International Psychoanalysis

14 Comments on “Discovering Wounded Healers in A Dangerous Method by David James Fisher”

1. Doris Friedensohn Says:
   December 1st, 2011 at 7:08 pm

   This is a wonderfully nuanced reading of a film which strives for and achieves a marvelously complex view of an important “moment” in the history of psychoanalysis. As someone interested in these matters from outside the profession, I’m struck by the richness of Fisher’s response to the film-maker’s amazing balancing act: we see the best of Freud and Jung, Spielrein and Gross along with their weaknesses and foibles. We see the power of love, friendship, analytic genius, and intellect. We see the ways these are undercut by competition, lust, and insatiable needs along with dreams of grandeur and domination. We see the role of gender in doctor-patient relations with its classic male-dominant aspects; we see and appreciate the unexpected twists as the female patient becomes healthier (and seemingly wiser) than the male doctors who compete to treat her and win her loyalty to their methods and world view. Most satisfying in reading this review is Fisher’s appreciation of the talents and weaknesses of each of the principle characters as presented by Chronenberg. From that base, he has much to say about tensions that continue to tear at psychoanalysis to this day.

2. nathan szajnberg, MD Says:
   December 2nd, 2011 at 7:54 pm

   A remarkably thoughtful and subtle reading of this film. But more so, Dr Fisher leads us to reflect on the ongoing power of psychoanalysis and the central importance that the analyst protect the analysand, himself or herself (and the profession) — but above all the analysand — from the analyst’s unresolved feelings that could hurt the patient (and the treatment). Fisher reminds us of the importance of the medical dictum: premum non nocere, first do no harm.

   Fisher also shows how the dynamics or politics of a discipline can interfere with the best possible care for the vulnerable patient.

   Al Flarsheim, a colleague of Bettelheim and analysand of Winnicott, said that it was OK for the patient to think of the analyst as god, provided the analyst not believe that. As Freeman Dyson writes in his review of Kahnemann’s new book, Freud dealt with our great passions — both sensual and violent (and their admixture). It is the best method for resolving these, provided the practitioners can reign in their passions and direct our feelings towards compassion (and understanding).

   Bravo to Fisher.

3. Tamar Schwartz Says:
   December 4th, 2011 at 7:52 pm

   Comment from Dr. Robert Rosenston:

   Bravo! It’s a terrific piece of writing and a superbreview / essay, at once broad and nuanced. I assume it is going into some psychoanalytic journal? Too bad, at least from this historian’s perspective. I’d love to see a version of this (some small changes might be necessary) in some history journal which also deals with film, such as Rethinking History. My only criticisms would be the first line, for I think anyone not in your profession might be able to think of things more delightful. But that’s a very small critique, and probably not worth making if this is going to n a
   psych journal. The one other criticism also may stem from you aiming at a particular audience: that is, there are times when the reader loses the distinction between what is on screen and what is the historical case. Knowing something about this case already, I could follow the way you slide in some paragraphs from one text to the other, but someone not familiar with the case and the early history of psychoanalysis might not find the distinction clear. I know this is difficult when dealing with a film and trying to fill in background that is not on the screen, but on this point alone, I think you might need to make some minor changes. Let me add that one of the things I love about the piece is your elaboration of Spielrein’s career and breakthroughs. I knew she became an analyst, but I had no idea that her works were so ahead of their time and important. What a shame that
   the patriarchy has downplayed her accomplishments.

   Dr Robert Rosenston.
   Robert Rosenstone is Professor of History, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech.

4. Tamar Schwartz Says:
   December 5th, 2011 at 12:24 pm

   Comment from Elio Frattaroli

   Haven’t seen the movie but sounds like it didn’t cover what to me is the most interesting thing about Spielrein, which I discovered in reading John Kerr’s 1993 book “A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein.” To quote from an article I wrote about the relation of Jung and Freud:

   “[Kerr] presented new material from Spielrein’s ‘transformation journal,’ a long 1907 letter to Jung in which she proposes that all mental life is governed by two fundamental tendencies, the power of the persistence of the complexes, and an instinct of transformation which seeks to transform the complexes. Spielrein reframed the idea in a 1912 publication, arguing that the sexual drive contains both an instinct of destruction and an instinct of transformation. There’s the origin of [what I call] the psychoanalytic quest philosophy, [as manifest in] both Freud’s dual-instinct theory and Jung’s theory of individuation!” (Frattaroli, “Me And My Anima:Through the Dark Glass of the Jungian/Freudian Interface” In “The Cambridge Companion To Jung, 2nd Edition” Cambridge University Press, 2008)

