She was, so to speak, my test case, for which reason I remembered her with special gratitude and affection. Since I knew from experience that she would immediately relapse if I withdrew my support, I prolonged the relationship over the years and in the end found myself morally obliged, as it were, to devote a large measure of friendship to her.
—Jung, letter to Freud, 4 June 1909
AT THE BURGHÖLZLI in early 1904, the resident expert on hysteria was not Jung but Riklin. It was Riklin who undertook to examine the responses of a group of hysterics on the association experiment, and it was Riklin who had first interested himself in the new methods of alleviating hysterical symptoms. As early as the end of 1901, Riklin had attempted to replicate the findings of Breuer and Freud by applying their “cathartic method”—the ab reaction of trauma under light hypnosis—to a Burghölzli patient named “Lina H.”
“Lina H.” suffered profound nausea and recurrent vomiting, and no physical basis for these symptoms could be found. Riklin interviewed her under light hypnosis and over the course of six sessions discovered multiple sexual traumas dating from her adolescence, including a rape by her uncle and an even earlier rape, at age twelve, by her alcoholic father. At first, the findings in this case seemed to augur well for the etiological significance of juvenile sexual traumas, but Riklin noted that the abreaction of those scenes did not lead to a cessation of the symptoms. Pursuing the investigation further, he then discovered that “Lina H.” was secretly masturbating at night. During the masturbation she would visualize her father as he had been the night he assaulted her. The next day she would be overcome with remorse and disgust at herself, and it was these emotions that caused her symptoms. Riklin’s conclusion was thoroughly prescient: fantasies, not trauma, lay in back of it all. But though this finding was essentially in place by 1902, Riklin had thus far declined to publish it.
It was already plain to the doctors of the Burghölzli that Freud was on to something important in the explication of basic psychological processes, even if he had overstated his case with regard to the etiology of hysteria. Then, early in 1904, Löwenfeld’s book came out containing not only Freud’s second thoughts about the etiological significance of trauma but also the updated description of his treatment method. Its appearance gave Bleuler, in his review in the Munich Medical Weekly, occasion for this positive comment:
Freud, in his studies on hysteria and on dreams, has shown us part of a new world, though by no means all of it. Our consciousness sees in its theater only the puppets; in the Freudian world, many of the strings that move the figures have been revealed.
For the sake of keeping the chronology clear, it is important to keep in mind these comments by Bleuler. As we shall see, they were to have important consequences in the faraway cities of Vienna and Berlin. The story of the institutionalization of psychoanalysis pivots on the Löwenfeld volume, and Bleuler’s review, in more than one respect.
THE DESCRIPTION of psychoanalysis in Löwenfeld’s book was the most extensive description yet to appear. It was seriously overdue. And it was incomplete. Here we come to an oddity that, though it was widely commented on at the time, has almost entirely escaped scholarly notice since. One of the great curiosities of Freud’s work during the period 1896–1904, noted by Löwenfeld and others, was that while he repeatedly based his claims on his new method of “psychoanalysis,” he was forever begging off a detailed discussion of what exactly that method entailed. To be sure, there was no question but that Freud believed that an inquiry into the patient’s history was needed, and that once the original trauma was discovered, and abreacted, a cessation of symptoms would ensue. Likewise it was clear that he readily broadened the inquiry to take stock of dreams, slips of the tongue, and chance ideas should these arise. But beyond that, Freud’s procedure was obscure, at least in terms of its technical aspects.
In Studies on Hysteria, written with Breuer, the principal method of investigation had been questioning the patient closely about the history of a given symptom under hypnosis. But Freud had also described an alternative, the “pressure technique.” Instead of using hypnosis, he would press his hand on the recumbent patient’s forehead and then, upon releasing the pressure, inquire closely about the first thought or image which next came into the patient’s mind, all this in the context of an ongoing inquiry into the history and point of origin of a symptom. Allegedly, the next thought or image that occurred was invariably of great significance in understanding the psychological structure of the case. But, as should be immediately clear upon reflection, the memory or image that occurred to the patient was not ordinarily self-explanatory. How and where this piece fit into the puzzle of a complicated neurosis was a matter of interpretation. Freud demonstrated that his was a formidable interpretive machinery, and that he had many ways of considering a piece of data in relation to the symptom picture. He also had a good ear for when he was being misled. But the reliance on his interpretive skill, ultimately his deft handling of the “resistance,” finally left the usefulness of the pressure technique hanging.
