Carl Jung: It seemed to me that my spookery struck you as altogether too stupid...

To Sigmund Freud

Dear Professor Freud, Burgholzli-Zurich, 2 April 1909

Worry and patients and all the other chores of daily life have beset me again and quite got me down for the first 2 days.

Now I am slowly coming to the surface and beginning to bask in the memory of the days in Vienna.

I hope you will have received my offprints in good time for Wednesday evening.

12.IV. After a 10-day interruption I have at last succeeded in continuing my letter.

From this interlude it appears that the above complaint was premature, because, as usual, worse was to follow.

Today I have put the last bad day behind me.

All during the Easter holidays, when other people were out walking, I was able to snatch only one day's breath of air.

On 15.IV I shall wrench myself free without fail and start my bicycle tour.

Since Vienna all scientific work has been out of the question.

But in my practice I have accomplished much.

At the moment a madly interesting case is stretching me on the rack.

Some of the symptoms come suspiciously close to the organic borderline (brain tumour?), yet they all hover over a dimly divined psychogenic depth, so that in analysing them all one's misgivings are forgotten.

First-rate spiritualistic phenomena occur in this case, though so far only once in my presence.

Altogether it makes a very peculiar impression. The patient is a man-slaying Sara, Raguel's daughter.

The case I told you about-evil eye, paranoiac impression-was cleared up as follows.

She was abandoned by her last lover, who is altogether pathological (Dem. praec.?); abandoned also by an earlier lover-this one even spent a year in an asylum.

Now the infantile pattern: hardly knew her father and mother, loving instead her brother, 8 years older than she and at 22 a catatonic.

Thus the psychological stereotype holds good.

You said the patient was merely imitating Dem. praec.; now the model has been found.

When I left Vienna I was afflicted with some sentiments d'incompletude on account of the last evening I spent with you.

It seemed to me that my spookery struck you as altogether too stupid and perhaps unpleasant because of the Fliess analogy. (Insanity!)

Just recently, however, the impression I had of the last-named patient smote me with renewed force.

What I told my wife about it made the deepest impression on her too.

I had the feeling that under it all there must be some quite special complex, a universal one having to do with the prospective tendencies in man.

If there is a "psychanalysis" there just also be a "psychosynthesis" which creates future events according to the same laws.

(I see I am writing rather as if I had a flight of ideas.)

The leap towards psychosynthesis proceeds via the person of my patient, whose unconscious is right now preparing, apparently with nothing to stop it, a new stereotype into which everything from outside, as it were, fits in conformity with the complex.

(Hence the idea of the objective effect of the prospective tendency!)

That last evening with you has, most happily, freed me inwardly from the oppressive sense of your paternal authority.

My unconscious celebrated this impression,with a great dream which preoccupied me for some days and which I have just finished analyzing.

I hope I am now rid of all unnecessary encumbrances.

Your cause must and will prosper, so my pregnancy fantasies tell me, which luckily you caught in the end.

As soon as I get back from Italy I shall begin some positive work, first of all for the Jahrbuch.

I hope you had a good Easter holiclay and feel the better for it.

N. Ossipow, head physician of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Moscow, has published a fine report on our affairs.

They seem to be working along our lines.

I have heard that Abraham with some others has issued a "psychanalytical questionnaire."

Let's hope it's a canard!

Cordial greetings,

Gratefully, JUNG ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 8-10