Dear Professor Freud, 8 November 1909
You will, no doubt, have arrived at a fair explanation of my long silence.
It's just that one has so much to do, and I expect this is the case on your side as well.
Many thanks for the long letter.
Meanwhile, some more news has cropped up.
But back to the past first, Friedlander: I treated him in the "grand" or haughty "manner and received him in the circle of my 4 foreigners.”
They started talking in English, and it turned out afterwards that he doesn't understand a word.
Otherwise I was polite, keeping my distance.
Pfister also suffered a visitation from him, likewise Foerster.
Forel's Society: Dr. Seif of Munich has been with me, working busily at psychoanalysis.
He is a member of the new Society and has divulged that Frank has spoken out strongly in our favour.
S. pressed me to join along with you.
Exactly what the Society wants to do or is supposed to do S. doesn't know either, but he thinks that in the end everything will be grist to our mill.
Maybe join after all?
Dr. F-- got his deserts from you.
He is, or seems to be, an obsessional neurotic; he was with me for about 3 weeks (also with Dubois,etc. etc.) but proved quite unapproachable because of the most incredible and laughable resistances.
He therefore took to his heels after confessing that he habitually reached his climax only with dirty prostitutes.
He could not forgive me this confession.
Bleuler recently told me that he intended to take up matters of principle with us, i.e., to say how far he is able or wining to follow, and how far not.
Naturally I am dying to know what sort of obliquities will come out.
He is struggling to communicate, and this in itself is not bad.
But ... ? I think we might take the edge off his paper (which to my knowledge doesn't exist yet) if it is published in the Jahrbuch.
In any case it won't be too awful.
Polemics inside our camp are bound to start sooner or later.
To take an example: Stekel's method of presentation will be hard to stomach in the long run, even though he is usually right.
We should, however, emphasize the distinction between real psychoanalysis and Stekel's brand.
I have to fight like mad with my students until I have dinned it into them that psychoanalysis is a scientific method and not just guesswork.
My English speech therapist, for instance, thinks on the strength of Stekel's letters that dream interpretation is something quite simple, a kind
of translation with the aid of the clef de songes.
Now the poor chap is sadly disappointed after seeing how toilsome the work is.
Most people reading Stekel have little appreciation of what we have achieved, not to mention other things.
Also, St. is definitely tending towards stock interpretations, as I can often see here with my students.
Instead of bothering to analyse, they say: "This is . . ."
As if the common-or-garden resistances were not enough, I now have to drive Stekel out of their heads as well.
But 1 don't want to drop him entirely; as usual, his paper for the Jahrbuch contains things that are astonishingly right.
He is valuable because of his findings, but deleterious for the public.
One of the reasons why I didn't write for so long is that I was immersed every evening in the history of symbols, Le., in mythology and archaeology.
I have been reading Herodotus and have made some wonderful finds (e.g., Book 2, cult at Papremis}."
Now I am reading the 4 volumes of old Creuzer," where there is a huge mass of material.
All my delight in archaeology (buried for years) has sprung into life again.
Rich lodes open up for the phylogenetic basis of the theory of neurosis.
Later I want to use some of it for the Jahrbuch.
It's a crying shame that already with Herodotus prudery puts forth its quaint blossoms; on his own admission he covers up a lot of things "for reasons of decency."
Where did the Greeks learn that from so early?
I have discovered a capital book in Knight's Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus." much better than Inman, who is rather unreliable.
If I come to Vienna in the spring, I hope to bring you various ancient novelties.
As a basis for the analysis of the American way of life I am now treating a young American (doctor).
Here again the mother-complex looms large (cf. the Mother-Mary cult?)
In America the mother is decidedly the dominant member of the family.
American culture really is a bottomless abyss; the men have become a flock of sheep and the women play the ravening wolves-within the family circle, of course.
I ask myself whether such conditions have ever existed in the world before.
I really don't think they have.
With kind regards,
Yours,
JUNG ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Vol. 1, Pages 265-268
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