Carl Jung And Sigmund Freud English Literature Essay

The relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud began in 1906 when Jung sent Freud a signed copy of his published studies.  Unknown to Jung, Freud had already purchased his own copy of the book after hearing how favorably his name figured into the writings.  Six months later, Freud sent a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in Zürich.  These professional gestures began a series of meetings and correspondences between the two men that lasted for six years. 

The first conversation between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud lasted for over 13 hours. This marked the beginning of an intense correspondence and collaboration between these two men which lasted for 7years. Freud, who was already a famous psychologist, saw this young, outspoken person as a sort of protégé.  Freud soon became a father figure to Jung.  In one of the correspondences, Freud referred to Jung as, “The Joshua to my Moses, fated to enter the Promised Land which I myself will not live to see.”  Again and again he speaks of Jung as his “heir,” once as “my successor and crown prince,” and even as “spirit of my spirit.”

In 1908, Jung became editor of the newly founded Yearbook for Psychoanalytical and Psychopathological Research.  The subsequent year, Jung and Freud traveled to the U.S., introducing psychoanalysis by means of their Fordham Lectures. They spent about 3 months touring America. This was the most intimate time of their friendship. They had several conversations , conversations which brought forth ideological differences between the two.

Jung’s major disagreement with Freud stalked from their conflicting concepts of the unconscious.  Jung saw Freud’s theory of the unconscious as imperfect and pointlessly negative.  According to Jung, Freud considered the unconscious solely as a storehouse of subdued emotions and desires.  At the same time Jung did agree with Freud’s model of the unconscious, as Jung called the personal unconscious, but he also projected the existence of far deeper form of the unconscious, which underlies the personal one. He called it the collective unconscious where the archetypes themselves resided.

This relationship and collaboration began to deteriorate as the years went on. While Freud thought of Jung as the most innovative person and his successor, he was unhappy with Jung’s difference with some of the basic doctrine of ‘Freudian theory’. For example, Jung believed that Freud was too focused on sexuality as a motivating force. He also felt that Freud’s concept of the unconscious was limited and overly negative. Jung argued that the unconscious could also be a source of creativity.

Carl also disagreed with Freud’s view that ‘all complexes come from sexual trauma, because he had experience with psychological problem that had different origins’.  Freud also did not agree with Carl’s views about spiritualism and parapsychology. 

According to Jung, the first real crisis in their friendship came in spring 1909. Jung visited Freud in Vienna and asked his opinion on precognition and parapsychology. But Freud was too selfish and discarded this matter in a way that upset Jung. Jung speaks about a strange thing which happened at the same time. As Freud was leaving, Jung heard a very loud crack which came from the bookcase next to them, this he spoke of as an example of paranormal phenomenon, which was discarded by Freud immediately. Immediately Jung predicted that in a moment there would be another loud noise, and yes indeed there came a second loud crack from the bookcase. Freud was puzzled but this incident hoisted his mistrust towards Jung.

The next crisis in their friendship came in 1910, when Freud was trying to make his sexual theory a code of belief against occultism.  According to Carl Jung, this had nothing to do with scientific judgment, but only with Freud’s ambition and past.   

Despite their difference they continued to work together until 1912.  It is believed that the break in their friendship came by Jung’s publication of “Symbols of Transformation”, which is full of mythological symbols. 

Freud dismissed Jung’s interest in religion and myths as being ‘unscientific.’  This rejection embittered Jung toward his mentor.  Carl, for reasons not known instigated a rumor that a romantic relationship may have developed between Freud and his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who had moved into Freud’s apartment.  He suggested that the affair resulted in a pregnancy and a subsequent abortion for Miss Bernays.  Freud met Jung’s antagonism with increasing detachment.   Freud visited his colleague Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen without paying a visit to Jung in nearby Zürich.  Jung felt severely slighted by this incident, which he referred to as the Kreuzlingen gesture.  

