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December 6, 1906. Jg.
(In answer to the reasons Jung gave for not putting the topic of therapy in the foreground of an exposition of psycho-analysis: the number of unsuitable cases, the mistakes in diagnosis, and the fear lest inexperienced doctors think that psycho-analysis in therapy is easy and thereby discredit it in their efforts to apply it.)
I can unreservedly subscribe to your remarks about therapy. I have had the same experiences, and for the same reasons have taken care not to maintain in my writings more than that ‘the method effects more than any other’. I will not even maintain that every case of hysteria is curable, let alone everything that goes under that name. Since I am not concerned with the percentage of cures I have often treated cases bordering on the psychotic, or delusional (delusions of reference, blushing phobia, etc.), and in that way at least learned that the same mechanisms apply extensively beyond the limits of hysteria and obsessional neuroses. One cannot explain things to unfriendly people. I have therefore kept to myself a good deal that I could have said about the limitations of therapy and its mechanism, or mentioned it in such a way as to be intelligible only to the expert. It would not have escaped you that our cures come about through attaching the libido reigning in the subconscious1 (Transference) which comes about with more certainty in hysteria than elsewhere. Where this fails the patient will not make the effort or else does not listen when we translate his material to him. It is in essence a cure through love. Moreover it is transference that provides the strongest proof, the only unassailable one, for the relationship of neuroses to love.
I warmly welcome your promise to accord me provisional belief where your experience does not yet allow you to come to a decision—of course only until it does allow you to do so. I think I deserve that credit in view of my severe self-criticism, but I ask for such credit only of very few peo