The case I told you about-evil eye, paranoiac

The case I told you about-evil eye, paranoiac

 

C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950

To Sigmund Freud

Dear Professor Freud, Burgholzli-Zurich, 2April1909

Worry and patients and all the other chores of daily life have beset me again and quite got me down for the first 2 days.

Now I am slowly coming to the surface and beginning to bask in the memories of days in Vienna.

12.IV

After a ten day interruption I my letter.

From this interlude it appears that the above complaint was premature because as usual worse was to follow.

Today I have put the last bad day behind me.

All during the Easter holidays, when other people were walking, I was able to snatch only one day’s breath of air.

On 15, IV I shall wrench myself free without fail and start my bicycle tour.

Since Vienna all scientific work has been out of the question.

But in my practice I have accomplished much.

At the moment a madly interesting case is stretching me on the rack.

Some of the symptoms come suspiciously close to the organic borderline (brain, tumour?) yet they all hover over a dimly divined psychogenic depth, so that in analysing them all one’s misgivings are forgotten.

First-rate spiritualistic phenomena occur in this case, though so far only once in my presence.

Altogether it makes a very peculiar impression.

The patient is a man-slaying Sara, Raguel’s daughter.
.
The case I told you about-evil eye, paranoiac impression-was cleared up as follows.

She was abandoned by her last lover, who is altogether- pathological (Dem. praec.?); abandoned also by an earlier lover-this one even
spent a year in an asylum.

Now the infantile pattern: hardly knew her father and mother, loving instead her brother, 8 years older than she and at 22 a catatonic.

Thus the psychological stereotype holds good.

You said the patient was merely imitating Dem. praec.; now the model has been found.

When l left Vienna I was afflicted with some sentiments d’incompletude on account of the last evening I spent with you.

It seemed to me that my spookerys struck you as altogether too stupid and perhaps unpleasant because of the Fliess analogy.(Insanity!)

Just recently, however, tl1e impression I had of the last-named patient smote me with renewed force.

\¥hat I told my wife .about it made the deepest impression on her too.

I had the feeling that under it all there must be some quite special complex, a universal one having to do with the prospective tendencies in man.

If there is a “psych-analysis” there must also be a “psychosynthesis” which creates future events according to the same laws.

(I see I am writing rather as if I had a flight of ideas.)

The leap towards psychosynthesis proceeds via the person of my patient, whose unconscious is right now preparing, apparently with nothing to stop it, a new stereotype into which everything from outside, as it were, fits in conformity with the complex.

(Hence the idea of the objective effect of the prospective tendency! )

That last evening with you has, most happily, freed me inwardly from the oppressive sense of your paternal authority.

My unconscious celebrated this impression with a great dream which preoccupied me for some days and which I have just finished analyzing.

I hope I am now rid of all unnecessary encumbrances.

Your cause must and will prosper, so my pregnancy fantasies tell me, which luckily you caught in the end.

As soon as I get back from Italy I shall begin some positive work, first of all for the Jahrbuch.

I hope you had a good Easter holiday and feel the better for it.

Ossipow head physician of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Moscow, has published a fine report on our affairs.

They seem to be working along our lines.

I have heard that Abraham with others have issued a psychological questionnaire

Let s hope it is a canard!

Cordial greetings,

Gratefully, Jung ~Carl Jung to Freud, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 9-11.