The Freud/Jung Conflict: Yahweh and the Great Goddess

Author(s): Tristan O. Cornes

Source: American Imago , Spring, 1986, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 7-21
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26303863

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 The Freud/Jung Conflict 7

The Freud/Jung Conflict:

Yahweh and the Great Goddess

Excavations of the substrata underlying the Freud/

Jung relationship have begun to yield empathie and non
polemical insights into this dramatic event in the history of
psychoanalysis. Harry Slochower has unearthed the reli
gious Yahweh aspects of Jung's transference on Freud,1
and James Kirsch has further elucidated one dimension of
the Freud/Jung conflict as a powerful, unconscious struggle
between two father gods: the Yahweh and Wotan arche
types.2 When one reflects on how and why the Great
Goddess cults were usurped by the patriarchal Yah wist re
ligion, and how the oedipal Father dominated Freud's in
cest and taboo theories while the bi-polar Great Mother
increasingly gained Jung's psychoanalytical attention—so
much so that she became the focus of Wandlungen und
Symbole der Libido,3 the book that "became a landmark, set
up on the spot where two ways divided"4—one is led to
wonder whether, at a very deep level, a struggle was en
acted between the archetypes of the Father god, Yahweh,
and the primordial Great Mother goddess.

The masculine plane of the Freud/Jung relationship

dominates their correspondence at the manifest level.
There is the "biblical" letter where Jung lives from the
crumbs of Freud's table,5 and the erotic undertone of Jung's
"religious crush." To Jung's desire that Freud regard their
friendship as one between a father and son, Freud responds
by "formally adopting" Jung as his "eldest son and anoint
ing him as successor and crown prince." When Freud
writes: "I put my fatherly horn-rimmed spectacles on again

American Imago, Spring 1986, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 7-21. Copyright © 1986 by
the Association for Applied Psychoanalysis, Inc., Brooklyn, NY 11218.

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8 Tristan O. Cornes

and warn my dear son to keep a cool head," Jung ac

knowledges that his father-complex has interfered with his
feelings and that "actually it is too stupid that I of all
people, your 'son and heir,' should squander your heritage
so needlessly, as though I had known nothing of all these
things."
Close attention to the language and metaphors used
throughout these letters yields important clues to the un
derlying masculine/feminine, Yahweh/Great Goddess dy
namic. For example, the year 1910 sees Freud addressing
Jung in strikingly masculine, militaristic imagery:

I am merely irritated now and then—I may say that

much, I trust—that you have not yet disposed of the
resistances arising from your father-complex, and con
sequently limit our correspondence so much more than
you would otherwise. Just rest easy, dear son Alex
ander, I will leave you more to conquer than I myself
have managed, all psychiatry and the approval of the
civilized world, which regards me as a savage!

Some eighteen months later, Jung is still "overjoyed" to

hear that Freud is dying to read his new work, for he is, "as
you know, very receptive to any recognition the father sees
fit to bestow." In this very letter, however, Jung invokes the
deeply feminized Gnostic concept of Sophia to best describe
his new discoveries, "the reincarnation of ancient wisdom in
the shape of WA."6 Here, Jung connects his new discoveries
with an aspect of the Great Goddess and her feminine
mysteries.7 And what are we to make of earlier passages
which suggest Jung's "feminine" role? One letter refers to a
feeling of being freed from the oppressive sense of Freud's
"paternal authority" while, in the same paragraph, Jung has
"pregnancy fantasies" about Freud's cause prospering;8
another letter tells how a resistance to publication causes
him to "abort" with increasing reluctance.
Even in the early psychoanalytic movement, there was
an unevenness between the role of women in the Vienna
and Zurich groups. As early as 1907, Jung could write to
Freud that "In my entourage Gradiva is being read with
delight. The women understand you by far the best and

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 The Freud/Jung Conflict 9

usually at once."9 Four years later, Jung writes that at the

Weimar Congress, the "feminine element" will be conspicu
ously represented from Zurich, but there was a dearth of
women in Freud's circle: "We Viennese," Freud laments,
"have nothing to compare with the charming ladies you are
bringing from Zurich. Our only lady doctor is participating
like a true masochist in the Adler revolt and is unlikely to be
present."
Midway through this period, Jung was already engaged
with the archetypal Great Goddess in many of her personal
manifestations. In 1909, he discloses that

An amiable complex had to throw an outsize monkey

wrench into the works. As I have indicated before, my
first visit to Vienna had a very long unconscious after
math, first the compulsive infatuation in Abbazia, then
the Jewess popped up in another form, in the shape of
my patient.10

This indicates that Jung's (mother?) complex was deeply

affected by his visits to Freud (i.e., to Vienna), and the image
of the "Jewess" indicates that it is the religious (archetypal)
dimension of the feminine which is being constellated. In
deed, this particular Jewess—Dr. Sabina Spielrein—later em
erges as a psychologically significant "mediator" between the
Yahweh/Great Goddess archetypes: her Jewishness aligns
her with Yah weh, whereas her feminine nature (and particu
larly the seductive, entrapping Goddess affect-images which
she appears to have activated in Jung's psyche) aligns her
with the Great Goddess.11
Outwardly, Jung gave the appearance of fully endors
ing Freud's emphasis on the role of the oedipal father. For
example, in 1909 he published a paper entitled "The Sig
nificance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual,"
and it was only in the next four years that he came to
appreciate the importance of the mother. Yet, even in this
early paper, there are latent precursors of the descent to
"The Mothers." Both the opening quotation and the final
sentence are most (un)revealing! First, the final sentence
which fortells the descent:

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10 Tristan O. Cornes

It is to be hoped that experience in the years to come

will sink deeper shafts into this obscure territory, on
which I have been able to shed but a fleeting light, and
will discover more about the secret workshop of the
daemon who shapes our fate.
Although this "daemon" is masculine in the Horatian
verse Jung quotes, the "Fates" in mythology are explicitly a
feminine force. And now for the opening quotation, which
deepens this interpretation. Again, Jung invokes the Fates:

The Fates lead the willing but drag the unwilling.

—Clean thes12

A deeper understanding of the Yahweh-Great Mother

dimension of the Freud/Jung relationship needs to take into
account a number of separate yet related themes.
First, there is the role of the Great Mother in Judaism
and her parallel role in psychoanalysis. Was she usurped by
both Yahweh and Freud's Oedipus because her darker
side—the "bad" mother whose archetypal image is the Ter
rible Mother of mythology—evokes intolerable anxiety?
Second, it appears that Freud indentified with Oedipus
(a masculine symbol) while Jung identified with the Sphinx
(a symbol for the Terrible Mother).
Third, the Freud/Jung correspondence indicates that
when both men became captivated by the myths and deities
of the ancient world, there developed a gradual polarization
between the world of the "rational" Father God and the
more "mysterious" realms of the Great Goddess.

I. The Terrible Mother in Judaism and Psychoanalysis

Latent tensions between the archetypal Father Deity and
the Great Mother underlie both Judaism and Freudian psy
choanalysis. Richard Rubenstein, a scholar of Judaic Theol
ogy who has also "mastered a good deal of classical psycho
analytic literature and theory,"13 suggests that both Jewish
monotheistic religion and traditional psychoanalysis have
substituted a relatively benign father deity in place of a more
archaic and decidedly more terrifying mother figure.14 Fears

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 The Freud/Jung Conflict 11

of punishment (castration) by this oedipal father pale in sig

nificance to the dread and horror evoked by the Terrible
Mother aspect of the Great Mother—devouring, starvation,
engulfment, drowning, death as return to womb and tomb.
Within Rabbinic Judaism, for example, archaic oral
anxieties or punishments far outweigh genital-castrative
ones. Rubenstein explains:
Matriarchal religions may not reflect the dilemmas of
phallic religion. The archaic strivings they reflect pre
cede and anticipate phallic development. The phallic
stage does not cancel out earlier archaic stages in the
development of the individual; neither does that stage
entirely cancel earlier stages in religious life. No matter
how violently patriarchal religions attempt to uproot
traces of matriarchal religions, the results are at best
only partially successful. The incorporation legends in
dicate how deeply rooted the older anxieties remained
in supposedly phallic rabbinic Judaism. In all likeli
hood, they had a greater capacity to deter behavioral
deviance than the traditions which reflected castration
anxiety. Historically and psychologically, there was far
more direct involvement of the people in the tales of
the Flood, the demise of the Egyptians, and Korah's
rebellion, than in the less significant stories of Ham's
violence or the frogs' castration of the Egyptian nobles.
The latter were isolated stories; the former were widely
told and repeated. The drowning of the Egyptians is
rehearsed daily in Jewish liturgy.

A remarkable example of the powerful influence of the

Great Mother within Judaism is the concern with eating. It
is laws of eating which dominate traditional Jewish daily life.
But the "good," feeding aspect of this Great Mother is not
what demands her suppression. Rather, it is mother as de
priving tormentor, devouring witch, and hideous ogress.
Kali, Cybele, Hecate, and Medea are all images for this
dark, demonic side of the Great Goddess—the "bad"
mother of Kleinian psychoanalysis and the Terrible Mother
archetype which played a central role in Jung's excursus
into the mythological terrain of the individual psyche.

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12 Tristan O. Cornes

Just as patriarchal religions arose in response to, and at

tempted to suppress, this demonic power of the dark Femi
nine, so it is likely that Judaism's substitution of a relatively
benevolent father deity for the bi-polar (Good/Terrible)
Great Mother was a central unconscious factor in Freud's
working-out of both religion and psychoanalysis. We can
speculate that Freud was particularly well defended against
the Terrible Mother. In his circle, the role of orality and the
pre-oedipal mother was taken up by Karl Abraham, a young
psychiatrist who worked at the Burgholzi with Jung and
whose first contact with Freud came in 1907. (Here, some of
the seeds were sown for the later division between Freudian
and Kleinian psychoanalysis—another instance of a struggle
between the archetypes of the Yahweh and the Great Mother
whose story is yet to be told—as Abraham was Melanie Klein's
mentor and analyst up to the time of his early death in 192515.)

II. Freud and Jung as Oedipus and the Sphinx

The encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx
symbolizes an heroic, masculine rationality seemingly over
coming a darksome, irrational, and feared aspect of the de
vouring feminine, thus touching another dimension of the
conflict between Yahweh and the Great Mother. Behind the
"Oedipus complex" in psychoanalysis lies Freud's fascina
tion—perhaps even an identification—with the young Oedi
pus. At the foot of his couch, alongside the bas-relief of
Gradiva, was a reproduction of Ingre's painting of Oedipus
interrogating the Sphinx.16
The medallion commissioned for Freud's fiftieth birth
day had on one side a profile portrait of Freud ("The best
and most flattering [portrait] of all," Freud writes to Jung),
while on the obverse is a representation of Oedipus answer
ing the Sphinx, with the lines (in Greek) from Sophocles,
"who divined the famed riddle and was a man most
mighty."17 Not only does the image imply an identification
of Freud with Oedipus, but it also touches on a longstand
ing phantasy. At the presentation of the medallion, Freud
became pale and agitated, asking in a strangled voice who
had thought of it:

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 The Freud/Jung Conflict 13

He behaved as if he had encountered a revenant, and so

he had. After Federn told him it was he who had
chosen the inscription Freud disclosed that as a young
student at the University of Vienna he used to stroll
around the great Court inspecting the busts of former
famous professors of the institution. He then had the
fantasy, not merely of seeing his own bust there in the
future, which would not have been anything remark
able in an ambitious student, but of it actually being
inscribed with the identical words he now saw on the
medallion.18

Focusing attention on the oedipal, father-son dynamics

of the Freud-Jung relationship misses the deeper, more
"hidden" symbolism of the Oedipus-Sphinx (masculine Yah
weh—feminine Great Mother) encounter. Explicit imagery
concerning the solving of the riddle emerged in the Freud/
Jung correspondence. Referring to the "libido paper" (i.e.,
Symbols of Transformation) Freud "congratulates" Jung with a
Sophoclean(!) quip:

I am gradually coming to terms with this paper. .. . and

I now believe that in it you have brought us a great
revelation, though not the one you intended. You seem
to have solved the riddle of all mysticism, showing it to
be based on the symbolic utilization of complexes that
have outlived their function.19

