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Given Some of the negative interactions between Joyce and Jung, the limited search for influence is understandable. Joyce referred to Freud and Jung as the Viennese Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and adamantly refused a patron's offer to pay for analysis by Jung. He later referred to the incident in Finnegans Wake: ‘I can psoakoonaloose myself anytime I want’ (JOYCE 4, p. 522). Jung, whose copy of Ulysses contained a personal inscription by Joyce, had difficulty in coming to terms with the novel. On an early reading, he found it painfully boring, noting that ‘in all the book there is nothing pleasing, nothing refreshing, nothing hopeful, but only things that are grey, grisly, gruesome, or pathetic, tragic, ironic, all the seamy side of life and so chaotic that you have to look for the thematic connections with a magnifying glass’ (JUNG 8, para. 169). In 1930 he wrote a disparaging preface to the German translation of Stuart Gilbert's book on Ulysses about which Joyce remarked, ‘He seems to have read Ulysses from first to last without one smile. The only thing to do in such a case is to change one's drink’ (JOYCE 6, p. 262). A friend suggested to Joyce that Jung's distaste for him could be explained by translating his name into German (Freud). In 1934, when Jung served as an analyst for Joyce's daughter, Lucia, his personal association with Joyce led him to the conclusion that Joyce was a latent schizoid who used drinking to control his schizoid tendencies.
The record, however, is not entirely negative. A later reading of Ulysses by Jung caused him to state that ‘the whole book is borne along on a subterranean current of life that shows singleness of aim and rigorous selectivity, both of these being unmistakable proof of the existence of a unified personal will and directed intention’ (JUNG 8, para. 173).