Correspondence

I was Interested in Judith Hubback's saying, or implying, in her paper, ‘Developments and similarities, 1935-1980’ (this Journal, July 1980 issue, 25, 3) that Jung's Tavistock lectures are now outdated but that ‘someone picking up the book now could perhaps assume that it constituted a definitive statement by Jung and that it is a description of present theory and practice’. I fully agree that the book is misleading. Its title Analytical Psychology, its theory and practice does not even describe the lectures as they were given in 1935. I was present at the lectures and talked with Jung both before and after they were given, and I know he, himself, did not consider them more than a surface account of his work. What is not generally known, and is not brought out in Dr Bennet's otherwise good introduction, is the frustration Jung initially felt with this highly critical audience. Moreover, among its members there were some who wanted him to be the miracle-man of depth psychology and they were frustrated because he insisted on being so down-to-earth. In the end he did take his audience into real depth with his amplification of an archetypal dream. The people who had enjoyed his down-to-earth approach were accordingly dismayed.

When Jung realised this was all the depth they could take, he cut off the amplification before the dream was fully analysed and spent the rest of the time talking about the transference. At that point he ceased being the teacher and became an inspired group leader. He had often adopted this role in his seminars in Zürich, and I well remember the therapeutic effect it had upon us as a group. But when we wrote down what he had said he cautioned us not to take too seriously ‘all the nonsense I speak in my seminars’.

This is what happened when some of his statements in London, especially on transference, were written down and printed as dogma. Judith Hubback refers to them as ‘hostile remarks: “We do not need transference”; “transference or no transfere