The final letter written from Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung read, “Your allegation that I treat my followers as patients is demonstrably untrue. . . . It is a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel ashamed of his own neurosis. But one [meaning Jung] who while behaving abnormally keeps shouting that he is normal gives ground for the suspicion that he lacks insight into his illness. Accordingly, I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely.”        

-Sigmund Freud, 1912

In 1912, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung met in Munich among prominent colleagues to discuss psychoanalytical journals. Freud was overcome by a sudden fainting spell At Jung’s talk about his new psychoanalytic essay on Amenhotep IV.  It is said that Jung picked-up Freud, and carried him to a nearby couch.  Jung and Freud personally met for the last time in September of 1913 for the Fourth International Psychoanalytical Congress, also in Munich.  Jung gave a talk on psychological types, the introverted and the extraverted type, in analytical psychology.  This talk introduced of some of the key concepts which came to distinguish Jung’s work from Freud’s for the next half century

After Freud

Parting with Freud left Jung shattered to a great extent, he resigned from the International Psychoanalytic Congress in 1914. The rivalry growing between the two was clearly visible in the letters they exchanged. At one point, Jung sarcastically wrote, “…your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies… I am objective enough to see through your little trick” (McGuire, 1974).

Jung soon began an intensified self-analysis (an examination of oneself) in order to discover the mysteries of the unconscious psyche. From 1913 to 1921 Jung published three important papers: “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology” (1916, 1917) and “Psychological Types” (1921). The “Two Essays” provided the basic ideas from which his later work was developed. He described his research on psychological typology (the classification of personalities by studying their similarities and differences)-that there are two basic classifications, or “two types of personalities,” in the way they relate to the world: introversion and extroversion. Introversion, in which one has the characteristic of being self-involved, withdrawn, occupied with one’s “inner world.” Extroversion, in which one relates to the world through social involvement and has interests outside of oneself and is “outgoing.” He expressed the idea that it is the “personal equation” which, often unconsciously but in agreement with one’s own typology, influences how an individual observes and interacts with their world.

Jung’s main contribution was his discovery that man’s fantasy life has a certain structure. There must be subtle active centers in the unconscious which control natural behavior and free imagination. These combine to form Jung’s concept of archetypes. An individual will dream on impulse, and these dreams will have a theme or story similar to a fairy tale, or a myth, from a time long past, that are unknown to the person dreaming. To Jung this meant that archetypal symptoms (memories of experiences of people from the past that are present in every person’s unconscious mind) belong to human beings of all ages and from all times; they are the expression of a collective body of man’s basic psychic nature. Many neurotic sufferings have happened due to a feeling of self-estrangement (the alienation of oneself from oneself) because of man’s creation of a logical framework and control of his dependence on these “memories” of experiences that exist in the unconscious.

His first achievement was to differentiate two classes of people according to attitude types: extraverted (outward-looking) and introverted (inward-looking). Later he differentiated four functions of the mind-thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition-one or more of which predominate in any given person. Results of this study were embodied in Psychologische Typen (1921; Psychological Types, 1923).

As a boy Jung had some weird powerful fantasies or dreams that had developed in intensity through the years. After his break with Freud, during self analysis he deliberately allowed this aspect of himself to function again and studied the experience and responses scientifically by keeping detailed notes of the same. He later developed the theory that these experiences came from an area of the mind that he called the collective unconscious, which he held was shared by everyone. This much-contested conception was combined with a theory of archetypes that Jung held as fundamental to the study of the psychology of religion. In Jung’s terms, archetypes are instinctive patterns, have a universal character, and are expressed in behaviour and images.

