Psychiatry then, as so often now, was managed by men who, by virtue of their education and class, were far removed from the patients they treated. In Switzerland with its cantons and local dialects, apart from their illness, patients were not easily intelligible to their urban upper-class doctors, but both Jung and Bleuler had Swiss countryside backgrounds and had the advantage of being familiar with Swiss peasant dialects thus making them more accessible to their patients even before attending empathically to their patients’ words.