   Spielrein presented her 1912 paper to an audience that included Freud. He commented favorably on her idea at the time but gave her no credit when he stole the idea practically whole cloth (and, to be charitable, probably unconsciously) while changing the name of the two instincts to the death instinct and Eros. Too bad he didn’t take Spielrein’s idea more seriously and understand it better because not only did it represent an integration of Freud’s focus on libidinal discharge with Jung’s focus on
   psychological/spiritual growth; it also represented an integration of Freud’s physicalist metapsychology of the It and his at-that-time very undeveloped (mentalistic) ego psychology. The result is that Freud’s dual-instinct theory was profoundly confused, marred by his ambivalence about abandoning a reductionistic metapsychology that didn’t work for an integrated Self-psychology that he was striving for but never achieved. As I discuss at length in a paper on psychoanalytic orthodoxy and heresy soon to be online on ip.net, and also in my book, HSAB, I believe that Robert Waelder (in his insufficiently appreciated masterpiece, “The Principle of Multiple Function”) resolved Freud’s ambivalence and actually achieved the integration (under Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity) that Freud was striving for in his dual instinct theory.

5. Zvi Lothane Says:
   December 6th, 2011 at 5:46 am

   DJ Fisher refers to my 1999 paper, reprinted with addendum and discussion on erotic vs. nonerotic love in Covington (2003):

   “There is an intelligent paper by Zvi Lothane (1999, 2003)that holds that their
   relationship did not include sexual intercourse. Jung’s biographer also sees the evidence as ambiguous.(Bair, 2003). I am unconvinced by their arguments.”

   However, Fisher does not cite another authority who remains unconvinced about sex between Spielrein and Jung: John Kerr himself, as stated in Kerr’s A Most Dangerous Method, a cotribution to the film’s script.

   In the review of Kerr’s book cited on this blog we read:

   “Now while Kerr demonstrates that that romance and the psychic themes resulting from it played an important role in the formulation of some of Jung’s ideas, ideas that were to result in the eventual break with Freud, it is the ideas that are the focus of the book, not the love affair.”

   To emphasize: the love affair was doubted by Kerr, but he erred in claiming the Spielrien played a role in the historic breakup between Freud and Jung (see Lothane, 1996 and 1997, below).

   Sensational sex sells books and movies. As such, the Cronenberg film is rife with sexploitation.

   As a period piece, it is a charming recreation, but note the poetic license with which historical events are treated. However, with the portrayal of Freud is a lovely and loving rebuttal of the tidal wave of Freud-bashing that had previosly swept both shores of the Atlantic.

   As to Jung: It is absurd to portray Jung as beating Spielrein on the behind, with or without a strap. The defloration scene, complete with blood on the sheets, was taken from Christopher Hampton’s 2002 The Talking Cure, which eclipsed the nuanced 1996 play Sabina by Willy Holtzman, who portrayed hugs and kisses but not penetration.

   Here are my publications on Spielrein:
   Lothane, Z. (1987). Love, seduction, and trauma. The Psychoanalytic Review, 74(1):83-105.
   Lothane, Z. (1996). In defense of Sabina Spielrein. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 5:203—217, also in Mahony, Bonomi & Stensson, eds., Behind the Scenes Freud in Correspondence. Stockholm: Scandinavian Universities Press, 1997.
   Lothane, Z. (1997). The schism between Freud and Jung over Schreber: its implications for method and doctrine. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 6:103—115, 1997
   Lothane, Z. (1999). Tender love and transference: unpublished letters of C.G. Jung and Sabina Spielrein. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 80:1189—1204 (also published in German, Italian, Polish, and Russian).
   Lothane, Z (2003). Tender love and transference: unpublished letters of C. G. Jung and Sabina Spielrein (with an addendum/discussion). In: Covington, C. & Wharton, B. Sabina Spielrein Fogotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis. Brunner-Routledge: Hove and New York, pp. 191-225.
   Lothane, Z. (2003). Afterword (English) (published as Nachwort von Zvi Lothane). In: Spielrein, S. Tagebuch und Briefe. Die Frau zwischen Jung und Freud. (Hg.) Traute Hensch, veränderte, um das Nachwort von Zvi Lothane und den Epilog von Christa von Petersdorf ergänzte Neuauflage. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2003, a new German edition of A. Carotenuto’s 1980 Diario di una segreta simmetria, pp. 249-278.
   Lothane, Z. (2006).Verführung/Entführung, mit/ohne Psychoanalyse. Oder: was suchen jüdische Mädchen bei germanischen Helden und vice versa? Psychozial, 29(106,III):97-124.
   Lothane, Z. (2007). The snares of seduction in life and in therapy, or what do young Jewish girls (Spielrein) seek in their Aryan heroes (Jung), and vice versa? International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 16 (No. 1):12-27, 16:81-94.

