can be done directly, since one cannot start a fight with American newspapers.
All they are interested in is sensationalism, bribery, and corruption.
But in my American lectures I can slip in a parenthetical remark that will make our position clear.
Anyway Prince has already been out-trumped by Dr. Allen Starr," as you will see from the enclosed cutting.
About this there is even less to be done.
Our only available weapon is moral annihilation.
But these wretches annihilate themselves as soon as they open their mouths.
We are therefore left defenceless.
Our ultimate opponents will be the ones who commit the vilest atrocities with Psychoanalysis, as they are even now doing with all the means at their disposal.
It's a poor lookout for Psychoanalysis in the hands of these crooks and fools!
I hope to see Baron Winterstein at my place next Monday.
I would like to keep the article on Roosevelt a few days longer for further study, and then send it back to you.
Now and then I correspond "amicably" with Bleuler on scientific matters.
There seems to be a tacit agreement 'between us not to tread on one another's corns.
Stoning's" assistant in Strassburg, young Dr. Erismann,' wants to
join us.
I have successfully treated his sister (whom you may remember).
Many thanks for your exceedingly interesting article in Imago.
A pity the bulk of my manuscript is already with Deuticke; I could have made a number of improvements.
Like you, I am absorbed in the incest problem and have come to conclusions which show incest primarily as a fantasy problem.
Originally, morality was simply a ceremony of atonement, a substitutive prohibition, so that the ethnic prohibition of incest may not mean biological incest at all, but merely the utilization of infantile incest material for the construction of the first prohibitions. (I don't know whether I am expressing myself clearly!)
If biological incest were meant, then father-daughter incest would have fallen under the prohibition much more readily than that between son-in-law and mother-in-law.
The tremendous role of the mother in mythology has a significance far outweighing the biological incest problem-a significance that amounts to pure fantasy.
Kind regards,
Most sincerely yours,
Jung ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Vol. 1, Pages 501-502
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