Murray Stein, Ph.D.

Michael Fordham once told me in a private conversation that he considered Jung’s greatest “discovery” was the inner world. I would recast that insight and say that his fundamental idea – his one really Big Idea – was the irreducible reality of the psyche and that this led him to explore and uncover what Fordham called the inner world. The many significant contributions he made to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis flow from this one. The rest are details, though not trivial ones. In this paper I will offer my own list of those details. It is a personal list, and perhaps others will want to add further to the list or rearrange it into another set of priorities. On this subject, however, I can speak only for myself.
     Many people have by now made major contributions to psychoanalysis. The field is consequently large and diverse due to the great variety of these contributions. Among the most significant of the contributors was C.G. Jung, and although he was regarded for many decades as an outsider and a renegade by the mainstream psychoanalysts (Freudian), he nevertheless left a legacy that is relevant to the general field of psychoanalysis and challenging as well. About Jung’s contributions, one can say too much or too little, overstate or understate the case. Who knows the correct measure? In my personal view, next to Freud himself, Jung is the most significant psychoanalyst in the history of the field. The real question is: Did Jung so transform psychoanalysis that his version of it thereby severed its links irrevocably to the main body and thereby became another field altogether, or did his contributions, mostly neglected by the mainstream until now, add features to psychoanalysis that can be, or need to be, assimilated into the mainstream and given their proper place there? What is the connection between Analytical Psychology (i.e., Jungian psychoanalysis) and Psychoanalysis per se? 
     My own answer to this question is that Jung’s interests and contributions flowed out way beyond the more narrowly focused interests of most psychoanalysts but nevertheless retained connections to psychoanalysis itself all along the line, from questions of technique and practice to more general matters pertaining to the interpretation of culture, religion, and history. On all of these points, Jung gave his specific and quite unique views and answers, and to date almost none of them have been responded to by members of the field that follow Freud and his more closely defined tradition of thought and practice. This is unfortunate, in my opinion, and very one-sided, since on the Jungian side of the divide there has been a great deal of consideration of psychoanalytic ideas and perspectives, traditional and modern, and many attempts have been made by Jungian psychoanalysts to incorporate them into their practices. This has been a one-way street to date.
     So what did Jung contribute to psychoanalysis? In this paper I will confine myself to matters pertaining to praxis and the theory on which it is based and will leave aside the cultural hermeneutics and other more general issues dealt with by Jung, especially in his later works. As we all know well enough, Jung was Freud’s “crown prince” and the designated heir of psychoanalysis until he differed publically with Freud on several key ideas, most importantly on the understanding and definition of libido. It was Freud’s term, and he wanted to specify it as the sexual drive. For Freud, libido was fundamentally sexual in nature and origin. At first, their difference of opinion had to do with the etiology of neurosis and schizophrenia. Freud wanted to pinpoint sexuality as the prime and only cause; Jung was skeptical about the universality of this claim, both with regard to neurosis but more especially and certainly with regard to the causes of psychosis and schizophrenia. Jung transformed the meaning of libido from sexual desire to psychic energy, which as such could take various concrete forms, depending on the nature of the object desired and the goal to be achieved. 
     Their final break was precipitated by Jung’s publication of a two part work precisely on the theme of libido, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, and by Freud’s cool reception of it. Jung believed that in this work he had made major contributions to psychoanalytic theory, while Freud dismissed the articles as a restatement of what was already well known to psychoanalysts. In one of his last letters to Freud, dated 3 December 1912, Jung accuses Freud of letting his neurosis (as evidenced by his fainting spells in Jung’s presence and by his constant vigilance against what he perceived as Jung’s “death wish” towards him) get in the way of proper understanding and appreciation for his (i.e., Jung’s) position:  
“Dass Sie nämlich – verzeihen Sie mir den unehrerbietigen Ausdruck –  meine Arbeit nicht nur wenig, sondern sehr viel unterschätzen, geht aus Ihrer Bemerkung hervor, dass ich, ‘ohne es zu beabsichtigen, das Rätzel aller Mystik gelöst hätte, welche auf der symbolischen Verwendung der ausser Dienst gestellten Komplexe ruht’.  
Lieber Herr Professor, verzeihen Sie mir noch einmal, aber dieser Satz zeigt mir, dass Sie sich des Verständnisses meiner Arbeit dadurch berauben, dass Sie sie unterschätzen. Diese Erkenntnis, von der Sie sprechen und in der Sie einen Gipfel vermuten, liegt ganz unten am Berg. Diese Einsicht ist für uns seit Jahren selbstverständlich. Verzeihen Sie, bitte, noch einmal diese Offenheit. Ich leide nur hie und da am bloss menschlichen Wunsche, intellektuell verstanden zu werden, ohne am Massstab der Neurose gemessen zu werden.” (Briefwechsel Sigmund Freud-C.G. Jung, S. 583) 
This feeling of being underestimated, misunderstood, and dismissed has continued to haunt the relations between Jungians and Freudians to this day, and not without reason. But what did Jung think he was contributing to psychoanalysis in this work, and was this a valid contribution? Is it so even perhaps still today?
     The substantive contributions in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido are many: the differentiation of two types of thinking (fantasy thinking and directed thinking); the detailed evidence of complex mythological background in contemporary fantasy images; the insight that incest has more to do with a longing for childhood and with nostalgia than it does with sexual attraction to one’s opposite sex parent; and much more. Here I will focus only on the more fundamental theoretical contributions, which served to give Jung’s approach to psychoanalysis its characteristic style and quality and that today still can make an important contribution to psychoanalytic thinking and practice if only it were taken up and assimilated into the mainstream of psychoanalysis. The words in the title of that extensive essay, Wandlungen and Symbole, give us the key reference points. These are brought in relation to the psychoanalytic term, libido. Jung’s specific understanding of these three terms gives his approach its characteristic features in the long run and summarize as well his major contribution to psychoanalysis.
     With the notion of transformation (Wandlung), Jung introduced dramatic openness and flexibility into the psychic system and laid the groundwork for considering the possibility of prolonged psychological development throughout the lifespan, i.e., the individuation process. With his understanding of the symbol, he radically overcame the prevailing intellectual tendency in psychoanalysis toward reductionism, including psychological reductionism and not only biological reductionism. Together, these two terms open a vast space for investigating the reality of the psyche as it presents itself phenomenologically in analysis and in evolving, meaning-generating human beings. 
     Wandlungen are transformations of psychic energy that can be observed in the course of psychological development from infancy to old age. They extend from minor and subtle changes in the attitudes of consciousness to deep structural modifications in the psyche that have long-term ramifications. Such transformations are based upon emergent patterns of a psychic nature (i.e., archetypes) that come into play as the personality develops and individuates. These emergent patterns are inherent as potentials in the self, which is given at birth. Michael Fordham described these transformations with his theory of deintegration-integration sequences, through which the potentials in the self emerge into consciousness and become contents and structures of ego-consciousness. Today the ubiquitous theory of emergence in so many contemporary sciences is very much in line with Jung’s intuition that the psyche, too, emerges in the course of development and that the transformations induced by such emergences continue throughout an entire lifetime. These emergent patterns are not to be causally linked backward in a historical chain to early childhood experiences. In fact, they emerge despite earlier experiences and often in radical defiance of them. This is Jung’s famous teleological principle, already embedded in the early notion of Wandlungen, which ran directly counter to Freud’s proclivity to trace the present features of the psyche back to early childhood experiences, especially those of a sexual nature. 
     The implications of this notion of psychic transformation for psychoanalytic treatment are, of course, profound. The notion of transformational emergences creates anticipations for psychological development in the future, once there is psychic space for them through an amount of release from old neurotic patterns frozen into place at the outset of treatment. These new developments are not induced by the analyst’s input or interpretations, nor are they promoted through suggestions or subtle influence, but rather they emerge spontaneously from the psyche itself as space is opened up for them through the analysis of pathological or inhibiting psychological structures. Old neurotic patterns are thus “outgrown,” as Jung observed, as new psychic patterns emerge. The function of analysis is to create space for them within the psychic world of the analysand.