6. nathan szajnberg, MD Says:
   December 6th, 2011 at 12:17 pm

   This is a setting within which to think about significant matters such as how founding members of the “insight” discipline behaved (and thought). Here, we may not be able to prove whether Jung had physical sex with Spielrein.

   But, Jung’s overall comportment was shady; his character, shadier. He allegedly had an affair with his “analyst,” a psychiatric nurse at the Burgholzli. He was taken with (and perhaps by) his patient, Otto Gross’s (possibly drug-addled) ideas about having sex with patients (when Gross wasn’t escaping from the Burgholzi). His accounts of his personal psychosis (more detailed in the Red Book), places him in a different category, psychologically, than Freud and many of the earlier Freudians. His pas de deux with the Nazi party doesn’t burnish his character.

   Learning that he took Spielrein’s ideas and presented them as his own also doesn’t help his character.

   Overall, whether he penetrated Spielrein or not, and even though he appeared to help her overcome her psychiatric illness, Jung behaved questionably, if not badly. When Spierlein’s mother wrote from Russia asking Jung to stop the “affair” with her teenage psychotic daughter, Jung told her to pay her bill.

   How ironic for Jung to claim that his break with Freud because he disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on sexuality,. If Jung could have followed Freud more carefully, with more discipline, with less suggestions of sexual boundary violation (such as with Tony Wolff), he might have offered more to this discipline.

   Zvi Lothane’s scholarly work may persuade us that Jung didn’t bust a hymen, but Jung’s comportment undermines Dr. Lothane’s otherwise elegant scholarship.

7. Zvi Lothane Says:
   December 8th, 2011 at 5:33 am

   I am adding one more reference to the ones already listed, my review of:

   JUNG A BIOGRAPHY. By Deirdre Bair. Boston/New York/London: Little, Brown and Co. 881,

   published in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 53:311-324, 2005.

   I corrected a number of Bair’s mistakes but I appreciated her explicit portrayal of Jung as a compulsive womanizer about which he did not tell Freud but disguised it in a phony anonymous portrayal of Spielrein as a difficult patient. Sabina Spielrein wrote to Freud about her relationship with Jung and it was only then that Jung said to Freud: yes, that is the person I have been writing to you about since 1906.

8. David James Fisher, Ph.D. Says:
   December 9th, 2011 at 1:56 am

   I have argued that “A Dangerous Method” is a fine movie and a serious work of art, operating on a number of levels. That it has generated some controversy and intense discussion on this site is a tribute to its historical and contemporary relevance.

   I want to thank Professors Friedensohn and Rosenstone for their strong and supportive comments on my essay. Both understand the critical importance of the movie being about Spielrein, telling her story in complicated and nuanced ways.

   Elio Frattaroli has not seen the film. If he had, he would have noticed two parallel scenes in it. The film often uses the device of doubling to illustrate contrasts between Freud and Jung on the same issues. The first is one with Jung and Spielrein discussing her ideas about sexuality and destruction, that is, her thesis that sex involves a dissolution of the individual self in the act of sexual union. During the merger of sexual intercourse, two distinct individuals temporarily become one, forming a union. Jung is intrigued by her ideas and will subseqently borrow, even plagiarize them. In her scene with Freud, Spielrein explains the concept to him, who appreciates the originality in it, saying that he sensed his own drive theory lacked this dimension. Yet he does not entirely agree with or understand Spielrein’s formulation. He will publish her paper in an analytic journal and have her present the paper for discussion before the Vienna Society. He then offers to refer two analytic patients to her, an act that is both immensely flattering to the young Spielrein and co-optative. He thinks this acknowledgement will secure her sense of solidarity with the Freudian movement, blocking her fascination with Jung and Analytic Psychology. A film, of course, is not a scientific treatise. Yet, Cronenberg’s film deals with important ideas deftly and often in a sophisticated manner.

