I also wish there could be a supplementary bibliography
Dear Professor Freud, 14February 1911
First of all I am very glad to hear you are well again.
Couldn’t anyone smell the gas?
From a very discreet source a little of your son’s “complex” story has come to my ears.
Is Martin his mother’s favourite? I am sure you know the rest as well as I do.
I am thinking of having all Adler’s publications reviewed in extensor and discussed in Zurich. Putnam is a real brick.
Even before your letter arrived I had written him that in agreement with you I would advance the date of the Congress so that he might leave Genoa on September 28th.
He will meet you in Zurich at my place; you could then give the seminar instead of me, for Putnam personally, of course.
He will be here for 2-3 weeks, working.
An amazing man, a natural aristocrat.
Yes, I do have some wishes in regard to the third edition of your Interpretation of Dreams: I have criticized Morton Prince’s “Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams” very sharply and in detail, and have also drilled my seminar students in the most rigorous Freudian usage.
Now, I have noticed that my students (and I myself) take exception to the following passages: p. 92 (2nd edn.)
“The dreams of young children … quite uninteresting compared with the dreams of adults.”>
This sentence is objectionable in terms of Freudian dream interpretation; likewise p. 94: “though we think highly of the happiness of childhood.?” etc., objectionable in terms of the Freudian sexual theory.
The ‘children’s dreams on pp. 92 and 93 seem to me insufficiently interpreted; the interpretation uncovers only a superficial layer of the dream, but not the whole, which in both cases is clearly a sexual problem whose instinctual energy alone explains the dynamism of the dreams.
But you may have reasons (didactic?) for not revealing the deeper layer of interpretation, just as in the preceding dreams (your own).
I also miss a specific reference to the fact that the essential (personal) meaning of the dream (e.g., Irma,” uncle,” monograph,” etc.) has not been given.
I insist on my students learning to understand dreams in terms of the dynamics of libido; consequently we sorely miss the personally painful element in your own dreams.
Perhaps this could’ be remedied by your supporting the Irma dream with a typical analysis of a patient’s dream,” where the ultimate real motives are ruthlessly disclosed, so that the reader will realize (right from the start) that the dream does not disintegrate into a series of individual determinants, but is a structure built around a central motif of an exceedingly painful nature.
In my seminars we always concentrate for weeks on “The Interpretation of Dreams”, and I have always found that inadequate interpretation of the main dream-examples leads to misunderstandings and, in general, makes it difficult for the student to follow the argument since he cannot conceive the nature of the conflicts that are the regular sources of dreams.
(For instance, in the monograph dream the crucial topic of the conversation with Dr. Konigstein,” which is absolutely essential if the dream is to be understood properly, is missing.)
Naturally one cannot strip oneself naked, but perhaps a model would serve the purpose.
I also wish there could be a supplementary bibliography” of the literature concerned ‘with your work.
I hope you won’t be angry with me for ‘my bold criticism and wishes.
There’s a tremendous lot of work to do before I can get the Jahrbuch together.
This time I wanted to write something for it myself.
Many kind regards,
Yours sincerely,
JUNG
~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Vol. 1, Pages 391- 394
