Firm Affinities: Jung's relations with Britain and the United States

Jung apparently had learned English by the time he went to the Burghölzli Clinic, in 1900. There he worked with American and British psychiatrists, wrote papers in English, and treated his first American analysands. Through one of these, Medill McCormick, Jung came to know influential Americans and his curiosity about the United States grew. In 1909, he first visited the States, along with Freud, and by the time of their break Jung had established ‘firm affinities’ with America. His relations with Great Britain took root about then. The first Jungian group was formed under the leadership of Constance Long, who was effective also in organizing American Jungians. After the Great War, Jung frequently visited England to lecture and lead seminars arranged by H. G. Baynes and M. Esther Harding. He travelled to the American Southwest, East Africa, and India in the company of American and English friends. After World War II, Jung's association with Mary and Paul Mellon's Bollingen Foundation and the publishers Routledge and Kegan Paul led to the joint project of the Collected Works. In 1976, fifteen years after Jung's death, the twentieth and final volume appeared, and work on editions of Jung's letters, interviews, and seminars, also under American and British auspices, was well advanced.