   Nathan Szajnberg always has incisive points to contribute, in this case regarding psychoanalytic ethics. Here he holds that we need a balanced approach toward therapeutic healing while monitoring our often passionate feelings about helping or caring for a vulnerable patient.

   Zvi Lothane states that John Kerr was “unconvinced” about the sex between Jung and Spielrein, even “doubted” the love affair. This is simplistic and misses the dialectical complexity of Kerr’s perspective. Kerr is actually undecided about both dimensions of their liaison. On page 224 of “A Most Dangerous Method” he writes: “For myself, I find it at least plausible that the two stopped short of intercourse. As an indication to the contrary, though, I have to note the reaction of the two when they were caught out. Clearly, in their own minds, they had sinned.” And again on page 227, more ambiguity, not an outright disavowal: “In short, ‘poetry’ was Spielrein’s word for what happens when a couple, both enamored of mysticism, move backward from it to a sexual realization–and keep psychoanalyzing. Analysis and fantasy, incest and myth, had started to merge into each other.”

   In Bettelheim’s seminal essay on the Freud/Jung/Spielrein triangle, he plainly states his conviction that Jung and Spielrein had sex. But he raises some searching questions about psychoanalytic treatment and about what contributes to a cure. “Whatever may be one’s moral evaluation of Jung’s behavior toward Spielrein, his first psychoanalytic patient, one must not disregard its most important consequence: he cured her from the disturbance which he had been entrusted to his care. In retrospect we ought to ask ourselves: what convincing evidence do we have that the same result would have been achieved if Jung had behaved toward her the way we must expect a conscientious therapist to behave toward his patient? However questionable Jung’s behavior was from a moral point of view–however unorthodox, even disreputable it may have been–somehow it met the prime obligation of the therapist toward his patient: to cure her. True, Spierlrein paid a very high price in unhappiness, confusion, and disillusionionment for the particular way in which she was cured, but then that is often true for mental pateints who are as sick as she was. Perhaps Spielrein’s story offers us a useful reminder, that, contrary to our easy optimism that we know exactly what is necessary in the therapy of psychologically very sick people, in their treatment there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” (Bettelheim, “Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays,” pp. 79-80.

   I hope that more colleagues and friends of psychoanalysis will see this movie and reflect on the issues it raises. Perhaps then there will be more understanding of our roles and responsibilities as wounded healers, as we continue to learn and grow and deepen our own self-understanding as we work with seriously ill patients. Perhaps it will also encourage us to regard our forerunners with more historical empathy and understanding, not expecting them to know in the first decade of the 20th century what we think we know now in the first decade of the 21st century.

9. Zvi Lothane Says:
   December 10th, 2011 at 5:07 am

   Response to Fisher by Zvi Lothane, MD.

   David James Fisher writes in response to my comments about Kerr:

   “Zvi Lothane states that John Kerr was “unconvinced” about the sex between Jung and Spielrein, even “doubted” the love affair. This is simplistic and misses the dialectical complexity of Kerr’s perspective. Kerr is actually undecided about both dimensions of their liaison.”

   I find the adjective simplistic to be dismissive of my contribution to the Spielrein historical research. I was in no way simplistic, I stated correctly that Kerr himself doubted the sexual liason.

   In my articles I have devoted a lot of space precisely to the complexity of the Jung-Spielrein relationship, to the role of love writ large, not simply reducible to sex, about which Kerr and I are on the same page (I hope, at least), as I discussed in the addendum to the reprinting of my 1999 article in the book edited by Jungians Covington and Wharton.

   Fishes is dismissive of that article by saying he is not convinced by my arguments but he did not offer any discussion of the historical data I have unearthed.

   Fisher also states:

   And again on page 227, more ambiguity, not an outright disavowal: “In short, ‘poetry’ was Spielrein’s word for what happens when a couple, both enamored of mysticism, move backward from it to a sexual realization–and keep psychoanalyzing. Analysis and fantasy, incest and myth, had started to merge into each other.” This is nothing but fanciful conjecture.

