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24th June 1969.
Dear Dr. Sargant,
You may be surprised to hear from me out of the blue, but there is a communication I want to make, and the stimulus is your interesting article on The Physiology of Faith in World Medicine.
When we meet you always seem to be friendly and we seem to get on all right together, and you did indeed say some words to Robert Graves which made him think that I was not altogether
reprehensible. Can you accept, therefore, a letter from me in which I express some criticism?
In this article to which I refer, as in so many of the things you write, you take the trouble to inject something about psychoanalysis in the sort of way that has an effect on readers perhaps greater than that of the article itself. The readers find themselves caught up in your general argument and descriptive writing, and they do not bother to question the two or three things that you let drop, so that it amounts to a kind of propaganda against something that you call psycho-analysis.
In this article you will recognise what I am saying if you look at page 19 in the middle of the first paragraph. You jump from Buddha and Christ to Freud and Jung, and the uninformed reader simply takes it for granted that on the couch the patient is being invited in a more or less subtle way to acquire absolute faith. This joins up with a shorter reference on page 14: “…. such as the psycho-analyst's absolute and unshakeable faith in the existence of a highly sexualized Freudian subconscious mind;….” I suggest that you are letting yourself down very badly when you continuously do this sort of thing.
I have to ask myself where it was that you became acquainted with psycho-analysis and analytic psychology. I of course know analysts who are dogmatic and indoctrinating types and from my point of view they are all bad analysts. What I know of Jungians makes me feel the same way about them, that when they work on the basis of the sort of belief in Jung that you are referring to, they are bad Jungians.