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The members of both Freud's and Jung's family wished these letters to be published as historical documents, and this they undeniably are. The story of their preservation and pathway to publication is itself a fascinating one.
Many readers will hope to learn more from these letters of the causes of the rift between these two great minds. The great attraction they had for each other is movingly evident in the early letters, where Freud writes to Jung with a warmth and love that is missing even in his letters to Abraham.
Jung always wrote that Freud's narrow view of sexuality as the basis of mental disorder was unacceptable to him, and his doubts on its applicability to dementia praecox (schizophrenia) are documented in his letters from 1907 onwards. However, other analysts including Abraham were able to develop their insight into the psychoses within the framework of Freud's theory, and to modify or extend his theory without breaking away from the psychoanalytic movement. Jung's letters in 1907 asked for Freud's help in his analysis of schizophrenic patients in the Burgholzli mental hospital; different readers will find different clues in the letters as to why Freud could not give the right help or why Jung could not use it. Some of Freud's key replies are missing; from the context they seem to be letters containing criticisms of Jung's writing.
The loss that Jung represented to psychoanalysis can be measured already in these early years; his remarks on children's dreams, on the analytic material from his own little daughter, and on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, axe perceptive and far-reaching.
Earlier readers of the unpublished letters were reported as being disappointed with their trivial contents: it is true that from 1908 the letters no longer contain much exchange of ideas (unlike Freud's correspondence with Lou Andreas-Salome) but a statement on one side met by silence on the other. The “going-wrong” of the relationship seems never to have been openly discussed;