Letter from C. G. Jung to Sigmund Freud, December 4, 1906

Burghölzli-Zürich, 4 December 1906

Dear Professor Freud,

First of all I must tell you how sincerely grateful I am to you for not taking offence at some of the passages in my “apologia.”1 If I allowed myself certain reservations it was not in order to criticize your theory but a matter of policy, as you will surely have noticed. As you rightly say, I leave our opponents a line of retreat, with the conscious purpose of not making recantation too difficult for them. Even so things will be difficult enough. If one attacked an opponent as he really deserves, it would merely result in a disastrous dissension which could have only unfavourable consequences. Even as it is, people find my criticism too harsh. If I confine myself to advocating the bare minimum, this is simply because I can advocate only as much as I myself have unquestionably experienced, and that, in comparison with your experience, is naturally very little. I am only beginning to understand many of your formulations and several of them are still beyond me, which does