     Turning to the notion of the symbol, Jung had in mind with this term something quite other than Freud’s definition of symbol as part of the disguise created by dream work and censorship. Like Freud, Jung observed that the reality of the psyche is a symbolic reality, that is, one that shows itself in symbols. Unlike Freud, though, Jung did not see the function of symbols as one that disguises biological instincts or historical facts in order to preserve conscious equanimity and calm. The role of interpretation of dream symbols, for Freud, was to reverse the dream work and uncover the latent dream thoughts, the repressed and therefore unconscious drives and memories of a troubling or traumatic nature. The childhood dream of the Wolf Man, for instance, had to be interpreted until the “memory” of the primal scene was uncovered. The dream image served to disguise the memory sufficiently so that the child would not be troubled by the awful memory of seeing his father mount his mother from behind and have sexual intercourse with her. Once the historical scene was “remembered” through interpretation and reconstruction, the dream symbol was no longer of any value or use. Its work had been to conceal what was now revealed. It had no further meaning. Jung disagreed with Freud about the nature of psychic symbols and found in them, instead of a way backward to the past and scenes of childhood, a way forward to the psychological future of the analysand. Symbols arise in the psyche as emergent patterns and structures, and they make their way from unconscious to conscious states first in dreams and fantasy and then by becoming assimilated to consciousness in a more deliberate way by interpretation and realization. The symbol is the best possible expression of a still unconscious content and is therefore a forerunner of new possibilities, new transformations. It is latent psychic structure coming into being.
     Jung’s break with Freud was predicated on several key differences: the possibility of significant future psychological developments (transformation), the interpretation of symbols (as signals of emergence rather than as disguised repetitions of memory and the past), and the nature and direction of libido. On this last point, object relations theorists also had a disagreement with Freud. For Freud, libido had its origin in the sex drive and exerted a pressure on the psyche toward discharge and reduction of tension. When this was inhibited, other substitutes were found (sublimations) or neuroses developed. For object relations theorists (the English Schools of Fairbairn, Guntrip, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, etc.), libido was the desire for objects and for relationships. Its pressures were not directed toward release and tension reduction but toward attachment to suitable objects in the environment. It finds its satisfaction in relationships between self and other, not in the discharge of drive energy. For Jung, the direction and goal of libido is yet other. Neither Freud nor the object relation theorists speak of what he had in mind, namely the unfolding and realization of the self in consciousness. For Jung, the goal of libido is individuation. This would be his contribution on this point. 
     This brings us, then, to individuation as a major contribution by Jung to psychoanalysis. It is a term that other schools of psychoanalysis do not use to any great extent, and certainly not in the sense that Jung gave to it. The transformations and symbols of libido have a very specific teleological aim in Jung’s thinking. It is the unfolding and full emergence of the potential personality, which is given from the beginning of life. This takes place in two major movements – differentiation and synthesis. The first has to do with establishing separateness, identity, uniqueness. (Margaret Mahler touched on this in her contribution, but only for early childhood development.) The second has to do with creating wholeness through integration or assimilation of the aspects of the self that are left behind in the course of building up separateness and a unique identity. Generally the first movement is emphasized in the so-called first half of life, and the second movement in the second half of life. Libido is the force that drives this process of development, the energy within the dynamic movements of the psyche toward unfolding and individuation. It becomes extremely important, therefore, in practice to recognize what the psyche is intending when it produces symptoms, dreams, fantasies, and symbols of all sorts and varieties. It may be that a cigar is a phallic symbol in the first half of life and that a penis is a symbol of the transcendent function in the second half of life. Symbols are interpreted according to an understanding of the reality of the psyche and its present condition with respect to individuation. This hermeneutic, based on psychological emergence and architectural features of the present, is another fundamental contribution of Jung’s to psychoanalysis.
     The interpretation of symbols lay at the heart of Jung’s disagreements with Freud. An instructive moment in his attempt to convey what symbols intended to bring into the psychic world occurred in his correspondence with Sabina Spielrein. Some years after she left Zurich for Vienna, and after she had worked with Freud there and had married and moved to Geneva where she set up a psychoanalytic practice, she and Jung resumed correspondence. In her letters she returned to the subject of Siegfried, the imaginal child they had produced many years earlier in their relationship. Spielrein continued to long for this child and expressed this as a concrete desire to have a child with Jung. Jung became irritated and exasperated with her and tried to bring her around to a symbolic understanding: 
You constantly want to drag the Siegfried symbol into reality, while this is the bridge to your individual development. Humans stand not only in one world, but between two worlds and must distinguish themselves from their functions in both worlds. This is individuation. You discard the dream and seek after practical solutions. Then the dreams come and cancel your practical intentions. Dreams are one world, and reality is another. You must stand between them and assist the traffic between the two worlds, as Siegfried stands between men and Gods. 
(My translation from Tagebuch einer heimlichen Symmetrie, ed. By A. Carotenuto, p. 217)
For Jung, the symbol functions as a bridge between two worlds, the conscious world and the domain of the unconscious. So it is with all dream symbols. They function, in Jung’s view, to bridge conscious and unconscious and thereby to compensate the one-sidedness of ego-consciousness, which tends to lose touch with the instincts and archetypes as it becomes embedded in the world of persona, of adaptation to culture, and of its own constructed identity based on conscious uniqueness and unconscious identifications personal, cultural, and archetypal. Working with dreams in analysis – a feature of Jungian psychoanalysis that continues to this day to hold a central place in practice – therefore moves the analysand toward possible transformations of the libido based on newly emergent structures.
     The technique that Jung introduced for assisting these newly emergent contents into consciousness was active imagination. Active imagination takes up the symbolic psyche on its own terms and enters into a relationship with it. The purpose of this is not to analyze but to link, conscious with unconscious, in other words to do the work consciously that symbols do spontaneously. This is not a technique for mining the unconscious, recovering early and lost memories, healing the body of illness through imaging, or other purposes to which it has been turned and used in recent times. It is a method for retaining and extending the domain of the symbolic and ultimately for integrating and assimilating emergent structures of the psyche. Active imagination creates a space in consciousness for the shadow, the anima and animus, and ultimately for the self to whatever extent is possible. It is a tool in the service of individuation and therefore an important feature of Jungian psychoanalysis. It is largely an untapped resource for mainstream psychoanalysis, which until recently has been more intent on analysis of childhood structures than on development of the personality especially in the later stages of life. Here Jung’s contribution can be of enormous value, especially for analysts who are working now increasingly with older patients in first world cultures whose populations are aging so dramatically.
     On shipboard back from the United States in 1909 with Freud, Jung had an important dream that proved decisive for his view of the psyche. The dream, well known to readers of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, features Jung descending through the levels of a house whose upper storey dated from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. In the cellar he discovered walls that dated from Roman times, and in a room beneath even that level he found the remains of a primitive culture. These lower levels “signified past times and passed stages of consciousness,” he writes (MDR, p. 161). This awareness of the psyche’s embeddedness in history and culture brought Jung to the clarifying realization that the psyche is not only a personal acquisition made during the course of one’s individual experience in family and society, but that in its lower levels it is constructed of impersonal, cultural, and historical features. This would lead to his keen awareness of the factor of culture in the structuring of the unconscious. 
     In practice this has a critical role to play in interpreting the meaning of symptoms and unconscious fantasy, as Jung discovered famously in the case of the de Witte sisters from Holland who as young children had been raised in Java and injected with the alien elements of Asian culture through the “milk of their ayas.” The success of their analyses hinged centrally upon Jung’s ability properly to amplify their dream and fantasy images using his knowledge of Kundalini Yoga, among other symbol systems. The importance of understanding an analysand’s cultural background and unconscious assumptions has become more urgent as globalization and multiculturalism affect our Western societies and bring people of utterly different cultures into our practices. These differences often constitute an important unconscious aspect of the analyst’s and the analysand’s transferences. (For a contemporary version of this, see “The Islamic Cultural Unconscious in the Dreams of a Contemporary Muslim Man” by Michael Vannoy Adams.) The recent work of Singer and Kimbles on cultural complexes and the collection of papers they edited in the volume, The Cultural Complex, have brought this important contribution of Jung’s powerfully into the contemporary discussion. 
      In the letter to Spielrein quoted above, Jung cited cultural factors at work in her concrete interpretation of a dream: 
You present your dream as a German expression of concrete action, completely geared to reality. Your earlier Russian attitude is one of impracticality. But a Christification has preceded this latter attitude. You fall between a German and a Russian attitude, between a real and an unreal. That is precisely the symbolic, which is the common function of both. Probably you are living the symbolic to a great degree without being aware of it. Therefore your dreams speak of lighted spaces and green meadows. (Ibid.)
He here employs the notion that cultural attitudes influence our ways of thinking about the psyche and its productions. These must be made conscious. 
