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The German publishing house of S. Fischer has for some years now been issuing volumes of correspondence between Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries, and last year it was the turn of that between Sigmund Freud and the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, published for the first time in an outstandingly presented edition by Gerhard Fichtner. The letters concerned were exchanged between two far from equal partners: Sigmund Freud, who had already crossed the threshold of the sixth decade of his life and was therefore concerned not only to safeguard the theory of psychoanalysis and ensure its further development, but also to consolidate its position in relation to other disciplines, in particular psychiatry, in the face of persistent, usually unobjective and in some cases malicious resistance; and Ludwig Binswanger, 25 years his junior, who had only just begun to familiarise himself with contemporary psychiatry during the course of his practical traineeship in medicine.
However, age was not the only major difference between the two correspondents. Unlike Freud, Ludwig Binswanger was a scion of a prominent Swiss family of psychiatrists with an upper middle-class background. His grandfather had founded the internationally renowned Bellevue Sanatorium at Kreuzlingen, near Konstanz, on Lake Constance; his father had become its medical director; and once Ludwig had completed his medical studies and psychiatric training, and obtained some practical experience, including a period with his uncle, Otto Binswanger, Professor of Psychiatry at Jena, and, in particular, a spell at Zürich's Burghölzli under Eugen Bleuler, he was to follow in his predecessors' footsteps as medical director of this sanatorium; because of his father's early death, however, he found himself at the helm of this institution much earlier than planned.
During his time at the Burghölzli in Zürich, the University Psychiatric Clinic headed by Bleuler, he met not only C. G. Jung, who was then senior physician