Insulted by Freud's "neurotically blinkered" mis-reading

of his work, Jung responds by invoking an epithet from the
rites of initiation into the Isis mysteries: Your "bit of neuro
sis" leads to "the semblance of a voluntary death." And as to
the remark about Jung solving the riddle of all mysticism,
Jung believes that this can only show how Freud is deprived
of understanding his work by underestimating it: "You
speak of this insight as though it were some kind of pinnacle,
whereas actually it is at the very bottom of the mountain.
This insight has been self-evident to us for years."
An understanding of Freud's identification with Oedi
pus and Jung's identification with the Sphinx is deepened by
considering the very focus—the bi-polar Great Mother of the

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14 Tristan O. Cornes

paper involved. It is in this work that the "Terrible Mother"

symbolism of the Sphinx is elucidated: The Sphinx "is a
semi-theriomorphic representation of the mother-imago, or
rather of the Terrible Mother, who has left numerous traces
in mythology." For example, the Sphinx was sent by Hera, a
mother-goddess who hated Thebes on account of the birth
of Bacchus. As if in response to (or anticipating?) Freud's
quip, and in order to stress the fearful power of the negative,
devouring mother, Jung reminds us that it was through
Oedipus' overestimating the intellect "in a typically mascu
line way" that he walked right into her trap:
The riddle of the Sphinx was herself—the terrible
mother-imago, which Oedipus would not take as a
20
warning.

III. The Polarization between Freud as Yahweh

and Jung as the Terrible Mother
A close reading of the Freud/Jung letters (prior to the
publication of Jung's treatise on the psychological signifi
cance of the mother-imago) reveals further glimpses of an
underlying tension between the archetypes of the Father
Deity and the primordial Great Mother.
Jung's first letter indicates his reservations about the ex
clusivity of the sexual theory, something Freud had long sus
pected. In Jung's next letter, we see the genesis of his empha
sis on the mother archetype and her bi-polar domains:
But don't you think that a number of borderline
phenomena might be considered more appropriately in
terms of the other basic drive, hunger: for instance, eat
ing, sucking (predominantly hunger), kissing (predomi
nantly sexuality)?

Months later, when Jung asks, "Do you regard sexuality as

the mother of all feelings?" Freud responds that such a
formulation is presently unjustified. He adds that "Along
with the poet, we know of two instinctual sources. Sexuality
is one of them." But what is it that prevents Freud from
explicitly stating the second source? He knew that this "mys
terious" other is hunger—an aspect of the "bad" or Terrible

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 The Freud/Jung Conflict 15

Mother—for the poetry Freud alludes to is Schiller's "Die

Weltweisen" ("The Philosophers"):
Quite temporarily
While waiting for philosophy
To take the world in hand,
Hunger and love command.
Not only does Jung's question attempt to invoke the missing
feminine (i.e., sexuality as the mother of all feelings), but in re
ply, Freud's draws from a poem concerning lovers of Sophia!
Whereas Sophia might be described as an image for the
"higher" virtues of wisdom and the feminine, Freud and
Jung were at this time preparing for a descent into the
historical psyche of all mankind. The alluring riches of my
thology beckoned and fascinated them almost simultane
ously. Indeed, it appears that in October 1909, a mythological
moment was constellated in the Freud-Jung relationship.
Freud's "interesting excursion into archaeology" was pro
viding material about the nature of symbolism, while Jung
was increasingly excited by his own finds: "Archaeology or
rather mythology has got me in its grip, it's a mine of mar
vellous material." Freud's response, although enthusiastic, is
couched in masculine, even militaristic, language:

I am glad you share my belief that we must conquer the

whole field of mythology. Thus far we have only two
pioneers: Abraham and Rank. We need more men for
more far-reaching campaigns.

Tardy with his next letter, Jung's (manifest!) excuse is

his mythology expedition:

One of the reasons why I didn't write for so long is that

I was immersed every evening in the history of symbols,
i.e., in mythology and archaeology ... All my delight in
archaeology (buried for years) has sprung into life
again. Rich lodes open up for the phylogenetic basis of
the theory of neurosis.

