Correspondence

Sir,

In Michael Fordham's review (which I greatly appreciate) of The Freud/Jung Letters in the  J. Anal. Psychol.,  20, 1, pp.  79-80↗, he refers to ‘a story that, when Jung sent the whole volume [Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, ] … to Freud, he received it back with a note inside saying, “This is nothing but a resistance against the father.”’ Joseph Wheelwright, in a ‘commentary’ by way of review of the Letters in  Psychological perspectives,  2, pp.  171-6, recounts the story as Jung told it to him: ‘Jung said that when he got a copy of his magnum opus from the publisher, he sent it to Freud. It came back by return mail, pages uncut, obviously unread. Scrawled across the fly leaf, Freud had written: “Widerstand gegen den Vater” (Resistance to the father) and was signed S. Freud. I asked Jung how he felt, and he said that he turned to his wife, Emma, and said: “I feel as though I had been thrown out of my father's house.”’ I heard Dr Wheelwright relate the anecdote when he spoke at a symposium, ‘Freud and Jung: an historical perspective’, in San Francisco on 26 October 1974.

So far as I have been able to discover, this vivid, nearly classic anecdote does not square with the facts. The contents of the letters between Freud and Jung are evidential to some degree. Part One of Wandlungen (to abbreviate), which Freud first saw in its original Jahrbuch form on 20 August 1911 (letter 268 F), did not provoke an adverse reaction. After a first reading, Freud wrote (270 F): ‘So you too are aware that the Oedipus complex is at the root of religious feeling. Bravo!’ Jung had been sure that Freud would disapprove, as Emma Jung's letter of 6 November 1911 to Freud states, but Freud wrote him further words of commendation on 12 November (280 F): ‘One of the nicest works I have read (again).’ Jung, now at work on Part Two, seemed confident still that Freud would disapprove, as we learn from another letter of Emma Jung on 14 November: ‘[His] fear of your opinion was only a pretext for no