In 1896, in “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence,” Freud referred back to the Studies while coining a new term for his method: “There … some information is to be found about the laborious but completely reliable method of psycho-analysis used by me in making those investigations—investigations which also constitute a therapeutic procedure.” And to the charge that he might be implanting the idea of pre-pubertal sexual trauma in his patients, Freud had this to say: “[W]e may ask that no one should form too certain judgements in this obscure field until he has made use of the only method which can throw light on it—of psycho-analysis for the purpose of making conscious what has so far been unconscious.” But neither here nor in a companion piece published the same year, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” did he describe his method further—it could not even be discerned whether he still used pressure—beyond insisting that it entailed the recovery of the original trauma underlying the symptoms. In effect, Freud was claiming that his procedure was uniquely effective, but was relying on his findings to carry the point.
The evasiveness continued. In works such as “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetting,” “Screen Memories,” and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud presented detailed reconstructions of the chains of associations underlying various symptomatic acts, while making it clear that his interpretive devices were derived from a therapeutic method he was otherwise employing with nervous patients. But that method had yet to be published. The lack was made official in The Interpretation of Dreams:
If a pathological idea … can be traced back to the elements in the patient’s mental life from which it originated, it simultaneously crumbles away and the patient is freed from it. Considering the impotence of our other therapeutic efforts and the puzzling nature of these disorders, I felt tempted to follow the path marked out by Breuer, in spite of every difficulty, till a complete explanation was reached. I shall have on another occasion to report at length upon the form taken by this procedure and the results of my labours.
In this context, it is unsurprising that Löwenfeld, an expert hypnotherapist who kept consistently up-to-date on all the latest developments in his field, finally petitioned Freud for a description of the therapeutic method. “Freud’s Psycho-Analytic Procedure” in Löwenfeld’s volume went far in terms of the mechanics involved: the patient lay on a couch, the analyst did not touch the patient or do anything else that would suggest a hypnotic induction, the patient was instructed not to suppress chance ideas, etc. But, writing in the third person, Freud insisted that there was yet a great deal more to know specifically with regard to the rules of interpretation:
The details of this technique of interpretation or translation have not yet been published by Freud. According to indications he has given, they comprise a number of rules, reached empirically, of how the unconscious material may be reconstructed from the associations, directions on how to know what it means when the patient’s ideas cease to flow, and experiences of the most important typical resistances that arise in the course of such treatments.
Here we have to pause to take stock of what was going on. Unless he was simply being disingenuous, Freud evidently believed that his procedure, including interpretive rules, could be systematized. But most of his recent publications had been based on self-observation, known to constitute methodologically shaky ground, and even in the face of criticism on just that point, Freud had thus far refrained from publishing a comprehensive, objective account of his method, though he continued to insist he had one.
Instead, Freud had reported any number of occasions where eliciting trains of associations had indeed seemed to clarify the unconscious motivations underlying various psychic phenomena, including nervous symptoms, dream images, and slips of the tongue. He had also argued, most prominently in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, that it was a simple logical necessity that the unconscious motives behind these psychic phenomena would betray themselves in the associations called forth by the examiner’s inquiry. In fact, Freud’s self-assurance on this last point was misplaced. Associations are determined by the subject’s frame of mind and current interpersonal context; no matter how revealing, they do not necessarily reflect what was operative in his or her mind on any prior occasion. But even if that consideration is set aside, Freud’s reliance on associative chains to extend the realm of the physician’s inquiry plainly required that one be able to identify the associations that were most relevant, also that one be able to translate these back into the language of motivation. What was called for, in other words, was a manual of interpretation. In the absence of such a manual, anyone seeking to utilize Freud’s technique would be forced to rely purely on empathy and clinical intuition.
Beyond this, we also have to note another aspect of Freud’s reticence. For reasons that simply cannot be fathomed, Freud had also failed to report that in one very important respect his method had undergone a significant change some years previously. In every publication to date, the Löwenfeld article included, Freud had consistently described the elicitation of the chance idea or “free” association (Einfall in German), in the context of an ongoing inquiry directed by the physician into the meaning of a specific symptom, slip of the tongue, dream symbol, or chance memory, all of it controlled and directed by the physician. That is to say, Freud had not yet reported the method, which he had been using for at least four years, where the patient, and not the doctor, sets the day’s agenda.
