Fierz-David, Linda

Linda Fierz-David (1891–1964) was a German philologist and one of the first Jungian analysts in Zurich. She was the first woman admitted to the University of Basel, where she studied German philology. She met Carl Jung in 1920, becoming one of his first pupils and closest friends. She collected rare books and studied psychology, anthropology, mythology and literature. In 2007, a critic writing for the Spanish newspaper El Pais described Fierz-David as "one of the most notable investigators of analytical psychiatry, one of the group of notable women who worked with Carl Gustav Jung in Zurich and were his disciples, and, according to the professor's wife (in a letter to Freud), "all, naturally, fell in love with him." Susan Rowland, an authority on Jung and his female acolytes, writes that "the Fierz family and the Jungs became friends" in the 1920s, and that "Jung travelled with the husband while analysing Linda on her unorthodox romantic situation: she was in love with both her husband and an Italian cousin." Rowland notes that Fierz-David was nicknamed "Sieglinde" by Jung and that she "sought to remedy Jung's inattention to the feminine perspective."