C.G. Jung’s Original Letters to Sigmund Freud on e-manuscripta.ch

Or, when the rest of boundless admiration is silence

193 letters from C.G. Jung to Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, are now accessible on e-manuscripta.ch, the platform for digitized manuscript material from Swiss libraries and archives. This milestone takes place only a few months after the ETH Zurich University Archives went live with catalogue data on more than 32,000 letters from and to C.G. Jung in their archival database.

In particular, the digitized letters allow you to trace the rise and fall of the two masterminds’ friendship straight from the horse’s mouth. Thus, in a letter of 1907, Jung expressed his “boundless” admiration for Freud “both as man and researcher”, indeed he even confessed that his veneration had “something of the character of a ‘religious’ crush”. At the end 1912 the tone had entirely changed: Jung diagnosed his former fatherly friend with a neurosis. Freud answered by braking off their friendship, while Jung on his part set an end to the personal relationship by quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The rest is silence”.

Freud’s letters to Jung are part of the Sigmund Freud Archives. These letters have been digitized as well and are accessible via the digital collection Sigmund Freud Papers on the web site of the Library of Congress.

The publication of Jung’s scanned original letters to Freud on e-manuscripta.ch was possible thanks to the kind permission of the Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung.