Carl Jung: The results obtained by this method can be interpreted in several ways
C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950
To Smith Ely Jelliffe
Dear Dr. Jelliffe, 26 February 1936
The reports of my seminars are mere protocols which are exclusively destined for members of the said seminars.
They wouldn’t be fit for scientific use.
I don’t think that my volume Wirklichkeit der Seele has any interest for you because it is merely psychological and has nothing to do with your medical point of view.
I’m quite willing to answer your questions. I owe a great deal of mental stimulation and of knowledge to Janet, whose lectures I followed in 1902 in Paris.
I also got a great deal from his books. I certainly owe a very important psychological point of view to his psychology.
I never denied the fact that my psychiatry comes from Bleuler’s clinic.
I was there already in 1900.
The concept of the “Geftihlsbetonter Komplex” as it is used in the association test is really my own invention, if one doesn’t insist that the word “complex” has been used in many other ways before my time.
But I’m not aware that it has been used in the particular way I have been using it.
When you study Kraepelin’ s experimental work about associations (Aschaffenburg, etc.) you don’t find any systematic consideration of this fact, nor in the experiments of Wundt’s school.
I quite agree with you that normality is a most relative conception.
Yet it is an idea which you can’t do without in practical life.
It is quite certain that from century to century or even from month to month our point of view changes, yet there is always a stock of
human beings or of facts which represents the average functioning, and which is called “normal.”
If this conception didn’t exist, we couldn’t speak of something abnormal, by which term we express the fact that certain functions or events are not conforming to the average course of events.
It is quite true that the reason why I couldn’t continue to collaborate with Freud was that everything in his psychology was reductive,
personal, and envisaged from the angle of repression.
A thing which seemed to me particularly impossible was Freud’s handling of dreams, which looks to me like a distortion of facts.
The immediate reason for my dissension was that Freud in a publication identified the method with his theory, a fact that seemed
inadmissible to me, because I am convinced that one can apply a scientific method without believing in a certain theory.
The results obtained by this method can be interpreted in several ways.
Adler for instance interprets neurosis in a very different way, and the same Freud’s pupil Silberer has quite clearly shown, independently of myself, that one can interpret in what he called an anagogic way.
I think a psychologist has to consider these different possibilities and it is my sincerest conviction that it is much too early for
psychology to restrict itself to a one-sided reductive point of view.
If you carefully study Freud’s paper Die Zukunft einer Illusion you see what the results are.
Freudian psychology reaches into a field that simply cannot be reduced to Freudian premises, if one studies the actual facts without bias.
Yours truly,
C. G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 210-211
