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JOAP 40(1):99 (1995)

The Wrong Mccormicks

Author: William Mcguire MA

Notes

In a new printing (1994) of my edition of The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung (originally published in 1974 by Princeton University Press in the United States and Hogarth Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul in the United Kingdom) I have added a preface containing, together with other information, the following statement:

In a letter of March 7, 1909 (133J), Jung informed Freud that he had a new patient, a ‘well-known American’. The man was not named, however, until July 7 (150F), when Freud wrote that a Mr McCormick, ‘identified as a patient of yours’, had asked for an appointment but had not shown up. A few days later (151J), Jung mentioned the same patient and his wife.
In seeking to annotate those McCormicks, I consulted members of the Jung family and others in Zurich who might have some knowledge about this couple. The consensus was that they were Harold Fowler McCormick and Edith Rockefeller McCormick — widely acknowledged to have been close to Jung in later years. Consequently, it was those McCormicks who were named in my footnotes. In 1990, the publication of an article by Kristie Miller,1 presenting letters in 1909-1910 between Jung and her grandparents, Medill and Ruth McCormick, accurately identified the McCormicks mentioned by Freud and Jung. The footnotes have therefore been corrected for this 1994 edition, though unhappily the misinformation was taken as fact in several publications that followed the 1974 English translation, as well as in the German edition.
According to Fowler McCormick, the son of Harold and Edith McCormick,2 Jung and his parents met only in 1912, when Jung was in New York (see the comment following 321J). They were introduced by Medill McCormick.

‘The Letters of C. G. Jung and Medill and Ruth McCormick’, Spring, 50 (1990), 1-25.
Interview by Gene F. Nameche in the C. G. Jung Oral History Archive (1969, but restricted until 1980), Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston.

JOAP 40(1):99 (1995)

The Wrong Mccormicks

Author: William Mcguire MA

Notes

In a letter of March 7, 1909 (133J), Jung informed Freud that he had a new patient, a ‘well-known American’. The man was not named, however, until July 7 (150F), when Freud wrote that a Mr McCormick, ‘identified as a patient of yours’, had asked for an appointment but had not shown up. A few days later (151J), Jung mentioned the same patient and his wife.
In seeking to annotate those McCormicks, I consulted members of the Jung family and others in Zurich who might have some knowledge about this couple. The consensus was that they were Harold Fowler McCormick and Edith Rockefeller McCormick — widely acknowledged to have been close to Jung in later years. Consequently, it was those McCormicks who were named in my footnotes. In 1990, the publication of an article by Kristie Miller,1 presenting letters in 1909-1910 between Jung and her grandparents, Medill and Ruth McCormick, accurately identified the McCormicks mentioned by Freud and Jung. The footnotes have therefore been corrected for this 1994 edition, though unhappily the misinformation was taken as fact in several publications that followed the 1974 English translation, as well as in the German edition.
According to Fowler McCormick, the son of Harold and Edith McCormick,2 Jung and his parents met only in 1912, when Jung was in New York (see the comment following 321J). They were introduced by Medill McCormick.

‘The Letters of C. G. Jung and Medill and Ruth McCormick’, Spring, 50 (1990), 1-25.
Interview by Gene F. Nameche in the C. G. Jung Oral History Archive (1969, but restricted until 1980), Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston.