Geoff wrote today's script without even knowing that Putting Jung In a Sack and Beating Him With A Stick is pretty high up on my list of intellectual history fantasies. Mainly as payback for all of the comically inaccurate yet still widely believed things he said about Nietzsche and Freud... He called the former a "decadent neurotic" and Freud a fame-seeking tyrant, and proceeded to denigrate their works and character with a phenomenal lack of insight so as to make himself seem more important and revolutionary than he in fact was.

Basically, Jung desperately needed to see himself as The Great Revolutionary of psychoanalysis, and so he desperately needed to believe himself to be wildly at ends, both professionally and personally, with his precursors. This caused him to invent a world in which everyone was out to insult him, when in fact people, and especially Freud, were consistently kind to him even as he repeatedly slapped them in the face. He insisted to the whole world that, after sending Freud his first book, Freud sent it back unread with a note saying "Heresy must be stamped out!" when in fact Freud read it, wrote Jung a couple of nice letters about its contents, and carried it with him on his travels. Again, Jung decided to take grievous offense that Freud did not swing by and say hello to him while he was visiting a cancer-ridden friend in Switzerland, screaming to everybody that would listen that Freud was so intimidated by his radical ideas that he couldn't stand personal contact with him. In fact, Freud had written Jung that he was coming to Switzerland, and it was Jung who refused to write back offering a convenient time to meet. Again and again, Jung lied and howled that he was the great misunderstood and maligned genius of the new wave of psychoanalysis. But he wasn't. Freud was entirely decent to him, and his ideas were never nearly as world-changing as he believed they were. Freud was more revolutionary at 80 than Jung was at 30.

There are other reasons to not like Jung to be found within his works, but it is here, in the self-serving and baseless disdain with which he treated his intellectual forbears that his pettiness as a thinker and human really shine through.

And so he's in a sack.

- Count Dolby von Luckner