THE YEAR 1904 was a watershed for the new treatment method. In America, the Harvard neurologist James Jackson Putnam was trying his hand at psychoanalysis on the new ward for nervous patients at Massachusetts General Hospital. But Jackson’s efforts were relatively primitive. Regarding technique, he seems to have thought the point of inquiring after associations was to distract the patient from the symptom (this sort of “side-tracking” was one of Dubois’s techniques). Putnam’s sense of psychology can best be summarized by the single notation he inserted into one of his patient’s charts: “All nervous symptoms began 7 years ago after an affaire de coeur.” At the Burghölzli, by contrast, a sophisticated approach was adopted at the outset. Jung and Riklin were fast becoming masters of the association experiment. Riklin had begun examining a sample of hysterics with the new method while Jung had started collecting the spontaneous associations of a dementia praecox patient to see what complexes they revealed. And Bleuler was composing an important volume, Affectivity, Suggestibility, and Paranoia, whose argument would depend in important parts on Freudian theories of symptom formation.
Spielrein was admitted in late August. Even assuming that her delirium cleared rapidly, this was the time of year when the hospital staff was regularly decimated as its physicians took turns satisfying their yearly military obligation. Not until mid-October would there have been sufficient staff coverage to allow Jung the luxury of offering this one patient one- to two-hour interviews every other day. Karl Abraham arrived at the Burghölzli to take up a post as an assistant in December of 1904. His subsequent account had it that Jung’s analysis of Spielrein was definitely complete by the time of his arrival. Spielrein’s analysis, then, took at most two months and may well have been considerably shorter.
The shortness of the analysis was consistent with its use as an investigatory technique, i.e., as something rather akin to an unstructured association experiment. The Breuer-Freud therapeutic strategy of abreacting the trauma, meanwhile, was thought suspect. In June 1905, Jung would again psychoanalyze a patient—his first known case after Spielrein—and when he subsequently wrote up his results, he deliberately soft-pedaled the idea of abreaction:
The confession of her sinful thoughts may have given considerable relief to the patient. But it seems unlikely that the cure can be ascribed to their verbal expression or to the “abreaction.” Pathological ideas can be definitely submerged only by a strong effort. People with obsessions and compulsions are weak; they are unable to keep their ideas in check. Treatment to increase their energy is therefore best for them. The best energy-cure, however, is to force the patients, with a certain ruthlessness, to unearth and expose to the light the images that consciousness finds intolerable. Not only is this a severe challenge for the patient’s energy but also his consciousness begins to accept the existence of ideas hitherto repressed.
Raising the patient’s energy level was Janet’s rationale, confrontation with reality was Bleuler’s, and combining the two of them to justify the Viennese procedure was, when Jung published it in 1906, a nice piece of diplomacy.
Jung’s technique differed in another respect; he did not use a couch. Rather, he had Spielrein sit in a chair while he sat behind her. Or, at least, that is the method he reported for his second known psychoanalytic patient, the one seen in June of 1905. The variation seems never to have bothered Jung much. Freud had a couch handy for the simple reason that it was a standard piece of equipment for an outpatient neurologist, necessary for the administration of certain routine procedures such as electro-galvanic massage. But Jung was not a neurologist and he did not have experience dealing with reclining patients. As for the seating arrangement Jung chose, Janet had reported sitting out of sight of a celebrated patient, “Achilles,” who was possessed by a devil, so as not to interrupt the man’s dissociated state. Janet’s example would have surely struck Jung owing to its resemblance to his mother’s having to sit behind her father—to keep the devil out—while he composed his sermons. But perhaps Spielrein had something to do with it as well; she considered herself unattractive, disliked being looked at, and may have been more cooperative once her psychoanalyst agreed to sit out of sight.
At some point, then, in late October or early November 1904, Sabina Spielrein was sufficiently composed to volunteer for an experimental procedure designed to elucidate the pathological antecedents of her hysterical delirium. She sat in a chair; Jung sat behind her. He asked her to tell him the history of her nervous troubles, being careful to include any stray thoughts that came into her mind. At certain points, such as when an image appeared in the train of associations, Jung asked her to associate to that image with the next thought that came to her. He also would have been on the lookout for certain telltale “complex indicators.” Should she hesitate, forget her train of thought, interject a literary quotation, gesture, or become symptomatic, he would have pressed her for the thought that had provoked the change. A given interview would have taken from one to two hours, and interviews would have been held as often as every other day. The entire procedure, as already noted, took no more than two months and quite possibly less.
