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Excavations of the substrata underlying the Freud/Jung relationship have begun to yield empathie and non-polemical insights into this dramatic event in the history of psychoanalysis. Harry Slochower has unearthed the religious Yahweh aspects of Jung's transference on Freud,1 and James Kirsch has further elucidated one dimension of the Freud/Jung conflict as a powerful, unconscious struggle between two father gods: the Yahweh and Wotan archetypes.2 When one reflects on how and why the Great Goddess cults were usurped by the patriarchal Yahwist religion, and how the oedipal Father dominated Freud's incest and taboo theories while the bi-polar Great Mother increasingly gained Jung's psychoanalytical attention—so much so that she became the focus of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido? the book that “became a landmark, set up on the spot where two ways divided”4—one is led to wonder whether, at a very deep level, a struggle was enacted between the archetypes of the Father god, Yahweh, and the primordial Great Mother goddess.
The masculine plane of the Freud/Jung relationship dominates their correspondence at the manifest level. There is the “biblical” letter where Jung lives from the crumbs of Freud's table,5 and the erotic undertone of Jung's “religious crush.” To Jung's desire that Freud regard their friendship as one between a father and son, Freud responds by “formally adopting” Jung as his “eldest son and anointing him as successor and crown prince.” When Freud writes: “I put my fatherly horn-rimmed spectacles on again