Friendship with Freud

The book I sent to Sigmund Freud triggered our relationship and we met the year after I sent my book to him. He was intriguing! His theories were interesting and when we first met, we talked for thirteen hours without stopping. Although there was a twenty-year age difference between us, that did not stop us from collaborating intensely and supporting each other when necessary. We were huge influences on each other during the years when we were still talking to each other and even after we stopped talking, there still remained traces of our influences on each other. We traveled with each other often and enjoyed each other’s companies. However, the tension grew between us as we started to disagree and argue more and more over our differing concepts of the unconscious. Although my old friend viewed the unconscious as only a place for repressed memories and desires, I thought differently—I believed in something spiritual that was entangled in the idea of the unconscious. His ideas were unnecessarily negative and moody. However, that disagreement was the separating point of our relationship and caused us to ignore each other and have a bad relationship after the beneficial relationship we had been sharing before the argument. I miss my old friend greatly, but he just won’t admit that he is wrong! I wish he would open his mind up more. Maybe his idea of the unconscious is from his own observations of himself—he is obviously repressing himself from admitting that I am right.

Sigmund Freud on the left; Carl Jung on the right