What did Jung find? It is easier to say what he did not find—a sexual assault in childhood. Had such a thing turned up in Spielrein’s responses, Jung would certainly have reported it, since the issue was very much up for discussion at this time. There is, however, no evidence for such a thing in any document we possess concerning Spielrein, nor is there any mention of such a finding in any of the descriptions of her case penned by Jung. But if not an assault, then what?
The mystery deepens when we consider that Jung utterly missed something of importance in the case—the fact that Spielrein’s mother had kept her completely ignorant of the sexual facts of life. Spielrein’s own later account is quite explicit on this point: she confronted this lacuna in her conscious awareness only after she enrolled at the university. Spielrein’s account has it that as a child she had been tortured by thoughts of the Plague, which she personified as a tall, dark figure that would take her away with him. According to her own later analysis, behind this fantasy lay a fear, and knowledge, of sexual processes. By the time she entered the Burghölzli, Spielrein had long since forgotten this fantasy, but when she enrolled at the university nine months later, and began studying diseases in earnest, she had a foreboding sense that the subject matter was somehow familiar to her. It was then and only then that her deeply repressed knowledge of the sexual facts of life returned to her. It is important to be clear about the chronology here: Spielrein did not enroll at the university until April of 1905 and was not allowed to start attending classes until after her discharge in June. But Jung’s “analysis” had already been completed the previous December.
That is more than a little surprising. Jung was an extremely sensitive clinician and a very tough interviewer. Further, the endless word association protocols should have sharpened his ear to the point where he would have been a natural at the new method. And yet he had missed an important fact about Spielrein’s state of mind—she was consciously ignorant of what the procreative act was all about.
The answer to the riddle of Jung’s oversight may be simpler than we imagine. Quite conceivably, Jung never got much further than analyzing the immediate content of Spielrein’s delirium—her father’s chastising hand. In the literature on sexual deviancy of the day, it was a commonplace observation that some men derived sexual pleasure from delivering blows to the “nates” and furthermore that some men—also some women—derived pleasure from receiving them. Once the aspect of sexual excitement was established, the rest of the case—displays of disgust coupled with “ill-concealed masturbation”—fell readily into line with Riklin’s “Lina H.” All that was truly different here was the (assumedly) inborn masochistic tendency—Freud was lately stressing constitutional factors, too—which mediated between the precipitating event and the sexual reverie. Indeed, it is likely that Jung elected to make Spielrein his test case precisely because her dynamics so closely resembled those of Riklin’s earlier case. Once one grasped the masochistic element, Spielrein’s delirium was almost self-explanatory: she was fantasizing being beaten by her father and feeling both sexual pleasure and a concomitant sense of disgust with herself as a result. The business of the psychoanalysis, in this context, was to determine what events in Spielrein’s day-to-day existence served to trigger the delirium. Or to put it in terms derived from the word association experiment, the job at hand was to determine which stimuli provoked the erotic complex, such as it was. In terms of her history, similarly, one would want to know which scenes, perhaps redolent with other meanings, had precipitated worsenings of her hysteria.
Such a scenario (and the brevity of the treatment) might account for Jung’s extraordinary oversight in the case. Conceivably, it might have been possible to uncover any number of instructive scenes, instances where masochistic fantasies were provoked, without its ever occurring to the doctor that the girl did not know how she was supposed to express her sexual feelings. Then, too, Jung may have been betrayed by his method as well. So long as it fell to him to set the agenda for each session, and direct the inquiry, Spielrein was free to remain happily silent on the matter of sexual knowledge on the basis that her doctor evidently felt it was not worth going into. And by her own subsequent account, Spielrein rather “liked” herself “in my innocence.”
BEYOND THE “energy-cure” of a brief psychoanalysis, Jung’s therapeutic efforts with Spielrein seem to have been chiefly didactic. That is to say, he attempted to educate her about the mechanisms of dissociation by way of encouraging her to build up her level of concentration and self-control. Since his dissertation contained an excellent summary of the issues, he assigned it to her for her edification. She, in turn, grasped a parallel between herself and Helene Preiswerk:
The girl was deeply rooted in him, and she was my prototype. It is also significant that right from the beginning of my therapy Dr. Jung let me read his dissertation, in which he described this S.W. Later on he would sometimes turn reflective when I said something to him: such and such a woman had spoken just this way. And it was always this girl.
Jung also appears to have assigned Spielrein another book out of his library, Joseph Grasset’s 1902 volume, Le Spiritisme devant la Science. Grasset was a popularizer of the findings of French psychopathology with his own terminology. His “polygonal” psychology was constructed with “the personal, conscious, free and responsible ego” at its apex. Either at Jung’s behest or by her own invention, Spielrein regularly went to bed imagining the image of a polygon while thinking of the various things she had to do the next day.