The final paragraph of this letter is most telling, reveal

ing Jung's first appreciation of the Great Mother and the
power of her devouring, darker side:

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16 Tristan O. Cornes

As a basis for the analysis of the American way of life I

am now treating a young American (doctor). Here
again the mother-complex looms large (cf. the Mother
Mary cult). In America the mother is decidedly the
dominant member of the family. American culture
really is a bottomless abyss; the men have become a
flock of sheep and the women play the ravenous
wolves—within the family circle, of course. I ask myself
whether such conditions have ever existed in the world
before. I really don't think they have.

Freud's enthusiastic response foreshadows the eventual

forking of their pathway:

I was delighted to learn that you are going into mythol

ogy. A little less loneliness. I can't wait to hear of your dis
coveries .... I hope you will soon come to agree with me
that in all likelihood mythology centers on the same nu
clear complex as the neuroses. But we are only wretched
dilettantes. We are in urgent need of able helpers.

"Although it was the Devil who taught her,

He cannot do it by himself"21

This paragraph is particularly significant, not so much

for its manifest statement about mythology's "nuclear com
plex"—mythology's "center" in the Oedipus complex is
what Freud surely implies—but for the lines (quoted from
Faust) which acknowledge the incomparable powers of the
negative feminine. After all, the scene of this action is the
Witches Kitchen! Faust, revolted and disgusted by this crazy
witchery, is aghast when Mephistopheles insists that if, as
Faust laments, the "narrow life" doesn't suit him,

"Well, then its the witch for you"

Faust resists, hoping that Mephistopheles (rather than the

old hag) can make the brew; but, he is told:

The Devil taught her how to brew it,

But by himself the Devil cannot do it.

In other words, although Freud hopes for (male) helpers—

recall the "men for the campaigns"—he recognizes, uncon

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 The Freud/Jung Conflict 17

sciously, that the witch, the dark side of the feminine,

guards the secrets of the psyche!
Four days later, Jung responds with a veritable outburst
of mythological amplifications linking the "nuclear com
plex" to the Terrible Goddess, castration, and phallus wor
ship. Freud is "delighted" and exhorts that "these things cry
out for understanding." In the next two weeks, Jung be
comes more and more excited about the "marvellous vi
sions" and "glimpses of far-ranging interconnections" be
tween the individual psyche and mythology, and in an early
lecture draft of his "libido" paper, he finds that "in the
individual fantasy the primum movens, the individual conflict,
material or form (whichever you prefer), is mythic, or my
thologically typical."
One year later, Jung has entered such darksome realms
that he warns Freud to "be prepared for some strange
things the like of which you have never heard from me."
His work's "Faustian" themes—i.e., the descent to the
Mothers and the encounter with the eternal Feminine—are
implicitly validated for Jung when, as he writes his friend,
"After seeing a performance of Faust yesterday, including
bits of Part II, I feel more confident of its value."
By now, the world of the feminine mysteries loomed as
a force that demanded psychoanalytic attention. In the fol
lowing months, Freud grapples with the place occultism oc
cupies in the study of the psyche. Earlier Freud had visited
a medium with Ferenczi, to whom he later wrote "I am
afraid you have begun to discover something big." Now he
writes again to Ferenczi:

Jung writes to me that we must conquer the field of

occultism and asks for my agreeing to his leading a
crusade .... I can see that you two are not to be held
back. At least go forward in collaboration with each
other; it is a dangerous expedition and I cannot accom
pany you.

In a bold attempt to prepare himself for Jung's mysterious

discoveries, he tells Jung (after having reported that his own
theories had been bolstered since seeing a performance of
Oedipus Rex):

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18 Tristan O. Cornes

In matters of occultism I have grown humble since the

great lesson Ferenczi's experiences gave me. I promise
to believe anything that can be made to look reason
able. I shall not do so gladly, that you know. But my
ußpig [hubris] has been shattered.

Within days Jung indicates that he is plunging further

into these very realms. In a letter to Freud, he quotes from
Faust and again evokes the Terrible Feminine:
Ucs. fantasy is an amazing witches cauldron:
"Formation, transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation.
Thronged round with images of Things to be,
They see you not, shadows are all they see."

This is the matrix of the mind, as the little great grand

father correctly saw. I hope something good comes out
of it.

