As I mentioned, this took place during the early days of psychoanalysis, in which Jung became Freud's closest colleague and co-worker in its development and dissemination. Indeed, the senior Freud for some time considered C.G. Jung his "heir apparent" to psychoanalysis once he himself was gone. Though both Freud and Jung were traditionally trained as physicians, psychiatry, like psychotherapy, was really still in its infancy. While, as medical doctors, they both recognized and had sworn to uphold the Hippocratic ethic of maintaining professional boundaries with patients, the concepts of what Freud famously came to call "transference" and "counter-transference," while taken for granted today, were still poorly grasped, and there had been limited opportunity for psychoanalysts to gain practical clinical experience contending with these powerful phenomena. So psychotherapy was, in this sense, still highly experimental. Freud had witnessed more than a decade before he gave birth to psychoanalysis, in the work of fellow physician Josef Breuer (see the case of Anna O.), how a female patient's erotic love (transference) for the physician could develop and wreak havoc with the medical treatment and doctor. This case marked, for Freud, the germination of what he eventually came to call "psychoanalysis."

The potentiality of love erotically entering into psychotherapy (or other professional relationships) is a constant peril. Such feelings are natural enough when two people meet regularly, discuss the most intimate matters, and when one regularly receives support, encouragement, empathy, respect, understanding and acceptance from the other. Since we all instinctively and sometimes neurotically need and seek love (see Part One), psychotherapists are susceptible to becoming the object of a patient's passionate admiration or ardor, and, in some cases, succumb to this tempting siren call, typically with catastrophic consequences for both parties. This is evidently what happened to the then young, susceptible and inexperienced Dr. Jung. And it would not be the last of Jung's extramarital affairs with one of his patients: Some years later, following his bitter falling out with Freud and excommunication from the psychoanalytic circle, he turned for support during his horrific mid-life crisis to Antonia "Toni" Wolff, whom he had previously been treating for depression. Wolff, who, like Spielrein, also later became an analyst, was, by Jung's own admission, his "other wife," with whom he maintained an open relationship for decades until her death. She helped Jung through his darkest period, during which he temporarily descended into psychosis, providing the additional love and understanding he evidently desperately needed after he had effectively helped her by providing his during Wolff's analysis. (See my prior posts on Jung and Jung's Red Book.) It should be noted that Jung's own highly conflicted childhood relationship with his mentally ill mother had been the source of great confusion, pain, distrust, feelings of abandonment, loss and anger, and can be seen, at least partly, as the cause of his compelling counter-transference reactions to these female patients. So Jung, who had never himself been in analysis, because of his own unconscious and unresolved "love wound," tended, in some early cases, to take the "love cure" quite literally. And he, unfortunately, was not the only analyst guilty of such unprofessional behavior.