You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Publication of the correspondence between Freud and Jung (McGuire, 1974) has produced an extraordinary response among historians of psychoanalysis—a continuing stream of studies far exceeding the scholarly interest in Freud's published correspondence with any other figure. The present symposium forms part of that outpouring, although it has been organized on the basis of the rediscovery of Jung's remarkable letter of 1955 in which, in his own terms, he reaffirmed his sense of profound divergence between his psychological system and that of psychoanalysis.
I assume that I was invited to participate in this effort because of my long-standing interest in the intellectual history of psychoanalysis (see Gedo & Pollock, 1976). In fact, for many years I have looked upon the rupture between Freud and Jung as one key to conceptualizing the essence of our discipline; in this view, I have followed Philip Rieff (1966) whose pioneering work about these matters I once had occasion to discuss in some detail (Gedo, 1972). More recently, I have examined the Freud/Jung letters (Gedo, 1979) as well as other evidence in the public domain in order to define the dynamics of the failure of their attempted collaboration, and reached the conclusion that the clashing personal needs and intellectual positions that determined that failure had common sources in the protagonists' respective psychological depths. From slightly different perspectives, Stepansky (1976) and Decker (1980) independently reached rather similar conclusions, and in a wide ranging monograph Homans (1979) made extensive use of my formulations, in his preliminary version of 1974.
In his commentary on Jung's Answer to Job, Slochower (1981) proposes the hypothesis that this book and, more generally, Jung's life-long religious attitudes represent sequelae