Dr. Jung credits Sabina Spielrein – Anthology

Carl Jung, The Red Book, Siegfried and Sabina Spielrein

Dear Doctor [Spielrein],

You are touching on something which belongs to the foundations of our culture.

I find it very understandable that you cannot understand me, in spite of the fact that your dream is coming to your assistance.

I am underlining all the passages in your letter where you are thinking concretely and typically, misunderstanding the symbol.

Do not think that I am spaking against your music.

Perhaps you are more a musician than a doctor.

I don’t want to argue in any way against your becoming a musician.

But that question has nothing to do with the question of symbolism.

Your dream gives you’re the German as a representation of a person who acts in a concrete way and whose attitude is completely fixed on reality.

Your earlier Russian attitude is that of an inactive dreamer.

But with this later attitude a christification has taken place.

Thus you are sandwiched between the German and the Russian attitudes, between the real and the unreal.

This is precisely where the symbolic is found, as a common function of both.

You probably ive the symbol to a large extent without being conscious of it.

For that reason your dreams think of bright spaces and green meadows.

In relation to the world yu have to be real, either a musician, or a doctor, or a wife and mother.

But your task is not completed when you do that.

Those are mere functions.

You have not thereby become yourself.

You are something different from those functions.

You are always trying to drag the Siegfried symbol back into reality.

Whereas in fact it is the bridge to your individual development.

Human beings do not stand in one world only but between two worlds and must distinguish themselves from their functions in both worlds.

This is individuation.

You are rejecting dreams and seeking action.

Then the dreams come and thwart your actions.

The dreams are a world, and the real is a world.

You have to stand between the gods and men.

Do you understand that?

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Jung ~Letter of Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein January 21, 1918, “Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis.”