In order to study in depth the archetypal patterns and processes, Jung visited so-called primitive tribes. He lived among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona in 1924 and 1925 and among the inhabitants of Mt. Elgon in Kenya during 1925 and 1926. He later visited Egypt and India. To Jung, the religious symbols and phenomenology (a system of beliefs developed by studying peoples understanding and awareness of themselves) of Buddhism and Hinduism and the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Confucianism all distinguished with respect to a man’s experience to find a path to his inner world, a world which was badly neglected by Western civilization. Jung also searched for traditions in Western culture, which made up for its one-sided outgoing development toward reason and technology. He found these traditions in Gnosticism (belief that personal freedom comes through spiritual knowledge and understanding), Christian mysticism (the belief that instinct and spiritual feeling are the ways to find God), and, above all, occultism (knowledge or use of supernatural powers). Some of his major works are deep and clear psychological interpretations of alchemical (the ability and power to make common things special) writings, showing their living significance for understanding dreams and the hidden theme of neurotic and mental disorders.

Inner development and growth of personality

Jung was keen on the detailing of the stages of inner development and of the growth of the personality, which he termed the “process of individuation.” He said that it’s a strong impulse from the unconscious which guides the individual toward its most complete uniqueness. This description was the result of a lifelong task of trial and error and recognizing and connecting the contents of the unconscious. It consists in an ever-increasing self-knowledge and in “becoming what you are.”

Character of his psychotherapy

Jung devoted the rest of his life to developing his ideas, especially those on the relation between psychology and religion. In his view, obscure and often neglected texts of writers in the past shed unexpected light not only on Jung’s own dreams and fantasies but also on those of his patients; he thought it necessary for the successful practice of their art that psychotherapists become familiar with writings of the old masters.

Besides the development of new psychotherapeutic methods that derived from his own experience and the theories developed from them, Jung gave fresh importance to the so-called Hermetic tradition. He conceived that the Christian religion was part of a historic process necessary for the development of consciousness, and he also thought that the heretical movements, starting with Gnosticism and ending in alchemy, were manifestations of unconscious archetypal elements not adequately expressed in the mainstream forms of Christianity. He was particularly impressed with his finding that alchemical-like symbols could be found frequently in modern dreams and fantasies, and he thought that alchemists had constructed a kind of textbook of the collective unconscious. He expounded on this in 4 out of the 18 volumes that make up his Collected Works.

His historical studies aided him in pioneering the psychotherapy of the middle-aged and elderly, especially those who felt their lives had lost meaning. He helped them to appreciate the place of their lives in the sequence of history. Most of these patients had lost their religious belief; Jung found that if they could discover their own myth as expressed in dream and imagination they would become more complete personalities. He called this process individuation.

In later years he became professor of psychology at the Federal Polytechnical University in Zürich (1933-41) and professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel (1943). His personal experience, his continued psychotherapeutic practice, and his wide knowledge of history placed him in a unique position to comment on current events. As early as 1918 he had begun to think that Germany held a special position in Europe; the Nazi revolution was, therefore, highly significant for him, and he delivered a number of hotly contested views that led to his being wrongly branded as a Nazi sympathizer. Jung lived to the age of 85.

The authoritative English collection of all Jung’s published writings is Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler (eds.), The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, trans. by R.F.C. Hull, 20 vol., 2nd ed. (1966-79). Jung’s The Psychology of the Unconscious appears in revised form as Symbols of Transformation in the Collected Works. His other major individual publications include Ãœber die Psychologie der Dementia Praecox (1907; The Psychology of Dementia Praecox); Versuch einer Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie (1913; The Theory of Psychoanalysis); Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916); Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928); Das Geheimnis der goldenen Blüte (1929; The Secret of the Golden Flower); Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), a collection of essays covering topics from dream analysis and literature to the psychology of religion; Psychology and Religion (1938); Psychologie und Alchemie (1944; Psychology and Alchemy); and Aion: Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte (1951; Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self). Jung’s Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken (1962; Memories, Dreams, Reflections) is fascinating semiautobiographical reading, partly written by Jung himself and partly recorded by his secretary.

In 2009 the “Red Book,” a manuscript that Jung wrote during the years 1914-30, was published. It was, by Jung’s own account, a record of his “confrontation with the unconscious.” Containing both his account of his imaginings, fantasies, and induced hallucinations and his own colour illustrations, The Red Book also includes an extensive introduction and a translation into English.

