Letter from C. G. Jung to Sigmund Freud, April 17, 1910

Küsnach/Zürich, 17 April 1910

Dear Professor Freud,

I too have now read Isserlin's article and can only see that the fellow has stooped even lower than before. At the back of it all is still the same twisted mind, but he has now done a bit of reading and is worried by the criticism of his associates and by our success. As late as last autumn, in the holiday course in Munich, he compared the Freudian school with Titania's obsessed lover who woke up one day with an ass's head on him—something his own demon has obviously whispered in his ear. We won't have to wait long for his conversion. His unconscious at least knows this much, that Puck has already “miracled”1 the ass's head on to Ziehen and Oppenheim. And then all the equivocations! Your discovery of repression is nothing, but his conception of it suddenly amounts to something. The psychoanalytic method is not worth a button, yet he uses it to clear up the complexes of his patients. When all's said and done, the whole of Herr Isserlin lives and breathes only because of what you and I have discovered, yet he reviles us, not as impudently and loudly as before, but in private and therefore all the more dirtily, and still he can't help trying to cadge an invitation to Nuremberg. What's more he has put into my mouth a piece of nonsense I never said. But it hardly seems worth sending a correction to the Zeitschrift?

Friedländer has been puking again—in the Umschau,2 where he