Edith Rockefeller McCormick

Edith Rockefeller McCormick (1872–1932) was an American socialite and opera patron. McCormick was the fourth daughter of Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) and his wife Laura Spelman Rockefeller ("Cettie") (1839–1915). Her famous younger brother was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. wiki

"In 1913, following the deaths of two of her children and a long bout with tuberculosis of the kidney, she sunk into a deep depression. In what was to be a turning point in her life, Edith sought the help of Carl Jung, a charismatic Swiss psychiatrist and a close colleague of Sigmund Freud. She would spend the next eight years in Zurich, first as a patient and later as a collaborator and lay analyst. During that time, she became immersed in Jung’s artistic and humanistic techniques, and she underwrote his work. She also came in contact with many scholars and artists — among them James Joyce, whom she supported financially for a time.

"Emboldened by her newly found psychological insight, Edith reached out in letters to her estranged father: "There is warmth and love in your heart when one can get through all the outside barriers which you have thrown up to protect yourself — your own self — from the world," she wrote to him. But Rockefeller preferred not to probe the depths of his psyche. In his carefully worded responses, he would declare his fatherly love while politely declining to engage in such self-scrutiny: "Dear Daughter: I can think of nothing which I would more devoutly desire than that we should be constantly drawn closer and closer together, to the end the we may be of the greatest assistance to each other, not only, but to the dear ones so near and so dear to us."

"The rift between father and daughter would only grow wider with time. He couldn’t tolerate her extravagant lifestyle, her reckless spending or her peculiar choice of philanthropies; she thought him too rigid and judgmental, and resented the privileged treatment he had accorded his only son, the recipient of a disproportionate part of the Rockefeller fortune." Related

Her husband was Harold Fowler McCormick.

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