Jung he had to give his psychological practice, writings and explorations up in 1944 due to a severe heart attack.

Carl Jung’s near-death experience

In a hospital in Switzerland in 1944, the world-renowned psychiatrist Carl G. Jung, had a heart attack and then a near-death experience. His vivid encounter with the light, plus the intensely meaningful insights led Jung to conclude that his experience came from something real and eternal. Jung’s experience is unique in that he saw the Earth from a vantage point of about a thousand miles above it. His incredibly accurate view of the Earth from outer space was described about two decades before astronauts in space first described it. Subsequently, as he reflected on life after death, Jung recalled the meditating Hindu from his near-death experience and read it as a parable of the archetypal Higher Self, the God-image within. Carl Jung, who founded analytical psychology, centered on the archetypes of the collective unconscious. The following is an excerpt from his autobiography entitled Memories, Dreams, Reflections describing his near-death experience

I felt violent resistance to my doctor because he had brought me back to life. At the same time, I was worried about him. “His life is in danger, for heaven’s sake! He has appeared to me in his primal form! When anybody attains this form it means he is going to die, for already he belongs to the “greater company.” Suddenly the terrifying thought came to me that the doctor would have to die in my stead. I tried my best to talk to him about it, but he did not understand me. Then I became angry with him.

In actual fact I was his last patient. On April 4, 1944 – I still remember the exact date I was allowed to sit up on the edge of my bed for the first time since the beginning of my illness, and on this same day the doctor took to his bed and did not leave it again. I heard that he was having intermittent attacks of fever. Soon afterward he died of septicernia. He was a good doctor; there was something of the genius about him. Otherwise he would not have appeared to me as an avatar of the temporal embodiment of the primal form.

Women in Jung’s life

While traveling to the United States together in 1909, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud passed the time by interpreting each other’s dreams. Fifty years later in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung wrote about a dream he believed Freud was unable to accurately interpret. In the dream, Jung was living on the second floor of a two-story dwelling when he decided to explore the contents of the ground floor. On that level all the furniture and decorations were old, dating perhaps to the 15th or 16th century. After exploring that floor, Jung set about to explore the whole house. He found a stone stairway leading to the cellar where he discovered artifacts that dated to ancient Roman times. Descending even deeper, he came upon a dusty cave with scattered bones, broken pottery, and two human skulls. He then awoke.

Jung later accepted this dream as evidence for different levels of the psyche. The upper floor had an inhabited atmosphere and represented consciousness, the top layer of the psyche. The ground floor was the first layer of the unconscious-old but not as alien or ancient as the Roman artifacts in the cellar, which symbolized a deeper layer of the personal unconscious. In the cave, Jung “discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself-a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness” (Jung, 1961, p. 160). After Jung described the dream, Freud became interested in the two skulls in the cave, but not as collective unconscious material. Instead, he insisted that Jung associate them to some wish. Who did Jung wish dead? Not yet completely trusting his own judgment, Jung answered, “‘My wife and my sister-in-law’-after all, I had to name someone whose death was worth the wishing!

“I was newly married at the time and knew perfectly well that there was nothing within myself which pointed to such wishes” (Jung, 1961, pp. 159-160).

Although Jung’s interpretation of this dream may be more accurate than Freud’s, it is quite possible that Jung did indeed wish for the death of his wife. At that time (1909), Jung was not “newly married” but had been married for nearly 7 years, and for the past 5 of those years he was deeply involved in a sexual relationship with a former patient named Sabina Spielrein. Frank McLynn (1996) has alleged that Jung was a notorious womanizer who frequently had affairs with his patients and former patients. He claimed that Jung’s “mother complex” caused him to harbor animosity toward his wife while destining him to a life of promiscuity. McLynn, who is extremely antagonistic toward Jung, may have exaggerated Jung’s promiscuity, but little doubt exists that Jung had several extramarital affairs. In a letter to Freud dated January 30, 1910, Jung wrote: “The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful” (McGuire, 1974, p. 289).

