Letter from C. G. Jung to Sigmund Freud, May 13, 1907

Burghölzli-Zürich, 13 May 1907

Dear Professor Freud,

First of all I must beg you to excuse the long pause I have allowed myself. I could not and did not want to write to you until I had seen things a bit more clearly. Above all I wanted to absorb and digest your “Remarks on Paranoia.” But first the news! It will soon come to your attention that an assistant of Kraepelin's has slaughtered me with a review of my Dem. pr. book in Gaupp's Zentralblatt.1 You are included too, of course. His helpless flounderings are touching to see! If you don't have the Zentralblatt I can send you an offprint for your edification. In spite of everything, he has felt impelled to write a whole article about it. At least they have now started using heavy artillery. But in the end the thing has got me down again, for I see how infinitely difficult it is to communicate your ideas to the public.

Autoerotism has yet another triumph to chalk up. We have recently succeeded in analysing an educated and very intelligent young female catatonic who is blessed with very good introspection. She always walks around stiff and affectless and it is difficult to keep her in a good ward because from time to time she smears herself with excrement. She spontaneously admitted to us that since her illness she has become like a child in her thoughts, masses of old infantile memories pop up in which she gets completely submerged. She says the smearing came about simply because it occurred to her (in one of those “absent-minded” states) not to sit on the toilet but to defecate on a piece of paper on the floor. Oddly enough that is what she did as a child. She suffered from constipation and got too tired on the seat, then started