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The relationship between Jung and Freud developed mythological characteristics and is still embellished with stories told in secret among initiates. This correspondence brings more reality and detail to balance the myth-making without detracting from the drama of mutual love that moved on to hesitations and deceptions gradually to turn step by step into disillusionment, hatred and bitterness.
Jung did not favour the publication of these letters: he did not think that there was much of interest in them, and his secretary, Mrs Jaffé, to whom he deferred, expected ‘pearls of wisdom’ and was disappointed. But here there is wisdom, and folly too, in a combination which seems richly appropriate to the father-son myth in which the relationship was set. Yet Jung was right in saying that there is not much of scientific importance in the letters because most of the matter is already known and fully documented so that new content is only in matters of detail: but he greatly underestimated their literary and dramatic content. Both he and Freud developed letter writing into an art which played an essential part in their lives: therefore their correspondence makes a book that can be enjoyed as a story and as such it will be widely read. The parts that become too technical for this purpose and the dull passages, when official letters are recorded, can both be skipped without breaking up the continuity.
After Freud had first written ‘Dear friend’, having dropped the additional ‘and colleague’, Jung replied on 28 February 1908: ‘I thank you with all my heart for this token of your confidence. The undeserved gift of your friendship is one of the high points of my life … let me enjoy your friendship not as one between equals but as that between father and son’ (p. 122). So Jung expressed the myth first. Freud did not reply directly but developed the theme in considerable detail later and, as might have been expected of the older of the two, displayed more wisdom and tact, restraining Ju