Review of 'The Freud-Jung letters : the correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Freud and Jung met for the first time in Vienna in on March 1907 and according to Jung they “talked uninterruptedly for thirteen hours.” For Jung, this “was an event of the first importance.” The bond between the two men was deep. Freud saw in Jung a successor who might lead the psychoanalytic movement into the future. Jung moved even further. At some point he wrote to Freud: ‘Let me enjoy your friendship not as one between equals but as that of father and son,’ a weird thing to say to any friend but especially to the originator of the Oedipus Complex, the idea that at some unconscious level, male children have strong sexual desires towards their mothers and savage resentment towards their fathers.
Not long after that all begun to unravel. Not only because of their strange relationship, but mainly because of their differences and intellectual disagreements. For Freud …
Freud and Jung met for the first time in Vienna in on March 1907 and according to Jung they “talked uninterruptedly for thirteen hours.” For Jung, this “was an event of the first importance.” The bond between the two men was deep. Freud saw in Jung a successor who might lead the psychoanalytic movement into the future. Jung moved even further. At some point he wrote to Freud: ‘Let me enjoy your friendship not as one between equals but as that of father and son,’ a weird thing to say to any friend but especially to the originator of the Oedipus Complex, the idea that at some unconscious level, male children have strong sexual desires towards their mothers and savage resentment towards their fathers.
Not long after that all begun to unravel. Not only because of their strange relationship, but mainly because of their differences and intellectual disagreements. For Freud everything was about sex, the libido and its repression. Jung disagreed. Sex is important, he argued, but to address the challenges of the psyche, therapists should look beyond the surface expressions of sexual difficulties.
Read the full review on Notes of a curious mind
