Letter from C. G. Jung to Sigmund Freud, July 29, 1913

Internationale Psychoanalytische Vereinigung

Küsnach-Zürich, 29 July 1913

Dear Professor Freud,

I am still waiting for the announcement of a lecture from your side. As I would like to have the programme printed soon, I should be grateful for an early reply.

Many thanks for sending me your offprints. I must, however, point out that in your paper “An Evidential Dream,”1 which in other respects shows the fine qualities I have always admired in your writings, you put forward a conception of our views2 which rests on a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding turns on the conception of the actual conflict, which for us is not the petty vexation of the moment but the problem of adaptation. A second misunderstanding seems to be that you think we deny the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams. We fully admit the soundness of the wish-fulfilment theory, but we maintain that this way of interpreting dreams touches only the surface, that it stops at the symbol, and that further interpretation is possible. When, for instance, a coitus wish appears in a dream, this wish can be analysed further, since this archaic expression with its tiresome monotony of meaning needs retranslating into another medium. We recognize the soundness of the wish-fulfilment theory up to a certain point, but we go beyond it. In our view it does not exhaust the meaning of the dream.

With best regards,

Yours sincerely, JUNG