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“I still haven't heard anything from X.” Until now, this is how readers of Jung's letters have encountered Victoria Ocampo. His veiled mention of her can be found in the English translation of a reply that Jung wrote to Count Hermann Keyserling at the end of 1929 (Adler & Jaffé 1973, p. 72). This was the same year that Jung had published his “Commentary” on The Secret of the Golden Flower, as translated by Richard Wilhelm, the German missionary who had recently returned from China. Jung had met Wilhelm seven years earlier, at the School of Wisdom that Keyserling founded at Darmstadt. Keyserling, a Russian aristocrat married to a granddaughter of Bismarck, established an international reputation as a Kulturphilosoph and an exponent of world-civilizing values; the scope of his books, travels, and immensely popular public lectures had the ability to bring even East and West together.
At this point in time Keyserling—who had been in a depth-oriented body therapy with the Swiss pioneer of psychosomatic medicine, George Groddeck, from whom Freud had appropriated the term “id”—wrote to Jung for analytic help. Keyserling requested aid not for himself, but for this “X” who had recently collided with him around their mutual misunderstanding of the type of crush she had developed. X had become fascinated not with Keyserling's body, which she despised the sight of, but with his spirit, which from reading him she imagined was of an integrity so elevated that his sexual interpretation of her idealization came as a shock to her soul. A footnote in the 1973 edition of Jung's Letters explains that the previous month Keyserling had “described a strangely intense and at the same time unreal relationship that had developed between a well-known South American writer/editor and himself, in which she clearly played the role of the femme inspiratrice’. Her ambivalence led to considerable complications during his stay in S. America” (Adler & Jaffe, p. 72). Half a century later, Craig Stephen