How Toni Wolff met Carl Jung

Toni Wolff’s mother brought her to Jung, because Toni was suffering from depression and disorientation much accentuated by the death of her father. She was an unusually intelligent girl of twenty-three. Jung, immediately recognizing that she needed a new goal to reawaken her interest in life (which had been shattered by her beloved father’s sudden death), got her to do some of the research work that was still needed for his then uncompleted book. Her interest was immediately stimulated by the material, with the best results on her depression and disorientation. She appears in the photograph of the Weimar congress in September, 1911, looking very much at home; indeed, she had already found a new and interesting circle of friends in the psychological group. That in itself was life-giving to Toni, for she came from an old Zürich family whose circle was too restricted in its interests and too steeped in tradition for a girl of her unusual intelligence to be able to find sufficient nourishment. This friendship with Toni Wolff is an example of how the unconscious itself seems to compensate one loss with a gain, and in the most unexpected way. Anyone who knew Frau Wolff, a charming but conventional woman, cannot help wondering what induced her to go outside the tradition of her circle and take her daughter to such an original young doctor who, moreover, was still publicly championing Freud, a physician rejected by conventional Zürich at that time.