Do you remember my friend Jake of PARODY and DREAMS fame? I ask because I had the unusual opportunity of receiving from his wife a confidential letter of very intimate nature, which I am transcribing here with minor modifications, as required by the nature of its contents. She learned from her husband basic notions on the workings of the unconscious, enough to write the following amazing account, which throws incandescent light on the universal underpinnings of divorce. I'm planning a serial recount, allowing for questions and answers between the sections. Well, let's start with the modified {by me} paragraph that opens her narrative.

".... I agreed with Jake that ** ****** had mismanaged the matter, yet at the same time I was against the hard way he had reacted. For all his vaunted psychological, humanistic and scientific knowledge, he was not above petty, primitively narcissistic emotional reactions. I couldn't help thinking that I was contemplating --in a microcosm-- the tragic state of all humanity. Although 'tragic' is perhaps not the appropriate adjective; it might be enough to detachedly suggest that mankind ---in the course of its evolution-- has not yet outgrown the stage of immature narcissism.

I couldn't fail to notice that Jake's hostile feelings toward ** ****** influenced his attitude toward me, which became even more remote. Thus, the conjunction was favorable for divorce. I initiated the present memoirs expecting that by the time I finished writing them, the parting would be a definitive, accomplished fact. Now I find myself almost at my writing's and wit's end, yet still being unable to decide, to make up my mind. Why? Did Jake's renewed interest in archetypes play a role on my indecision?

Following a lead of an archetype that he 'found' thirty years before, now he 'discovered' the way Man 'suddenly appeared' on the crust of our planet --while Woman 'slowly evolved.' Jake's theory explained why the human male behaves in his characteristically unacceptable way. Did Jake's ramblings affect my reasoning in a subtle way? And what shall I say about what he read to me from a book concerning "Coolidge's effect"?
If all this apparent nonsense was actually true, then I had been mistaken --gravely so-- in my judgments. I shudder at the thought of the shadows that the above mentioned speculations may cast upon man-woman relations. Yet as long as the world is the way it is, on should be open to new ideas, to fresh attempts at understanding.
When the rate of divorce has reached staggering proportions, it is time to think that there is something basically wrong in man-woman transactions. I do not have the answers, of course. So the only thing I can do is let the flux of my thoughts follow its untrammeled course.

I started mentioning the possible influence of archetypes upon my hesitancy in asking for divorce. Jake had learned from Jung's writings about archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, yet he had been unable to clearly grasp the meaning of those concepts until he came across them while practicing in a southern town of Colombia in 1951...