Spielrein had begun her association with Jung as his patient, but the relationship soon turned into a sexual one. In spite of this sexual relationship, Jung continued to analyze Spielrein and eventually conducted a training analysis that enabled her to become a psychoanalyst. John Kerr (1993) has argued effectively that the feminine voice that spoke to Jung in the form of his anima was that of Spielrein. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung (1961) wrote that he recognized the voice as that of a patient, ” a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me” (p. 185). If Spielrein had a strong transference to Jung, then he reciprocated with a strong countertransference to her.

Spielrein may have been the first female patient that Jung took as a lover, but she was not the last. The most visible of all Jung’s affairs was with Antonia (Toni) Wolff, a dark-eyed beauty who first met Jung in 1910 when she was 22 years old. Like Sabina Spielrein, Wolff began her association with Jung as a patient, became his lover, received a training analysis, and became an analyst. When Jung descended into the depths of his unconscious after his break with Freud, it was Toni Wolff, not Emma Jung, who helped him retain his sanity and eventually emerge from that dangerous journey. Jung became so deeply dependent on Wolff that he pressured his wife to allow him to openly carry on his affair with Toni. Emma reluctantly and unhappily agreed. McLynn paints a picture of Emma, Carl, and Toni in a menage à trois, but such was not the case. Alan Elms’s (1994) description of this relationship is probably more accurate. According to Elms, Jung spent Wednesday evenings with Toni, and Toni cane to the Jung household for Sunday dinner with Carl, Emma, and the children, who were no more pleased than their mother over this arrangement.

Jung and Wolff continued their affair for at least 2 decades and made no attempt to hide the relationship. Nevertheless, the name Toni Wolff does not appear in Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Elms discovered that Jung had written a whole chapter on Toni Wolff, a chapter that was never published. The absence of Toni’s name in Jung’s autobiography is probably due to the hatred of Jung’s children for Wolff. They remembered when she had carried on openly with their father, and they harbored some lifelong resentment toward her. As adults with some veto power over what appeared in their father’s posthumously published autobiography, they were not in a generous mood to perpetuate knowledge of the affair.

By age 60, Toni Wolff had developed arthritis and had lost most of her physical attractiveness. Three years later, she died, no longer Jung’s friend or companion. Jung did not attend the funeral of the woman who served him as a second wife and rescued him from a severe midlife crisis.

One final, rather unsavory note on Jung’s relationships with women is his claim that Freud had had an affair with his own sister-in-law Minna Bernays. In 1957, Jung told John Billinsky, an American psychologist, that at the first meeting between Jung and Freud in Vienna in 1907, Minna Bernays pulled Jung aside and confessed that she was having an affair with Freud. According to Billinsky (1969), Jung told him:

Soon I met Freud’s wife’s younger sister. She was very good-looking and she not only knew enough about psychoanalysis but also about everything that Freud was doing. When, a few days later, I was visiting Freud’s laboratory, Freud’s sister-in-law asked if she could talk with me. She was very much bothered by her relationship with Freud and felt guilty about it. From her I learned that Freud was in love with her and that their relationship was indeed very intimate. It was a shocking discovery to me, and even now I can recall the agony I felt at the time. (p. 42)

Since Billinsky’s article appeared, scholars have debated the validity of Jung’s claims. Other than Jung’s story, little evidence exists that Freud was romantically linked to Minna Bernays-or any woman other than his wife. Although Jung’s mind remained clear until his death in 1961, his memory of Minna’s confession was 50 years old. Also, Jung described Minna as “very good-looking.” Beauty, of course, is subjective, but few people would view photographs of Minna Bernays and pronounce her as “very good-looking.” At almost all stages of her life, she was quite plain-looking and not nearly as pretty as her sister Martha Bernays Freud. In addition, it does not seem likely that Minna Bernays, having known Jung for only a very short period of time, would have called him aside and confessed having an affair with Freud. Perhaps Jung’s claim that Freud had a sexual relationship with Minna tells us more about Carl Jung than it does about either Sigmund Freud or Minna Bernays.