   Here Kerr speaks from both corners of his mouth, basing evidence supplied by Carotenuto in his book, The Secret Symmetry. However, the “evidence” presented by Carotenuto was “a literary analogy found in Proust. Swann and Odette used the metaphor “faire Cattleya” to express the physical act of possession”.

   In fact, the scholarship of Kerr in The Most Dangerous Method, published in 1993, is based entirely on Carotenuto.

   Therefore, Kerr was not in a position to include historical research that was published by Minder in 1994, who published Spielrein’s clinical chart, or the doctoral dissertation of Wackenhut and Willke who for the first time called attention to the RUSSIAN diary of Spielrein which they translated into German. In my 1999 article a presented material from that diary for the first time in the English literature PLUS hitherto unpublished letters between Sabina and her mother. There Sabina tells mother what SHE meant by the code word ‘poetry’: that while Jung had sex with other women, she did not cross the boundary of poetry. Whether you belive Spielrein or not, at the very least I furnished evidence to show that the jury is still out, that there is at least reason to entertain reasonable doubt.

   In conclusion: regarding Spielrein I am the more informed source than Kerr.

   There were two other films about Spielrein, of greater historical imort than Cronenberg’s:

   2002 My Name was Sabina Spilrein, a docudrama by Elisabeth Marton, a German fillm maker living in Sweden;

   2002 Roberto Faenza’s biopic, The Soul Keeper, released in the USA in 2004.

   In 2005 the Marton Film was released in the U.S. by Facets Video, a subsidiary of Facets Multi-Media.

   The film was shown in a program at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and I was invited to be a discussant. Before making my remarks, I conducted as staw poll by the audience. The result:
   there were roughly equal numbers of those voting for vs. those voting against the idea that Jung and Spielrein had sex.

   Yes, David James Fishes, people have convictions, from two sources: opinions and knowledge. The former are by the stronger one, because fed my emotions and wishes, likes and dislikes.

   You like Cronenberg’s film, I do not. An anonymous man who sat next to me at the theater, when the film was over, exclaimed “booh”, a strong conviction.

   However and forever, de gustibus non disuputandum est, tastes are beyond debates, only ideas are debatable.

10. Tamar Schwartz Says:
    December 11th, 2011 at 8:30 pm

    Comment by Robert Nye, Professor Emeritus of European intellectual history at Oregon Sate University,

    You may have missed your calling. This is a reflective and very well-reasoned, and scholarly
    review of what I take to be a serious film that the film-makers hope will reach a wide audience (judging from the marketing).

    You very nicely weave together modern psychoanalytic insights with the historical materials presented in the film. You capture this embryonic moment in the history of psychoanalysis when nothing was set in stone (except, perhaps in Freud’s mind, and perhaps not even there). The
    screenwriter was obviously trying to capture this moment of flux through this triangular relationship, and the best thing about your review is how well, and how sympathetically, you describe and evaluate that relationship, not only for the historical characters involved,
    but for the long evolution of psychoanalytic concepts. Your historical sensitivity allows you to resist reifying concepts like transference and countertransference, and however successful the film was in representing these emotional bonds, you place both them in historical AND in analytic context. You also do a nice job treating the film’s themes in an orderly and coherent way: the historical moment, Spielrein’s saga, the evolution of the talking cure, the Freud/Jung relationship. Excellent piece of work. It’s a shame your essay will not be handed out to all the movie’s attendees as they leave the theater.”

11. Henry (Zvi) Lothane Says:
    February 7th, 2012 at 6:04 am

    Tamar, who was Professor Nye responding to? Henry Z.

12. Tamar Schwartz Says:
    February 7th, 2012 at 7:27 am

    Dear Zvi Lothane,

    He is responding to David James Fisher himself.

    Tamar Schwartz

13. Henry (Zvi) Lothane Says:
    February 21st, 2012 at 5:59 am

    James Fisher argued against me by quoting these statements by Kerr:
    The one that I had quoted on page 224: “For myself, I find it at least plausible that the two stopped short of intercourse”

    JDF quoted additional words by Kerr:

    “As an indication to the contrary, though, I have to note the reaction of the two when they were caught out. Clearly, in their own minds, they had sinned.”