     As a further effort to overcome biases in himself and in psychological theorizing and interpreting generally, he produced a critical psychology in the form of “psychological types.” The fundamental insights put forward by Jung in his first big work after Wandlungen, Psychological Types (1921), have led to large scale movements and developments that have little to do with his basic intention in offering it as a contribution to the field of psychoanalysis as a critical psychology of consciousness. The most widely used psychological test in the United States has been for quite a long time, and continues to be, The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), which is based on Jung’s theory of types. Just as the Word Association Experiment went on after Jung picked it up and used it as a tool for investigating the unconscious to become the widely employed policeman’s “lie detector test,” so Psychological Types was taken up by psychologists with no interest whatsoever in analysis or psychotherapy and adapted to functions that are far removed from psychoanalytic contexts. However, within the context of psychoanalysis it had, and continues to have, the value of alerting trained analysts to their mental biases and attitudes and therefore of bringing greater consciousness to countertransference dynamics. With respect to theorizing, it provides a critical epistemology, a counterbalance to one-sided and psychologically naive thinking or feeling.
     One more (and final) point about Jung’s contributions to psychoanalysis. From his first meeting with Freud in 1907, Jung recognized and spoke openly of the transference as a key feature of psychoanalysis, its theory and practice: “The main problem of medical psychotherapy is the transference. In this matter Freud and I were in complete agreement,” Jung writes in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (p. 212).  In 1935, Jung was invited by the Institute of Medical Psychology (Tavistock Clinic) in London to give an account of his contributions to psychoanalysis. The Chairman for the lectures was a personal friend, the highly regarded British psychiatrist and founder of the Tavistock Clinic, H. Crichton-Miller. The audience included such future luminaries at Wilfred Bion and Samuel Beckett and mostly consisted of medical people with a psychoanalytic (i.e., Freudian) inclination. Jung spoke freely from a few notes. In the first lectures, he presented various aspects of his psychological theory and his understanding of dreams and their symbols. The questions from the audience focused more and more on the issue of transference, until by the end of the fourth of the five scheduled lectures Jung decided spontaneously to change his program and take up the subject of transference instead of finishing his exposition on dream interpretation. His audience was pleased. In the fifth lecture, and working from a few notes on the back of an envelop, he laid out his understanding of the dynamics and meaning of transference and countertransference as they are generated in and out of analysis. It was a completely unrehearsed and spontaneous performance. I consider it a tour de force, a statement that shows profound understanding of the phenomena and that merits careful study and consideration. Ten years later, he published his major work on the subject, “The Psychology of the Transference,” in which he emphasizes the mutuality of the analytic relationship. Transference is based on “mutual unconsciousness and contamination” (CW, par. 345) as he said in the fifth Tavistock lecture, and in this extended essay he develops that notion to a much greater extent. 
     What then do his views contribute to the psychoanalytic understanding of transference? In the Tavistock Lectures, Jung draws a sharp distinction between the personal and the impersonal levels of the contents projected. The members of the audience were familiar with the personal level as “repetitions of former personal experience” with “the whole series of people that the patient has experienced – the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers in schools, the uncles, the cousins, the brothers, and the father” (Ibid., par. 359). It is what Freud discovered and taught them. It was the impersonal, or archetypal, level that was news to them, as well as the instructions Jung offered for how to manage this level when it appears in the analytic setting. When the analysis of the personal transference has come to an end and all possibilities for consciousness there have been exhausted, and the transference still holds on and in fact shows even greater power and magnitude, “it is on account of the projection of impersonal contents”(ibid.). Such archetypal figures as savior, sorcerer, devil, witch and so on make up the content of these impersonal transferences. Jung’s advice for how to deal with these is to make a clear distinction between the person’s actual reality and these images of the collective unconscious. They cannot be assimilated, and they cannot be eliminated. They need a suitable container, an individual shape and form, a kind of personal religious icon that lies outside the ego but that the ego can relate to: “…they have to take on form, they have to live their characteristic life, otherwise the individual is severed from the basic function of the psyche, and then he is neurotic, he is disorientated and in conflict with himself. But if he is able to objectify the impersonal images and relate to them, he is in touch with that vital psychological function which from the dawn of consciousness has been take care of by religion” (ibid., par. 378). 
     It should be underscored that Jung is in no way promoting or advocating archetypal transference in his remarks. In fact, he says to one patient, “Thank heaven you have no transference. A transference is an illness. It is abnormal to have a transference. Normal people never have transferences” (CW par. 350). What is he speaking of in the Tavistock lecture is how to handle transference when it is in fact archetypal and not personal, and this is by no means the routine case. In such cases, however, the transference leads directly into a religious attitude toward the impersonal contents of the psyche. It is a kind of religious initiation, like baptism (see pars. 361-365). It contains symbols of lasting value for the individual. Essential is that the person does not identify with these symbols or try to assimilate them to the ego.