Beyond reeducation, Spielrein was also expected to participate in some form of work therapy, and, as she planned to enter medical school, she was assigned to help Jung and Riklin in the psychological laboratory. At this time, Jung was preparing a new contribution, “The Reaction-Time Ratio in the Association Experiment,” which was to be a rigorous demonstration of his contention that increased reaction times were regularly associated with feeling-toned complexes. This paper was also to be Jung’s Habilitationsschrift, the publication entitling him to teach at the university. Seeking subjects, Jung seems to have turned first of all to his wife. She is almost certainly “Subject No. 1” of the paper, described as “a married woman who placed herself at my disposal in a most co-operative manner and gave me all the information I could possibly need.” According to Jung’s analysis, the central complex for this subject involved her pregnancy and her fear that her husband might be losing interest in her. In any case, Spielrein also assisted:
He gave me some work to do on his … paper, “The Reaction-Time Ratio in the Association Experiment.” We had numerous discussions about it, and he said, “Minds such as yours help advance science. You must become a psychiatrist.” I stress these things again and again so that you may see it was not just the usual doctor-patient relationship that brought us so close together. He was writing that paper while I was still in the mental hospital. At that period I told him once I had dreamed about his wife, who complained to me about him, saying he was so terribly dictatorial and that life with him was difficult. Even then he did not respond to this like a doctor, but sighed and said he had realized that living together was difficult, etc. I spoke of the equality or intellectual independence of women, whereupon he replied that I was an exception, but his wife was an ordinary woman and accordingly only interested in what interested her husband.
Jung and Spielrein became friends. He showed her various archaeological books he kept in his library, and they occasionally went on walks together. Jung reported on one of these walks in passing in a little paper, “On Cryptomnesia,” published in 1905 in a popular Berlin magazine, The Future. The topic, unconscious plagiarism, had been the subject of a recent article there, and Jung saw a chance to report on his own investigations, not only into “cryptomnesia” but on other topics as well. The anecdote concerning Spielrein came amidst a discussion of hysteria and genius:
Recently I had to treat a hysterical young lady who became ill chiefly because she had been brutally beaten by her father. Once, when we were out for a walk, this lady dropped her coat in the dust. I picked it up, and tried to get the dust off by beating it with my stick. The next moment the lady hurled herself upon me with violent defensive gestures and tore the cloak out of my hands. She said she couldn’t stand the sight, it was quite unendurable to her. I at once guessed the connection and urged her to tell me the motives for her behavior. She was nonplussed, and could only say that it was extremely unpleasant for her to see her cloak cleaned like that.
Incidentally, by this time Jung had reread Freud’s book on dreams and begun interpreting his own dreams. The “Cryptomnesia” paper notes his reaction in passing: “Anyone who has read Freud’s dream analyses or, better still, has done some himself, will know how the unconscious can bedevil the most innocent and decent-minded people with sexual symbols whose lewdness is positively horrifying.”
Whatever else might be said of Jung’s treatment of Spielrein, it quite clearly worked—for both of them. She enrolled at the University of Zurich in April 1905, though she naively listed her address as the Burghölzli, with the result that her papers were deemed incomplete until she obtained a letter from Bleuler saying she was fit. She departed the hospital on 1 June 1905. Jung, meanwhile, was named Oberarzt, i.e., second in command to Bleuler, in April, and in June he became as well the head of a new outpatient department where ambulatory patients, including nervous cases, could be seen. Moreover, Jung also became the head of the psychology laboratory as Riklin left the scene to take over Bleuler’s old post as Direktor of the Rheinau asylum. Riklin’s new post constituted an important promotion, but in terms of career paths, he had made a mistake by removing himself from the psychology laboratory. Henceforth, Jung would have a clear field to direct the research as he pleased—and to put only his name on it. Thus it happened that Riklin’s role in the pioneering experiments eventually came to be all but forgotten.
By mid-1905, Jung had got over the temptation to present his theory of complexes as entirely original, and his publications now began to make increasingly clear, and positive, comments about Freud’s pioneering work in the area of repression and other topics. To be sure, Freud had recently published a paper (to be examined more closely in the next chapter), in which he had made Jung the veiled target of some surprising criticism. Specifically, Freud doubted that a “young” assistant at a hospital (in German, a “jung” assistant) could conceivably do a creditable job at analysis on the basis of what had so far been published about it. Jung undoubtedly knew about Freud’s statement, but he responded only by taking another patient into analysis in June of 1905. It is important to make the preceding point explicit: Not only did Freud and Jung first become aware of each other through their publications, but by virtue of that fact these publications also became their initial mode of communication. What they were signaling to each other was that each man had a lively sense of his own property rights when it came to matters of theory and practice.
