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In considering Jung and Freud's initial correspondence regarding the etiology and treatment of hysteria, it was not only their respective group cultures (the Burghölzli and the Vienna Group), but also their individual complexes that played an important part in the diverging evolution of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. It is generally agreed that, early on, Jung had a wish to find a father and Freud a son, and although this complementarity created a powerful bond, it ended up becoming fraught and led to dissolution.
Jung believed in multi-faceted origins of a complex, as he expressed in his second letter written to Freud, ‘…your therapy seems to me to depend not merely on the affects released by abreaction but also on certain personal rapports, and it seems to me that though the genesis of hysteria is predominantly, it is not exclusively, sexual’ (McGuire, 1974, p. 5). Freud was firm in his position and replied to Jung, ‘Your writings have long led me to suspect that your appreciation of my psychology does not extend to all my views on hysteria and the problem of sexuality, but I venture to hope that in the course of the years you will come much closer to me that you now think possible’ (McGuire, 1974, p. 5).
Unfortunately, psychoanalysis and analytical psychology have stuck to their positions like a parent and an adolescent resisting change. In more than 100 years since Jung and Freud first met, we still feel a disconnect that resembles a somewhat paranoid-schizoid position in which inflation and devaluation take place in the minds of the Jungian and psychoanalytic practitioner alike. Such discrepancy can be evident when a Jungian speaks in a group of psychoanalysts, or when a psychoanalyst speaks within a group of Jungians. During a 2014 lecture by Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched in Berkeley, California, I recall a participant speaking into the microphone saying, ‘My mother always told me to fear Jungians.’ She spoke in response to how open and integrating