[Buddha-l] freud jung

[Katherine Masis]

Dan,
 
>Was Sabina Spielrein in a forced or a consensual relationship with Jung?

Irrelevant. As recognized by the ethics of the therapeutic profession, and
by legal systems in the US (and I imagine elsewhere), a therapist sleeping
with a patient is a no-no. She is incapable of proper consent. Read up on
what Freud says about "transference" for an explanation of why that is the
case. Additionally, she was not his only indiscretion. Last time I counted,
there were five or six patients implicated.
 
K >> I am definitely not advocating that therapists sleep with their clients/patients.  It is an awful, terrible misuse and abuse of power that is devastating to the client/patient.  Back in the early days of analysis, there was a lot of fuzziness regarding professional boundaries. After her analysis (and affair) with Jung, Sabina went on to be an analyst herself.  Rudolf Lowenstein had an affair with Ruth Mack, then had an affair with Marie Bonaparte.  Lowenstein also analyzed Bonaparte's son in the middle of their romance, a professional boundary violation that would be frowned upon today.
 
>Is it really true that Freud had a longstanding affair with his
sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, right in his own home and enabled by Martha,
his wife?

Probably not. But even if it were, as long as she was not his patient, this
would not be a comparable situation (it would raise other problems). Freud
once noted that, unlike some others, he never personally benefitted from the
sexual revolution he was accused of fomenting (that was, among other things,
an indirect allusion to Jung).
 
K >> You're right, it is only probable that he did not.  It is also probable that he did.  My point is that we will likely never know.  You're also right in that it would not be a comparable situation.  But the problems it would raise would be just as awful, terrible and devastating--to Martha Bernays, atl least.

Thanks for illustrating another rhetorical strategy people use to make the
pain go away and avoid the unpleasant admission: False parity. X is off the
hook because Y also does it (even when in reality, Y didn't do it).
 
K >> Would you please clarify who is letting who off the hook--far be it from my intention to let anyone off the hook.

Buddhist celibacy rules were designed to side-step all this, although a
survey of the vinaya literature and the history of sangha practice suggests
the problems don't go away that easily. Gurus hitting on their devotees
(another subject discussed on this list quite awhile ago) continues to be a
problem -- and engendered many controversies amongst Western practitioners
under "Eastern" teachers (including Westerners assuming the mantel of the
Eastern teacher).
 
K >> Yes, I agree.  Both Eastern and Western spiritual teachers have no mandatory effective peer organizations at this moment in time to keep things in check.

> P.S. I'm using << >> instead of regular quotation marks because they are
showing as ? in my posts on this list. Any suggestions?

Turn off smart quotes. Your program is not using the standard ASCII code for
quotation marks; the code it is using is getting jumbled as it passes
through the servers.
 
K >> I will turn off the smart quotes, even though they have never given me problems before.

cheers,
Dan