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These letters are the direct evidence of the intensely fruitful and finally tragic encounter of Freud and Jung. The quality of tragedy, however, resides only in the encounter, the drama of the letters themselves, moving forward in almost a classical way toward the foreshadowed catastrophe of conflict and dissension. It can scarcely be said that the career, the life, of either man was tragically altered, but rather that Freud and Jung each derived creative values from the inevitable break.
Unlike their courteous and appreciative references to one another's published work while they were collaborators, or anything that either one wrote about their relationship during the bitter aftermath, the letters bear the most acute witness to the complex interplay of these two unique personalities, so different yet so strongly attracted to one another. The dialogue inevitably tempts analytical and psychoanalytical interpretation, philosophical rumination over its beginnings and its effects and its “meaning,” and the weighing up of its aggressions, projections, magnanimities, shafts of wisdom, seminal particles, and whatever else could be put into the balance. A consideration of the correspondence along such lines, however, has been ruled out by the sons of the two principals, who, in concluding an agreement to publish the letters, prudently stipulated that they were to be treated “like historical documents … in order to guarantee impartiality.”
In the years just before the beginning of this century, Freud was in a state of what he more than once called “splendid isolation.”1 His career had been wracked by frustrations; he had not become a research scientist as he had once hoped to, and he had not become a University professor.2 His collaboration with Josef Breuer had resulted