Banish the will-o'-the-whisps!

Psychiatrist, Carl Jung, was having an affair with his patient, Sabina Spielrein, when she wrote to her fellow Jew, Sigmund Freud, advising him of her desire to have a child by her lover.

The offspring of this union, as far as the infatuated Spielrein was concerned, would represent the fusion between Jew and Aryan.

In 1912, she abandoned this idea, married the Russian Jewish doctor, Pawel Naumowitsch Schefte, and had a child by him instead.

During her pregnancy she wrote to Sigmund Freud who, on 20 August 1912, responded thus:

"Your fantasy about the birth of the Saviour to a mixed union did not appeal to me at all. The Lord... had him born from the superior Jewish race."

The following year, Freud wrote to Sabine again, saying:

"I am, you know, cured of the last shred of my predilection for the Aryan cause, and would like to take it that if the child turned out to be a boy he will develop into a stalwart Zionist. He or she must be dark in any case, no more towheads. (Blondes) Let us banish all these will-o'-the-wisps.

We are and remain Jews."

Not exactly what you'd call an unbiased scrutineer of the human condition then. The most iconic presence in the historical oeuvre of psychoanalysis would appear to have been not only a fervent Zionist, but an anti-'Aryan' racist also.

This doesn't surprise me one bit.

If you are unaware of the terms 'Jewish ethnocentrism' and 'Jewish supremacism,' it may surprise you.

Historical notes:

a) In 1904, Sabina Spielrein enrolled as a student of medicine in Zurich. She had a breakdown a little while later and was admitted to the Burghölzli mental hospital where Carl Jung worked. The following year she resumed her studies.

She qualified as a doctor and was elected a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1911. It seems likely that she was intimately involved with Jung throughout that seven year period.

b) Sabina's brother, Isaac, was, himself, a psychoanalyst.