ABSTRACT
The treatment with Moltzer was crucial for Epper’s later development. It shows how Moltzer used the technique of active imagination in 1918, with focus on Epper’s fantasies. The ‘conversations with the unconscious’, as Epper named it in her diary, shows a moment in the development of Jung’s technique in which Jung was still himself in his later phases of his self-experiment. Although it is unknown how much Moltzer was under Jung’s guidance, it presents the use of the technique by an important collaborator of Jung. Moltzer gave up the collaboration with Jung in 1918 and documents of the Psychological Club in Zürich revealed the reasons for it. In the 1950s, Epper reviewed her treatment with Moltzer and she criticised Moltzer’s treatment severely, considering that it led her to a loss of reality and that it was a ‘direct way to madness’. It was Epper’s future husband, Ignaz Epper, who pushed her to stop the treatment with Moltzer and brought her to be treated by Jung.