Professional Accomplishments

    

In 1957, Jung wrote “The Undiscovered Self” (1957), which took on a nostalgic tone in reflection of his previous works and theories. In this relatively short book, Jung considers man’s position in relation to the state, church, himself and the meanings of each of those relations. Backed with little to no noted empirical evidence, Jung wrote eloquently about philosophical matters in psychological terms. This work was a typical example of how Jung tended to relate all matters to a handful of topics, such as religion, state, and so on.

One of Jung’s more creative works was “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” (1978). He started this piece by noting the difference between the simple creation of art and its essence. Anyone can simply put ink on paper or canvas, but an artist is inspired. Again, he related art to religion as they were both psychic phenomena and occur on different levels within different people. Art came from two main places, the individual creating the art with all of his or her expectation, intentions, faults, etc, and what he called the “collective unconscious”. The collective unconscious was like a living entity which used man as a medium to create. It was also explained as a river of timeless thoughts common to all people. The collective unconscious helped regulate cultures and helped inspire individuals. Inspired art can trigger a certain understanding between people across cultures, time, gender and age. There may be something common, that everyone can relate to. According to Jung, this was the essence of art.

In his autobiography “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”, which was published after his death, Jung wrote about his near-death experience. He recalled seeing the earth from outer space, noting each main body of land and ocean. He then came across a Hindu sitting and waiting for him in front of a temple he had seen in his life. The entire body of his works could be remembered so that he could view his accomplishments. He had feelings of being care-free and peaceful. Jung described the feeling as a middle of something without a beginning or end. The answers, it seemed, would be found in the temple. But before he could enter, his attention was shifted to the doctors bringing him back to life. That was the end of his vision.

Jung Love: Sabina Spielrein, a forgotten pioneer of psychoanalysis

Sabina Spielrein was an 18yr old who was brought in as a patient of Jung. Just before his association with Freud. Hospital records show that Sabina ‘ laughs and cries in a strangely mixed, compulsive manner. Masses of tics; she rotates her head jerkily, sticks out her tongue, twitches her legs… Cannot stand people or noise.’ The notes are written by a newly qualified Dr Jung. He diagnosed her ‘hysteric’.

Jung was enthusiastic to take on this case as it would help him discover the mysteries of the brain and the unconscious which affected the conscious mind and altered human behavior. Jung decided to try out a new technique on her, one he’d read about in a book by Sigmund Freud. This was psychoanalysis, and the technique was ‘the talking technique’.

Jung was principally keen on the ‘word-association experiment’: a series of random words were fired at the patient, who had to respond with the first thing that came to mind. Jung noticed that mentions of the girl’s father provoked ‘grimaces and gestures of abhorrence’.

Gradually Jung discovered that Sabina’s , ‘has the odd habit of buying everything she sees’. She then ‘has to borrow from relatives’ and ‘there is constant anxiety that the father might find out about this’. Also that her mother ‘competed with her adolescent daughter for the attentions of various men’. Spielrein’s father, meanwhile ‘insults and tyrannises’ the family, frequently going ‘wild and threatening suicide’. Spielrein is ‘always afraid that he will kill himself’.

Moreover, he frequently beat Sabina ‘on her bare buttocks’ in a ‘special room’ away from the family. Sabina, the eldest of five terrorized children (the youngest died of typhoid aged six), eventually confessed to Jung that she felt sexual excitement when her father beat her. Jung also came across a fact that Spielrein’s mother had raised Sabina ‘in complete sexual ignorance’, which explains her confused reaction to these oddly intimate episodes with her father. Either way, she came to conflate suffering – both physical and emotional – with love.

