Page from Freud's Letter to Jung

Translation

Your allegation that I treat my followers as patients is demonstrably untrue. . . . It is a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel ashamed of his own neurosis. But one [meaning Jung] who while behaving abnormally keeps shouting that he is normal gives ground for the suspicion that he lacks insight into his illness. Accordingly, I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely.

Sigmund Freud, 1913

Curator's Comments

At first Freud saw in Jung a successor who might lead the psychoanalytic movement into the future, but by 1913 relations between the two men had soured. While Freud claims in his letter that it is "demonstrably untrue" that he treats his followers as patients, in the very same letter we find him alluding to Jung's "illness."

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