ABSTRACT
IN A RECENT commentary on C. G. Jung's Answer to Job (1952), Harry Slochower (1981) has brought to light a remarkable letter the Swiss psychiatrist wrote to Hans Illing in 1955. In this document (presently unavailable for exact quotation), Jung, in his own terms, reaffirmed the profound divergence between his psychological system and that of Sigmund Freud. In Slochower's view, Jung's religious commitments were sequelae of his relationship to Freud, that is, of feelings toward Freud that Jung himself had characterized as a "religious crush" in the fall of 1907. As the letter of 1955 demonstrates, Jung certainly continued to nurse a quasi-paranoid sense of grievance about the rupture between himself and Freud. As I have discussed in the last chapter, the source of Jung's feeling of injury was the disappointment of his desperate need to idealize Freud as the prophet of a new therapeutic cult. Despite the clear persistence of this aspect of Jung's archaic reaction to Freud, I see an explanation of Jung's religiosity at the level of a transference interpretation to be so partial as to be misleading. In order to place this issue in a wider context, I will amplify the psychological portrait of Jung that I began to sketch in the preceding two chapters, placing particular emphasis on two issues uppermost in the recently discovered letter of 1955: Jung's attitudes toward Nazism and toward the Jews.