Jung achieved success with Spielrein within the first year with his new technique. Sabina was cured to such an extent that Sabina started living independently in Zurich and studying medicine at the university. Jung later claimed (in a letter to Freud, with whom he’d started corresponding during Spielrein’s treatment) that he maintained contact with her only because he ‘feared a relapse’. But Sabina did not feel so in 1906 she wrote to him ‘I love you too much,’. A year later Jung rather lewdly told Freud, ‘she admits that her greatest wish is to have a child by me. For that purpose I would naturally have to “let the bird out” first.’

It’s clear from Jung’s letters that they had an intimate relation and they were meeting every few days, in her flat ‘so you are less inhibited’ or taking boat rides ‘so we can be alone’. In 1908, when she went to Russia for the summer, Jung wrote, ‘I realise how much more attached I am to you than I ever thought.’ The intense relation was carried on for five years.

Once Spielrein’s mother received an anonymous letter (probably from Jung’s wife), which provoked her to write to Jung asking him not to ‘ruin’ the girl he had saved. His reply is remarkably coldhearted: ‘You do understand that a man and a girl cannot possibly continue indefinitely to have friendly dealings with one another without the likelihood that something more may enter the relationship.’

Until then, Jung and Spielrein’s meetings had been social. If she wanted him to remain strictly professional, he suggested, she should resume paying him : ‘My fee is 10 francs per consultation.’

The rumour was widespread enough to reach Freud in Vienna. Jung, terrified for his reputation, wrote to him that ‘a woman patient’ had ‘kicked up a vile scandal’. He went on to say that he offered her friendship only to realise ‘she was of course systematically planning my seduction’.

He admitted, however that, ‘during the whole business Gross’s notions [he was referring to Otto Gross, an analyst, morphine addict and enthusiastic advocate of free love] flitted about a bit too much in my head.’

Spielrein was furious to be cast in the role of temptress and wrote to Freud to defend herself. He apologised for jumping to conclusions, commenting to Jung that she was ‘very bright. There is meaning in everything she says.’ Freud continued to correspond with her for years, even after he and Jung had ceased all contact.

Despite this upset, Spielrein and Jung were back in touch within months – ‘We both loved each other fervently again,’ she says in her diary – and remained so for most of the next decade.

It’s amazing to think that until 1977, when the first cache of Spielrein’s papers was discovered in the former Psychological Institute in Geneva (these letters formed the basis of an acclaimed 2003 documentary, My Name Was Sabina Spielrein), Spielrein existed only as four footnotes in the works of Sigmund Freud.

Jung was married with two children, and it is clear that his relationship with Spielrein was inappropriately intimate (whether it was sexual or not is the subject of debate). He was also Freud’s declared ‘son and heir’; as the father of psychoanalysis, Freud certainly didn’t want to bring his baby into disrepute. But there was more to it than that.

Jung and Spielrein’s letters discussed theory at length. Just as Jung and Freud became increasingly distrustful of each other and possessive of their ideas, so too did Jung and Spielrein.

When he read her university dissertation on schizophrenia Jung told her, ‘I am surprised by the abundance of excellent thoughts, which anticipate various ideas of my own. But it is good that others see things the same way as I do.’

He hung on to her next paper, ‘Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being’ (written immediately after she graduated with top honours), for six months before commenting, ‘As I read your paper I find uncanny parallels with my own new work.’ Somewhat improbably he explained, ‘I had read your title incorrectly: “distinction” instead of “destruction”.’

Spielrein clearly exploded, for his next letter exclaims, ‘You are upsetting yourself unnecessarily again!’ His reassurance that, ‘your study is extraordinarily intelligent and contains splendid ideas whose priority I am happy to acknowledge as yours,’ is undercut by his assertion that, ‘I express myself so differently from you in my work that no one could imagine you had borrowed from me.’

Jung – and Freud, too – were dismissive of her work even as they appropriated it. Eight years after reading Spielrein’s ‘Destruction’ paper, Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Spielrein’s ‘destructive drive’ – which Freud had told Jung ‘was not much to my liking’ – forms the basis for his ‘death instinct’. (He duly credited her in a footnote.)

