The meeting between Freud and Jung in 1906 was a passionate one. Very shortly afterwards Freud designated Jung as the « crown prince » of his doctrine. Nevertheless Jung could not adhere unconditionally to Freud’s ideas for his experience as a psychiatrist had shown to himself, such conception could not be applied to that of psychosis.

When Jung developed his own notion of the concept of libido in The Psychology of the Unconscious in 1913, Freud felt personally attacked and “disowned” him, so to speak.

After his breakup with Freud, Jung wrote two texts in 1916, in which he explained his own conception of the psychic functioning. However, Jung did not publish them until the 1950’s because he was aware that such logic went against the mainstream of the traditional rational way of thinking and that he would not be understood by the scientific community. He had nonetheless the intuitive certainty about what he had observed. His clinical practice was indeed accurate, but he did not know how to “prove” it with the tools of rationalism.

In 1928, Jung received two ancient texts from the German sinologist Richard Wilhelm, which he had just translated. One was The Secret of the Golden Flower, and the other, the I Ching. These texts became a revelation for Jung, for he found in them the confirmation of his own theoretical hypothesis regarding the polarity and the paradoxical nature of the human functioning where the opposites were always balanced. This idea was diametrically opposed to the mainstream of Western rational thinking.