It is in this context that we should also take notice of a curious document that Spielrein later claimed to have in her possession: a letter, dated 25 September 1905, written by Jung describing her to Freud. Spielrein describes the letter as one
… in which Dr. Jung describes me as a “highly intelligent and gifted person of greatest sensitivity.” I was still a baby of 19 then, and ran around in very simple dresses and with a long, dangling braid, since I wanted to elevate my soul above my body. That explains why Jung went on, “Her character has a decidedly relentless and unreasonable aspect, and she lacks any sense of appropriateness and external manners, most of which must, of course, be attributed to Russian peculiarities.”
What makes this letter remarkable is the date Spielrein gives: 25 September 1905. This would mean that it was written some nine months before Jung’s and Freud’s correspondence ultimately began—written, but apparently never sent. Perhaps Jung had set about writing to Freud about Spielrein’s case, and then changed his mind. But this leaves obscure why Spielrein herself should have ended up in possession of the letter. A more likely scenario is that Spielrein was to have a consultation with Freud just before the fall semester got under way and Jung gave her the letter as an introduction. This was another indirect way for the two men to communicate, by referring patients. In effect, Jung’s intention was to show off his handiwork, and, no doubt, he hoped to learn something as well. As Spielrein was now his friend as well as his former patient, he could expect to hear from her in detail what Freud had been like. Then, for reasons that can only be guessed at, the plan fell through. In any event, the letter places Spielrein, in her dual capacity as former patient and as fledgling medical student, at the center of the relationship between Jung and Freud—even before it had properly begun.
ONE OF THE more interesting cases seen in the Burghölzli in the second half of 1905 involved a second Russian student, also hysterical, who was examined by Riklin with the word-association experiment. According to Riklin’s account, this twenty-year-old woman was like Spielrein in yet another way, for she was
… able so to repress all sexual experiences, and that knowledge which everyone necessarily acquires in the course of growth, that she was over twenty without having any correct ideas on the subject, although she was a student. She even took part in a discussion on prostitution without really knowing what prostitution was.
“Catterina H.” first developed hysterical symptoms when a boyfriend (“R.”) killed himself after she had spurned his advances. To that trauma was soon added a second:
Her condition was worsened by another circumstance. The patient was informed by a woman acquaintance, a midwifery student, about male sexuality and the sexual act, upon which the knowledge of the subject, hitherto repressed, entered completely into consciousness. She felt herself unhappy; mankind, hitherto idealized, became a beast; the idea that R. loved her sensually … troubled her terribly) … In slight twilight states she would often say, “I must go to his grave and ask him if he knew it.” She hated mankind on account of its sexual function, hated also her doctor, who she imagined was also like the rest; she could only esteem him when she saw him in attendance upon his patients and was then able to exclude the sexual image.
By contrast, we have no document describing what Spielrein did when she de-repressed her knowledge of sexuality. It may be guessed that, like “Catterina H.,” she had a considerable reaction, and that it was the basis for Jung’s later statement that she was prone to relapse if he withdrew his support. In any event, at some point in the year following her discharge and her matriculation at the Zurich medical school, Spielrein resumed seeing Jung on a regular basis—with scheduled appointments—rather more as an outpatient than as a friend and fledgling colleague, but with aspects of both.
Spielrein’s heretofore sterling status as Jung’s “test case” would have been at least slightly tarnished—for both of them—once they grasped what they had missed. That, I suspect, is what lies behind the following comments, which Spielrein appended to her later description of the unsent letter to Freud mentioning her “Russian peculiarities”:
How else should the good man have spoken, when I wanted to see him poor rather than rich, since wealth destroys the soul; when I wanted to view everyone as a fine person and of course soon had to recognize that “it’s all a swindle, all a comedy, people are all stupid and false,” etc. Ability to view the world as an artist [does] would come only with age, with the awakening of the sexual component. Then unreasonableness makes way for “maidenliness.” But at that time [September of 1905] Dr. Jung also failed to understand a number of things; before my very eyes he has undergone such great intellectual growth. I was in a position to follow his intellectual development step by step, and I learned a great deal not only from him but also from observing him.