Ten years later he remembered his ‘defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged’, and wondered at ‘how long it took before I became receptive to it’.

According to Coline Covington, who found more of Spielrein’s papers in 1995 and eventually published them in her book Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis in 2003, they couldn’t get past the fact that she was a former patient and a woman; they call her ‘the little girl’ and ‘the little authoress’ in their letters to each other.

But it was also because, as the two men’s relationship soured, each came to resent the other’s influence on Spielrein; they belittled her work as a means of disparaging each other.

When she presented her paper at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1912 – a bold move in view of the city’s rivalry with Jungian Zurich – Freud’s disciples were cool towards her, opining that ‘the presentation provides the opportunity for a critique of Jung’.

Freud became sarcastic about her attachment to ‘her Germanic hero’, while Jung smarted at her ‘Freudian’ notions. She was at once the colleague of both men and neither.

That same year Spielrein suddenly married a Russian doctor, Paul Sheftel, and in 1913 they had a daughter. It seems it was a desperate attempt to forget Jung.

As Covington notes, Jung’s bouts of coldness and passionate despair contained more than an echo of her father’s temperament. Whether the parallels went as far as the film claims – Knightley and Fassbender (as Jung) plunge into a sado-masochistic affair – we simply can’t know.

For years Spielrein moved endlessly, seemingly incapable of settling anywhere or with anyone. She was lauded everywhere she went ( training analysts at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva, becoming the director of child psychology at the First Moscow University), but she always moved on before she became established.

Meanwhile, says Kerr, ‘Jung was busy making her immortal.’ In the years following the First World War, Jung developed a means of categorising the mind. The ‘persona’ was the outward personality. The ‘anima’ was the soul.

He invested the anima with all sorts of qualities, some exhilarating and some dangerous which, Jung wrote, he’d recognised in ‘a woman… a patient, a talented psychopath who had become a living figure in my mind’. Jung’s anima is Sabina Spielrein.

In 1924 she returned to her home town, Rostov-on-Don, where she reunited with her husband and gave birth to a second daughter. Biographical detail from then on is sketchy. What we do know is that on 27 July 1942 Hitler’s troops occupied Rostov-on-Don, herded Spielrein and her daughters through the streets and shot them.

Red Book

In 1913 at the age of thirty-eight, Jung experienced “confrontation with the unconscious”. He saw visions and heard voices. He was initially confused and thought that he was “menaced by a psychosis” or was “doing schizophrenia.” But soon he realized that this was a valuable experience which could help in his studies, so he induced hallucinations, or, in his words, “active imaginations.” He recorded everything he felt in small journals. Jung began to notes as scientific evidence in a large, red leather-bound book, on which he worked in and out for sixteen years. A book, which was never meant to be published.

Jung left no instructions about the final disposition of what he called the “Red Book” after his death. Hence after his death his family eventually moved it into a bank vault in 1984. Sonu Shamdasani, a historian from London, tried to persuade Jung’s heirs to have it published for 3 years, but was declined. How and when it is not clear, but by mid-September 2009, nearly than two dozen people had seen it. Hence ultimately Ulrich Hoerni, Jung’s grandson decided to publish it to raise the additional funds needed for the foundation of the Philemon Foundation.

In 2007, two technicians for DigitalFusion, working with the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, painstakingly scanned one-tenth of a millimeter at a time with a 10,200-pixel scanner. It was published on October 7, 2009 (ISBN 978-0-393-06567-1) in German with “separate English translation along with Shamdasani’s introduction and footnotes” at the back of the book, according to Sara Corbett for The New York Times. She wrote, “The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality.”

The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City displayed the original Red Book journal, as well as some of Jung’s original small journals, from October 7, 2009 to January 25, 2010. According to them, “During the period in which he worked on this book Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation.” Two-thirds of the pages bear Jung’s illuminations of the text.