Russian Stereotypes in the Freud-Jung Correspondence

Abstract

Your Russian (and I must tell you again how I admire your patience, or rather your resignation) probably has some Utopian dream of a world-benefiting therapy and feels the work is not getting on fast enough. I believe their race more than any other lacks the knack for self-inflicted drudgery. By the way, do you know the story about the “glass rear end”? A practicing physician should never forget it.Freud to Jung, June 3, 1909From 1906 to 1914 C. G. Jung and Sigmund Freud exchanged 360 personal letters, most of them mailed between Zürich and Vienna. These years saw the consolidation of an international Freudian school by 1909 and multiple schisms within the movement, from the defection of Adler in 1911 to the final alienation of Jung himself. Given the era and the specific localities, it is not surprising to find that Russians and Russian political issues now and then figure, oddly and elliptically, among the welter of topics raised in the Freud-Jung Briefwechsel. Out of the fragmented data an incident of sorts emerges, with a Russian cast in the role of seductress (later heroine), Jung as victim (and unwitting villain), and Freud himself intervening “Sherlock Holmes-like” (as he put it) to help solve the case. Beyond its intrinsic and eccentric appeal, the material holds a three-fold historic significance for the Slavicist.

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