Jung's Three Secrets: Slochower on “Freud as Yahweh in Jung's Answer to Job”*

To discuss this paper adequately one would need to be a Jungian and a theologian, and I am neither. I feel constrained to approach this subject as a clinician, attempting to understand neurosis and character in terms of a person's developmental history, reactive and adaptive patterns, and personal myth and fantasy both conscious and unconscious.

Dr. Slochower calls our attention to the importance of Jung's picture of Freud in his conception of Yahweh in his Answer to Job. It seems to me Slochower's view is essentially correct and justified by his evidence. He does not say that Jung's picture of Freud is the sole origin of Jung's Yahweh.

As I read the paper, and then the Answer to Job, Jung's “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” and the later letters between Freud and Jung, I became fascinated by the complexities of an obviously creative mind. I found myself trying to make connections, trying to understand Jung's conscious myths about himself and his unconscious fantasy.

I began by trying to make some sense out of Jung's two great secrets from his childhood. The first was his earliest remembered dream, between 3 and 4, of a giant phallus on a golden throne in an underground temple.1 Jung denies any actual experiences which contributed to any of the details of the dream, except for a green curtain which he equated with the covering of green vegetation over the mystery of the earth. However, since our clinical experience leads us generally to look for the dreamer's actual experience, pre-conscious or repressed, to be represented in the dream, we would be inclined to hypothesize that the huge