S.
13 May 1908 9 Glückstrasse München
Dear Professor Freud,
I begin with again with warmly thanking you for the great pleasure your kind reception of me in Wien gave me. I speak only of the personal question, for only work and not words can thank you for what I owe to you in your more public capacity as a writer, and that I hope later to do. My stay in Wien, short as it was, will always be a most memorable one to me.[1] Next as to Gross.[2] You know, no doubt, that he has definitely entered Burghölzli, so that at present, he is probably having a bad time in the early drugless days. I hear that Jung is going to treat him psychically, and naturally feel a little uneasy about that for Jung does not find it easy to conceal his feelings and he has a pretty strong dislike to Gross; in addition there are some fundamental differences of opinion between them on moral questions. However we must hope for the best. My relation to his wife is of course difficult. Gross is obsessed with the idea of my treating her and is expecting reports from both of us as to complexes etc.. It is dangerous to start on a campaign of lies with such a penetrating man as he is, and to refuse outright would be a serious thing to him in his present state and would not improve their relations to each other. It will probably end in a compromise, like most things, and at present I am just having some talks with her about their relations. Her hate against him is not at all so strong as I expected and is accompanied as usual by an opposed feeling of affection. Also her feeling for me is not so strong as you and I expected. (I do not think I am far wrong in this.) She has a whole series of nervous symptoms, but every thing seems to point to their being due simply to the difficulty of their relations to each other. For the past few months she has been ‑‑ and to some extent still is ‑‑ deeply in love with another man, and has had to conceal this from Gross, as the two men dislike each other. Gross gets great delight in getting other men to love her ‑‑ no doubt a perverse paranoid development of his free love ideas. This she doesn't like, as she says it is her own business; in addition she has been very jealous about his relations with other women. All this I know you will treat as strictly private, but I thought you ought to know it. I should be grateful for any advice you may have time to send me.
I am working all day at the psychiatry Klinik. It will be very important for me in Canada for they think the world of Kraepelin and a government commission visited Europe recently and was most enthusiastic over his Klinik.[3] They are going to build one on its model in Toronto[4] and send their assistants over to Kraepelin to be trained. I therefore hope to get some position over there, which of course will be most important for me both as regards standing and material.[5] I hear that Kraepelin has been speaking very favourably of Jung's association work. Yesterday in his lecture he made the following remarkable statement. "According to the latest views of the French School[6] there is in hysteria a suppression of certain ideas ‑‑ «I might call it Verdrängung[7] ‑‑ ". He is making progress, nicht wahr, having got as far as l886.[8] Perhaps therefore there is a little hope for him. Several of his assistants lean strongly to your views but they can of course do nothing. I asked them why they didn't study some cases of hysteria instead of talking so much about it and they said it was so rare that they never saw any! The cases are of course called catatonia, traumatic neuroses, dementia pr[a]ecox etc., etc.[9] When I go to Canada I leave your interests and those of modern psychology in England in the hands of a young psychiatrist, Bernard Hart.[10] He is widely read in general psychology and very intelligent, but he has so far had no opportunity of studying hysteria and his German is very slight ‑‑ even worse than mine. He is coming to Wien tomorrow and I asked him to call on you, for I knew how extremely kind and courteous you are. Please excuse the liberty I take, but I feel sure you will not mind.
With kind regards and warmest thanks from yours sincerely Ernest Jones.
[1] Jones met Freud during the first international meeting of psychoanalysts at Salzburg on 27 April 1908 and presented his first psychoanalytical paper (Jones, 1908d). He then spent a few days with Freud in Vienna and attended a session of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; see Minutes, 1:389‑396.
[2] Otto Gross (1877‑1919), iconoclastic investigator in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, who advocated sexual, political, and cultural revolution, see Emanuel Hurwitz, Otto Gross: Paradies‑Sucher zwischen Freud und Jung (Zurich and Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979). A drug addict and patient of Carl Jung, Gross was also Jones's friend and informal instructor in the technique of psychoanalysis. Jones later described Gross as "the nearest approach to the romantic ideal of a genius I have ever met...he also illustrated the supposed resemblance of genius to madness..." (Jones, 1959, p. 173). Regarding Gross's relationship with Frieda (née von Richthofen) Lawrence, wife of D. H. Lawrence, see Martin Green, The von Richthofen Sisters; The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love: Else and Frieda von Richthofen, Otto Gross, Max Weber, and D. H. Lawrence, in the Years 1870‑1970 (New York: Basic Books, 1974) and E. W. Tedlock, Jr., ed., Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence (New York: Knopf, 1964, pp. 94‑102).
[3] Emil Kraepelin (1856‑1926) in 1904 took charge of the new psychiatric clinic at Munich (Nervenklinik der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität), where he became Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in the university. Jones studied at Kraepelin's clinic in November 1907, and again in May and June 1908. The Canadians' visit is discussed in C. K. Clarke, "Notes on Some of the Psychiatric Clinics and Asylums of Germany," American Journal of Insanity, 65(1908): 357‑76.
[4] After having agreed to finance the construction of the psychiatric clinic, the Ontario government yielded to pressures for prison reform and shelved the project indefinitely in 1909.
[5] See note 2 to letter 3, and note 12 to letter 6.
[6] The most important exponents of the school were Pierre Janet (1859‑1947), one of France's most eminent neurologists and psychologists, and Professor at the Collège de France (1902‑36); and Jean‑Martin Charcot (1825‑1893) who achieved great fame for his use of hypnosis in the study of hysteria.
[7] See Emil Kraepelin, "Über Hysterie," Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 18(1913):263‑264, where he discusses the concept of Verdrängung (repression) in Freud's sense.
[8] Jones might have had in mind Freud's paper on male hysteria (Freud, 1886f); or Charcot's seminal work on hysteria, Neue Vorlesungen über die Krankheiten des Nervensystems insbesondere über Hysterie (Leipzig and Vienna: Töplitz and Deuticke, 1886) translated by Freud, a product of Freud's six month period of study with Charcot in Paris (Freud, 1886e).
[9] Categories in Kraepelin's systematic classifica~tion of mental disorders as outlined in his Psychiatrie: ein Lehrbuch für Studierende und Ärzte, 7th ed., 2 vols. Leipzig: Barth, 1903‑04. (8th ed., 1909‑13).
[10] Bernard Hart (1879‑1966), British psychiatrist, introduced psychoanalysis in the English‑speaking world to the educated public and to psychiatrists. One of the original members of the London Psycho‑Analytical Society founded by Jones in 1913, but confined himself mostly to psychiatric practice.
