Analytical Psychology

Carl Jung entered into an intimate relationship with Sabina Spielrein, who became his patient at the Burghölzli clinic in 1904, when she was 19 and he was her treating psychiatrist. Historians dispute both how far the relationship went (some read the surviving Jung-Spielrein correspondence as evidence of a consummated sexual affair, others as an intense but unconsummated romantic and erotic attachment) and when it began: Spielrein left active treatment around 1905, and the relationship's best-documented intimate phase dates to several years afterward, by which point she had become Jung's research assistant and a medical student rather than his patient. The relationship was concealed for decades. Spielrein later became a psychoanalyst herself. Whatever its exact form, the entanglement is a documented boundary-relevant episode involving one of the most influential figures in depth psychology, unfolding during the period when he was developing core concepts of analytical psychology.

Jung assumed the presidency of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1933 after its German section was reorganized under Nazi leadership. He oversaw the Society during the period when Jewish analysts were expelled from the German section. Jung published editorials distinguishing between 'Jewish' and 'Aryan' psychology, writing that 'the Aryan unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish' (Zentralblatt, 1934). The extent to which these actions reflected antisemitic conviction versus political opportunism versus an attempt to preserve international psychotherapy remains debated.