Images of the dangerous feminine continue to be

evoked between the two. For example: Freud exhorts Jung
that "you must arm yourself, before it is too late, against the
dragon Practice," and Jung writes to reassure his colleague:

A quick word to let you know I am still alive. I am

having grisly fights with the hydra of mythological fan
tasy and not all its heads are cut off yet.22

Only days later, Jung attempts to clarify the under

worldly nature of his sojourn in the mother-imago:
This time I have ventured to tackle the mother. So
what is keeping me hidden is the Kataßaoig [katabasis =
descent] to the realm of the Mothers where, as we
know, Theseus and Peirithoos remained stuck, grown
fast to the rocks. But in time I shall come up again.23

Here, Jung knows that the Terrible Mother is not all

devouring—her power can be death-dealing (either literally
or symbolically) but, as a necessary dimension of the Great
Mother, she can be survived or "contained."24 Increasingly,
he recognizes the value of his quest—"The tremendous role

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 The Freud/Jung Conflict 19

of the mother in mythology has a significance far outweigh

ing the biological incest problem". Even his language begins
to resonate with the poetics of the Goddess mysteries:

Winterstein has turned up throbbing with the awe of an

initiate admitted to the inner sanctum, who knows the
mysteries and the hallowed rites of the Kataßaaiov. We
welcomed him with the benevolent smile of augurs.

It is at this point (14 May, 1912), that Freud begins to

distance himself more explicitly from the power of the
Great Mother. "Mother right," Freud says, "should not be
confused with gynaecocracy. There is little to be said for the
latter. Mother right is perfectly compatible with the polyga
mous abasement of women."
From now on, the conflict between Yah weh and the
Great Mother deepens! When Jung insists that, despite the
looming theoretical divergence, he will not be following
"Adler's recipe for overcoming the father" because "the cap
doesn't fit,"2 he is acknowledging that, despite the intense
"father complex" dimensions of their relationship, there are
additional archetypes involved in the relationship between
these two fellow explorers.
A derivative image for their struggle as one between
Yahweh and the Great Goddess is found in the work whose
publication brought to an end this "golden age" of psycho
analysis. In the chapter entitled "Symbols of the Mother,"
Jung describes how Egypt and the dragon symbolize the
seductive/devouring/entrapping Terrible Mother whom
Yahweh must overcome:

The name Rahab is frequently used for Egypt in the

Old Testament (in Isaiah 30:7, Egypt is called "Rahab
who sits still"), and also for dragon; it therefore meant
something evil and hostile. Rahab appears here as the
old dragon Tiamat, against whose evil power Marduk
or Yahweh goes forth to battle.26

This is the polarization whose eventual irruption brought

about the definitive break between Freud and Jung, and
still, to some extent—though diminishing in many areas of
contemporary psychoanalysis—constitutes one archetypal

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20 Tristan O. Cornes

ground of the contrasting emphases between these two

schools of analysis.

Tristan O. Cornes, Ph.D.

