Synopsis "Freud-Binswanger Correspondence 1908 (in English)"
Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) came from a distinguished Swiss psychiatrist dynasty that had run the internationally renowned sanitarium, Bellevue, in Kreuzlingen for generations. In 1907 he spent a year at the Zurich Burgholzli under Bleuler and Jung, and indeed it was Jung who took Binswanger with him to Vienna that year for his first visit with Freud.The correspondence between the two men blossomed, and they became both friends and admirers of one another's work. Freud wrote to Binswanger on December 26, 1911: "I am quite sure you will live to see the recognition of psychoanalysis and that you will then be glad to have been among the rebels in your youth."The letters show that Freud hoped, above all, that Binswanger would be the bridge between his life's work and academic and clinical psychiatry. And indeed, Binswanger did use psychoanalytic techniques of treatment and established them in his clinic. But he was never to become a partisan of the psychoanalytic movement, and eventually developed his own psychotherapeutic direction, "existential analysis."Even though Binswanger did not build the hoped-for bridges between psychoanalytic method and clinical treatment, the relationship between them remained warm and cordial. Their differences of opinion, well-documented in this correspondence, were aired in a free and open manner, without personal animosity. Freud wrote to Binswanger: "Unlike so many other people, you have not allowed your intellectual development, which you have increasingly removed from my influence, to destroy our personal relationship, and you have no idea how much good such refinement does for a person."
