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him to be some kind of Wagnerian hero, an Aryan conqueror. Sieg–
fried would be the visible sign of the J ung-Spielrein union, the living
symbol unifying the Aryan and Jewish souls. Siegfried also got into
the latent content of Spielrein's dreams . From a Jungian slant, the
dream could be interpreted to mean that the great Aryan-Semitic
hero might affectuate a lasting bond between Jung's typologies, his
interests in parapsychology and the occult and Freud's libido theory
and his more empirically based science .
Carotenuto quotes a fragment of a letter from Jung to
Spielrein, dated September 1911, in which J ung stiffly and didac–
tically advises his pupil how to court Freud in order to win his favor.
I find the advice mocking and contemptuous of Freud: "Approach
him as a great master and rabbi, and all will be well ." Spielrein took
issue with several ofJung's anti-Jewish accusations in January 1918 .
As a Russian Jew with a rabbinical heritage , Spielrein was aware of
the rich Jewish mystical and messianic tradition. She pointed out to
J ung that Jewish spiritual life had existed for centuries and that it
still existed; she also was upset by Jung's repetition of the old adage
that the Jews were historically responsible for the murder of Christ .
In defense of Freud, she asserted that Freud did not reduce all of
man's activity to primitive instinctual wishes; nor did Freud's theories
denigrate man's higher cultural accomplishments, simply because he
understood the roots of culture in the repression and sublimation of
primitive urgings.
To be sure, Freud reacted more negatively to the Siegfried fan–
tasy than didJung. He instructed Spielrein to break her dependency
on J ung by coming to Vienna and by entering into analysis with
him. Even after her marriage, Freud thought Spielrein remained
pathologically attached to Jung. This suggested self-hatred on her
part, a masochistic identification with her anti-Semitic aggressor.
Freud repeatedly referred to Jung in the letters to Spielrein as her
"Germanic hero," with his Aryan posturings and racial arrogance,
and he invited Spielrein to make the same choice that he had made:
"I imagine that you love Dr. J . so deeply still because you have not
brought to light the hatred that he merits. "
Despite Freud's words , Spielrein clung to her ideas about
generating a Siegfried. Upon learning of Spielrein's pregnancy,
Freud attempted to shatter her Wagnerian phantasm with irony: "I
am, as you know, cured of the last shred of my predilection for the
Aryan cause and would like to take it that if the child turns out to be
a boy, he will develop into a stalwart Zionist. " As a psychoanalyst