839 Toorak Road
Hawthorn East
Victoria, 3123
Australia

NOTES
1. Harry Slochower, "Freud as Yahweh in lung's Answer to lob," American Imago,
38 (Spring 1981).
2. James Kirsch, "Jung's Transference on Freud: Its Jewish Element," American
Imago, 41 (Spring 1984).
3. C. G. Jung, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, 1912. Translated into English
and published as Psychology of the Unconscious, 1912; revised edition: Symbols of
Transformation, 1952, CW 5.
4. Ibid., p. xxiv.
5. The Freudljung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G.Jung,
edited by William McGuire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p.
56.
6. Ibid., p. 95, 212, 218, 218-19, 232, 300, 438, 439.
7. On Sophia as an aspect of the Great Mother see Erich Neumann, The Great
Mother, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963);
and Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), pp.
53-59. On the relationship between Yahweh and Sophia, see C. G. Jung, CW
11, pars. 624, 727, and C. Jess Groesbeck, "A Jungian Answer to 'Yahweh as
Freud,' " American Imago, 39 (Fall 1982), pp. 251-252.
8. The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 217, 308.
9. Ibid., p. 55. Freud's fascination with the image of Gradiva (with both the novel
and the bas-relief that hung on his office wall at the foot of the analytic
couch—see S. Freud, "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's 'Gradiva.' " St. Ed. 9;
K. R. Eissler, Sigmund Freud : His Life in Pictures and Words (New York: Har
court Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 184-185; and Edmund Engelman, Berg
gasse 19: Sigmund Freud's Home and Offices, Vienna 1938 (Chicago and London:
Chicago University Press, 1976), p. 58 and Plate 12) may be interpreted as an
unconscious fascination with that archetypal, seductive feminine which Yah
weh must suppress. In support of this interpretation, there is a most remark
able and curious comment by Freud in a letter to Jung early in 1911. After
Freud had taken over Adler's chairmanship of the Vienna group, he writes: "I
now feel that I must avenge the offended goddess Libido" (The Freud/Jung
Letters, p. 400). See also Harry Slochower, "The Jungian Archetype: Reduc
tionism Upward," American Imago (Spring 1981).
10. Ibid., p. 440, 442, 229.
11. There is considerable evidence that Sabina Spielrein also attempted to take on a
more manifest role as mediator when she sensed the escalation of the Freud/
Jung conflict. See Aldo Corotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between
Jung and Freud (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); Bruno Bettelheim, "Scan
dal in the Family," The New York Review of Books, June 30, 1983; and Thomas
Kirsch, "Review of A Secret Symmetry," Quadrant, 16:1 (Spring 1983). Another
perspective on the "missing feminine" in the Freud/Jung relationship is offered
by C. Jess Groesbeck, "A Jungian Answer to 'Yahweh as Freud,' " op. cit.

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 The Freud/Jung Conflict 21

12. See CW 4, par. 744, note 26, p. 302, note 3, par. 693. For Freud on The Fates,
see "The Theme of the Three Caskets," St. Ed. 12. Oscar Zentner, in "From
the Verneinung of Freud to the Verwerfung of Lacan," Papers of the Freudian
School of Melbourne 1983184, notes that it was seven months after Sabina Spiel
rein's presentation of her paper "Destruction as Cause of Coming into Being"
that Freud wrote "Three Caskets": "There, Freud classes the woman as death,
and this does not seem to be independent of this—other woman called Spiel
rein" (p. 21). As Freud listened to Jung when Spielrein spoke (Zentner), is
there a hidden motive to the "Three Caskets"?—i.e., Freud shows why he is
aligned with Yahweh ("I AM") rather than with the Great Goddess (who
means, ultimately, the Goddess of Death).
13. Mortimer Ostow, ed., Judaism and Psychoanalysis (New York: Ktav, 1982), p. 75.
14. Richard L. Rubenstein, "The Meaning of Anxiety in Rabbinic Judaism," in
Ostow, ibid., pp. 77-109, 98-99, 74, note 7.
15. R. E. Money-Kyrle, introduction to Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation
(New York: Dell, 1977), p. ix.
16. Engelman, p. 58 and Plate 12; Eissler, p. 186.
17. The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 88, note 6, and Plate IV.
18. Ernest Jones, cited m Eissler, p. 331.
19. The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 524, 525, note 2, 526.
20. Jung, CW 5, par. 261, par. 264, 265.
21. The Freudljung Letters, pp. 4-5, 5, 7, 79, 80 (note 5), 245, 251-252, 255 (note
11), 258, 260.
22. The Freudljung Letters, p. 263, 265, 279, 288-289, 378, 384,, 255 (note 8), 421
(note 6), 422, 429, 431, 436, 483-484.
23. Ibid., pp. 487-488. As if to illustrate how close to the surface was Jung's
envelopment in the dark feminine, in a letter two weeks later, he calls some
one's wife "a dragon" and reports that the next volume of the Jahrbuch will be
"a regular monster" (p. 494)!
24. For the "depressive position" task of integrating the Good Mother and Terri
ble Mother aspects of the Great Mother see Tristan O. Comes, "Symbol and
Ritual in Melancholia: The Archetype of the Divine Victim," Chiron. A Review
of Jungian Analysis, 1985; and Norah Moore, "The Left Hand of Darkness:
Aspects of the Shadow and Individuation,"Journal of Analytical Psychology, 29:3
(1984).
25. The Freudljung Letters, p. 502, 503, 504, 512.
26. Jung, CW 5, par. 380.

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