Letter from C. G. Jung to Sigmund Freud, October 5, 1906

Burghölzli-Zürich, 5 October 19061

Dear Professor Freud,2

Please accept my sincerest thanks for the present you kindly sent me. This collection of your various short papers3 should be most welcome to anyone who wishes to familiarize himself quickly and thoroughly with your mode of thought. It is to be hoped that your scientific following will continue to increase in the future in spite of the attacks which Aschaffenburg,4 amid the plaudits of the pundits, has made on your theory—one might almost say on you personally. The distressing thing about these attacks is that in my opinion Aschaffenburg fastens on externals, whereas the merits of your theory are to be found in the psychological realm of which modern psychiatrists and psychologists have somewhat too scanty a grasp. Recently I conducted a lively correspondence5 with Aschaffenburg about your theory and espoused this standpoint, with which you, Professor, may not be entirely in agreement. What I can appreciate, and what has helped us here in our psychopathological work, are your psychological views, whereas I am still pretty far from understanding the therapy and the genesis of hysteria because our material on hysteria is rather meagre. That is to say your therapy seems to me to depend not merely on the affects released by abreaction but also on certain personal rapports,5a and it seems to me that though the genesis of hysteria is predominantly,