     It is precisely the impersonal level of transference that Jung sets out to investigate in his major work on the subject, “The Psychology of the Transference.” This work represents an investigation of an archetypal mythologem, the coniunctio, which Jung places at the heart of “the ‘classical’ form of transference and its phenomenology” (CW 16, p. 164). This type of transference, in which at an impersonal level the two psyches involved in the analytic process become merged and create a new being (a “third”), rests on what “doctors of the Romantic Age… defined as ‘rapport,’” Jung observes in passing (ibid., par. 366). Another term for this is empathy, which Jung uses in an earlier text, Psychological Types: “As a rule, the projection transfers unconscious contents into the object, for which reason empathy is also termed ‘transference’ (Freud) in analytical psychology” (CW 6, par. 486). It is to this aspect of the transference, in which contents pass from one person’s unconscious into the other and vice versa, and where the coniunctio takes place, that Jung speaks in this essay. This is a process that takes place in a sphere of mutual unconsciousness, and it is therefore different from Kohut’s formulation of empathy as vicarious introspection, or “the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person” (Kohut, 1984, p. 82, quoted by Cambray, p. 3) or Buber’s similar “I-Thou” relationship which depends on imagining the reality of the other. To describe it, Jung resorted to alchemical metaphors of conjunction as expressed in the Rosarium philosophorum.
     In a recent paper, Joseph Cambray has discussed this same issue in the light of recent neuroscientific discoveries about what is now being called “resonance.” He writes: “Cognitive neuroscientists have measured the transmission of basic emotions such as anger, sadness, disgust, or joy as occurring within milliseconds, often without conscious awareness, though frequently with alternations in mood.  Humans tend to spontaneously mimic and synchronize with the emotional behavior of others, especially those with whom they have some intimacy, often without consciously registering the phenomena” (”Crossroads on the Way to Wisdom: Empathy and the Analytic Field” p. 3).  When resonance gets set up in the analytic context, both analyst and analysand become affected (or, infected) by the intersubjective field that comes into being between them, and it is this dynamic that Jung sees as responsible for transformation in and through analysis: “Between doctor and patient, therefore there are imponderable factors which bring about a mutual transformation. In the process, the stronger and more stable personality will decide the final issue… the doctor is as much ‘in the analysis’ as the patient” (CW, 16, pars. 164-6). In Jung’s view, undertaking analysis is as much a challenge for the analyst as it is for the analysand. Both are subjected to the impersonal forces of the collective unconscious that this most personal and intimate, and yet also impersonal and archetypal, relationship is potentially capable of unleashing. For both it is an opportunity to individuate.
     To conclude, I will briefly summarize what I see to be Jung’s major contributions to psychoanalysis. They are: the fundamental recognition of the reality of the psyche, which is fluid, dynamic, and emergent, and whose basic drive is a teleological one aimed at self realization (individuation); a method of interpretation that preserves the symbolic nature of the psyche and does not reduce it to biological, sociological, or psychogenetic origins (a hermeneutical contribution); recognition of the importance of culture and history in the formation and psychological development of the individual (personal and cultural complexes); a self-critical psychology in the awareness of the psychological types (an epistemological contribution); an approach to analysis that takes into account both personal and impersonal factors in the mutual transference relationship and the intersubjective field. There is much more one could say, of course, but space is limited. These are, in my view, some of Jung’s more important contributions to the broad field of psychoanalysis, which is today a broad umbrella term covering many different perspectives, emphases, and theoretical nuances.

_{“As evidence that you… underestimate my work by a very wide margin, I would cite your remark that ‘without intending it, I have solved the riddle of all mysticism, showing it to be based on the symbolic utilization of complexes that have outlived their function.’ My dear Professor, forgive me again, but this sentence shows me that you deprive yourself of the possibility of understanding my work by your underestimation of it. You speak of this insight as though it were some kind of pinnacle, whereas actually it is at the very bottom of the mountain. This insight has been self-evident to us for years. Again, please excuse my frankness. It is only occasionally that I am afflicted with the purely human desire to be understood intellectually and not be measured by the yeardstick of neurosis.” (Freud-Jung Letters, pp. 525-6)}