Margaret Erwin Schevill (7-25-1946)

Margaret Schevill Link (18871962), American ethnologist, of Arizona. As a student of literature and art she had worked for some time with Jung and became interested in the myths of the Navaho Indians

Dear Mrs. Schevill,

(a)

I'm terribly sorry X. has to suffer from cancer, in her case cancer really comes too early and it is a mean way of killing people anyhow. But nature is horrible in many respects. It is a fact that the body very often apparently survives the soul, often even without a disease. It is just as if the soul detached itself from the body sometimes years before death actually occurs, or sometimes with perfectly healthy people who are going to die within a short delay by acute illness or accident. As far as we know at all there seems to be no immediate decomposition of the soul. One could almost say, on the contrary

JL1 ¶ 0
(b)

It is curious that you mention the problem of transference and its importance for the problem of death. I'm just about to publish a book about the psychology of transference, where I try to elucidate its problems with reference to its metapsychical aspects

JL1 ¶ 0