    Kerr is speaking from both corners of his mouth: what was Freud’s sin? Jung admitted to Freud to that he had been guilty of “Shufterei,” double dealing, but not sex.
    JDF also quotes Kerr on page 227, more ambiguity, not an outright disavowal: “In short, ‘poetry’ was Spielrein’s word for what happens when a couple, both enamored of mysticism, move backward from it to a sexual realization–and keep psychoanalyzing. Analysis and fantasy, incest and myth, had started to merge into each other.”

    Kerr is woolgathering, he has no authority to decide what poetry meant, only Spielrein herself had this right, as she did in a letter to her mother, as detailed in my 1999 paper. What is sexual realization? More flip-flopping. All this business about merging, whatever its merit, does not explain the purported sexualization.

    Nathan Szajnberg thinks that his arguments undermine my scholarship. I answer: no, they do not. David J. Fisher said he was not convinced by my scholarship, that is anybody’s right. What I object is disagreeing with questionable arguments, such as Nathan’s:

    “Overall, whether he penetrated Spielrein or not, and even though he appeared to help her overcome her psychiatric illness, Jung behaved questionably, if not badly. When Spierlein’s mother wrote from Russia asking Jung to stop the “affair” with her teenage psychotic daughter, Jung told her to pay her bill” –

    1. Whether he penetrated her of not — all one can do is raise reasonable doubt, as I have;
    2. he appeared to help her overcome her psychiatric illness – he did not appear, he brought her out of her serious adolescent turmoil;
    3. Jung did not behave badly – he panicked fearing a public scandal, which never happened and, as Freud wrote to him, news came from Muthmann in Vienna that another woman, not Spielrein, was spreading rumors about him;
    4. Jung did not have an affair with a teenage psychotic daughter – the alleged affair occurred in 1909, when Spielrein was no longer a teenager nor in treatment with Jung, and she was never psychotic, as certified by Eugen Bleuler, the director of the hospital;
    5. Jung was correct in telling Mme Spielrein that as two adults they were free to do what they damn wanted, but since her daughter was not in treatment, her intervention was not of a parent concerned about a patient, so there was a choice to be made. He did not demand to be paid for services rendered.

14. Henry (Zvi) Lothane Says:
    February 22nd, 2012 at 4:51 am

    Addendum to my comment on February 21, 2012.

    I misunderstood the reference in Kerr’s statement:

    “As an indication to the contrary, though, I have to note the reaction of the two when they were caught out. Clearly, in their own minds, they had sinned.”

    I read it as a reference to Jung and Freud, I apologize, but it was clearly a reference to Jund and Spielrein. Who was the sleuth that caught them out? There was no catching anybody out.

    Firstly, Spielrein and Jung were not caught out. Jung. Between 1906 and 1909 Jung wrote anonymously to Freud a number of times on having difficulties with a nonexitent patient, without revealing her name. At some point Spielrein entertained hopes of taking Jung away from his wife, marrying him and having a child by him. I quoted her mother’s reaction to this idea in my 1999 paper: you can get him, but it is not worth it. Of course, mother was right. Since Jung had no intentions of leaving his rich wife, no matter how enticing Spielrein was, he might have been careful not to have intercourse with her because it might make Spielrein even more passionate and thus more demanding.

    Secondly, the reason why Spielrein finally told Freud about her relationship with Jung had nothing to do with being caught out. When she was discharged from the hospital as cured in 1905 and supported by Bleuler to matriculate at the Zurich University School of Medicine, Jung gave her and her mother a letter in which he referred Spielrein to Freud for further treatment, if they so desired. The full text of the letter is published in my 1996 paper (not the 1999 paper). In it Jung stated that Spielrein fell in love with him. That letter was published by Minder in Gesnerus in 1993 and therefore unknown to Kerr. This explains why Spielrein became the actual whisle-blower and wrote to Freud. It was ONLY THEN that Jung confessed to Freud that Spierein was the “patient” about whom he had been writing to Freud all these years.

    Since Kerr knew nothing about this letter, or may not even know yet, his statement at the top of this comment is rubbish, as the English say. My pitch is to emphasize once again: let interpetations be of facts, not of fictions copied and repeated endlessly, mushroooming and becoming facts. This is how gossip goes around the world.

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