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Jung's Symbols of Transformation has long been acknowledged as his point of departure from Freud. It is in this work, based on the case of Miss Miller published a few years previously by Flournoy, that Jung openly proposed new ideas in opposition to those of Freud in relation to the concept of libido. The present article publishes for the first time in the English language a translation from the German of the original review of Symbols of Transformation by Ferenczi. The translation is interesting in its own right, both as an historical document and as the initial critique from Freud's supporters of Jung's ideas concerning the nature of libido. What is as interesting, however, is the accompanying essay by the translators, Figlio and Jordanova, which offers guidance to the present day reader of Ferenczi's review and which sets it in its surrounding historical context.
Although Symbols of Transformation foreshadows many of Jung's later ideas on the structure of the psyche and the collective unconscious, the review confines itself almost exclusively to the task of investigating Jung's theories of the libido from the standpoint of psychoanalysis. This was the most important aspect of the work as far as Freud and Jung jointly were concerned, as acknowledged both in their letters to one another and in Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. It is no wonder, therefore, that the translators should describe this subject as the linchpin that was both the foundation of the earlier collaboration between Freud and Jung and also the wedge that could drive them apart.
In his introduction, Ferenczi picks up and criticizes Jung's attempts to elucidate individual psychic contents with the aid of mythology, something which Jung came to call the process of amplification and which forms a basis for his synthetic method of interpretation. He also brings to the reader's attention a drawback in Jung's research in that he had chosen, in the case of Miss Miller, a subject whose mat