Sigmund Freud/Oskar Pfister Letters – Quotations
Psychoanalysis and Fiath, the Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister
Sigmund Freud/Oskar Pfister Letters
Your name has often been mentioned to me by our common friend C. G. Jung, and I am glad now to be able to associate a more definite idea with it; and I hope you will not keep your future work from me. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 15
It is certainly not the least of our friend Jung’s services that he has become the source of stimuli such as impelled you to your work. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 17
Jung left yesterday evening, but I obviously had no complaints about you to make to him, because all you have done is what he and I myself have done, that is to say, published material according to the state of your knowledge at the time and modified it later in accordance with the progress of your knowledge. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 22
But for your visit and your influence I should never have managed it; my own father complex, as Jung would call it, that is to say, the need to correct my father, would never have permitted it. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 24
You too must have been impressed by the great news that Jung is coming with me to Worcester.’ It changes my whole feeling about the trip and makes it important. I am very curious to see what will come of it all. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 25
In Jung’s opinion sister complexes play a part in the hostility of his pupil Erismann. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 26-27
The reason I write to you about family matters is that no visitor since Jung has so much impressed the children and done me so much good. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 27
Perhaps contact with Jung and Ferenczi (he too is one of the best) will stimulate something. Fortunately I am no longer so necessary and can gradually shrink into an ornament; perhaps there is a bit of providence in that. I send you my sincere greetings before the journey, and hope during it to hear a great deal about you from Jung. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 29
What I should like would be to win over more such people as yourself, Jung (one must not continue ‘and others of the same sort’), but there are not very many. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 29
I shall not tell you any more about America, as you have heard it all from Jung, or will. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 30
I still have not got over your not coming to Nuremberg. Bleuler is not coming either, and Jung is in America, so that I am trembling about his return. What will happen if my Zurichers desert me? ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 35
1 hope you agree with the Nuremberg decisions and will stand loyally by our Jung. I want him to acquire an authority that will later qualify him for leadership of the whole movement. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 37
You know that Switzerland has turned into Holland for us this year. If I can really get to Switzerland next year, I hope I shall find the split in Zurich healed and Jung the victor over the difficulties that are now being prepared for him. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 40
So you will have to tell Jung that for the first time I am refusing him something. You will have the manuscript back in the next few days. In its present form I think it will be too difficult for the type-setter, there will be a great deal he will not be able to read. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 41
If Jung were at home, I should have to write to him daily. I know where he is from the picture postcards he sends me, but not when he is returning. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 45
In Vienna there has been a small crisis of which I have not yet told Jung. Adler and Stekel have resigned, and next Wednesday I am letting myself be elected president. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 47-48
If Jung were to obtain the professorship without the administrative duties, it would of course be a huge gain for us, but I think that he himself regards it as improbable. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 56
It is a pity that you did not meet or speak to Jung. You could have told him from me that he is at perfect liberty to develop views divergent from mine, and that I ask him to do so without a bad conscience. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 56-57
We have finished with Bergmann.- Jung settled that very well. In January we shall have our journal again in a new guise, and I hope we shall find it satisfactory. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 58
Naturally I am very pleased at your opposition to Jung’s innovations, but do not expect me to write anything against him. My disagreement is too obvious to make any impression. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 58
My congratulations on having finished your book. I hope that in my judgment of it I shall once more see eye to eye with Jung. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 60
I am also of the opinion that the quality of the membership is more important than its quantity, and therefore appeal to you to put a tight rein on your kindliness, which makes you want to unite all conflicting elements; otherwise it will all end up again in a Jungian parody. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 67
I am taking the liberty of making just one short observation about the book I am sending you to-day. It represents an advance, in so far as I have finally overcome a great many confusions to which I had succumbed because of Jung and Adler. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 85
Your complete and ever more manifest defection from Jung and Adler has given me great satisfaction for a long time past. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 88
Jung’s behaviour in the case of our Frau H. was very ambiguous, but on principle I made no detail of the affair a casus belli. He would have spared himself the severe conflict of which you write if only he had not preferred to imagine himself in possession of the secret of curing her cito et jucunde. I am inclined to think that he had never had the opportunity of dealing with a case of such intensity and had no idea of the difficulties involved.
Do not have too much confidence in a lasting personal agreement between me and Jung. He demands too much of me, and I am retreating from my overestimation of him. It will be sufficient if the unity of the association is maintained. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 59
He [Rank] is in the best possible state of defection from Jung, but he obviously read Jung and Jung only before reading me, with the result that he ascribes to him a great deal of which he is as guiltless as he is of spectral analysis, while with a very few exceptions he objects to everything that is really his. Also I should like to eliminate a few personal remarks, such as his comparison of Jung’s style with mine, and Jung’s private statement that he does not reject me, and graciously allows me my place, but merely corrects me and makes me ‘fit for polite society’.
I should like to win over rather than put off the worthy but still obviously very inexperienced Muralt. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 73-74
… As for the anagogics you think you can detect in my other potboiler, I am completely innocent of the charge. What matter to analysis are catagogics. I have completely finished with the Jungian manner. Those high-falutin interpretations which proclaim every kind of muck to be spiritual jam of a high order and try to smuggle a minor Apollo or Christ into every corked-up little mind simply will not do. It is Hegelianism transferred to psychology; everything that is must be reasonable. If only that theory were true! ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 86-87
Permit me to express one surprising thing that struck me in retrospect in regard to the first edition of your Psycho-Analytic Method. This was that you put up so much better resistance to the confusion ofJung than you did to the absurdity of Adler. To you love is the salvation of the world and the core of religion, but nevertheless you hesitated for a time in the face of a theory which denies love and admits no motive but self-assertion. ~Sigmund Freud, Freud/Pfister Letters, Page 107
