Gerhard Wehr on Carl Jung and “The Inevitable Break” with Freud
The Inevitable Break
Predictably, Freud and Jung’s visit to America brought far-reaching consequences for the reception psychoanalysis received in the United States. Abraham A.
Brill translated Jung’s lectures, which had been given in German, and published them in American professional periodicals that had also reprinted Freud’s texts. From then on the number of publications on psychoanalysis generally increased.
Respected Americans, among them James J. Putnam, declared themselves in Freud’s favor at medical conferences.
Already in 1911 the American Psychoanalytic Association was formed in the United States, with Putnam as president and Ernest Jones as secretary.
As was to be expected, Jung’s contributions at this time made a strong case for psychoanalysis, and the two men’s friendship still continued.
The foreseeable shifts in emphasis, for example on the role assigned to sexuality, were scarcely noticed from the outside.
Since their journey, however, there was no question that Jung had recently been tending ever more strongly toward a mythopsychology that would enable him to get closer to the archetypal structural elements of the psyche.
What he was striving to do, as his correspondence with Freud documents, was to put “the symbolic” on a “psychogenetic” footing.
Hardly had he returned to his everyday work when Jung reported to Vienna on his intense activity and his heightened interest in mythology, as well as the archeology he had neglected for several years.
He was studying Herodotus; all four volumes of Fredrich Creuzer’s Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Peoples were receiving a careful rereading, along with Jakob Burckhardt’s four-volume Cultural History of Greece and Erwin Rohde’s Psyche.
The comparative mythological material revealed surprising prospects.
In addition he read pertinent works by authors in English.
And in the same letter of8 November 1909 in which Jung reported all this, we find the oracular statement: “Sooner or later polemics are certainly going to arise within our camp.”
The immediate reference was to Freud’s Viennese disciple Wilhelm Stekel, whose style had long been difficult to tolerate.
How little suspicion Freud and Jung had of the fundamental divergence in their assessments of mythical material is shown in Freud’s answer:
“I am glad that you share my conviction that we must thoroughly conquer mythology.”
It remained to be seen, of course, in what sense this would have to happen.
In any case, as early as late January 1910, Jung mentioned that he had given a whole series of lectures on the psychogenetic approach to symbolism, showing how essentially the fantasy life of the individual is connected with mythological material.
This was about the time when the beginnings of Jung’s later Symbols of Transformation first saw the light of day.
The two correspondents were still unaware of the consequences that would result from this only a few years later-as much for the further development of psychoanalytical research as for the personal relationship between Freud and Jung.
For Freud, Jung’s mythological studies were still refreshing.
Besides, there was hardly time for forebodings or suspicions, for both were thoroughly swamped with work.
Jung’s practice was for the moment relatively quiet, and therefore he turned his full attention to lecturing activity and the teaching of his students, with twelve weekly seminars of university training in psychoanalysis.
One of these students to whom Jung devoted much time and individual attention was Johann Jakob Honegger (1885-1911), who had already been his assistant at the Burgholzi and promised to become an important representative of psychoanalysis, until his suicide at the age of twenty-six.
Further adding to the extent of Jung’s professional duties, the compiling and editing of the / Jahrbuch that had been decided upon at Salzburg required some effort, and meanwhile the preparation and organization of a second Congress of Psychoanalysts had also become necessary.
Moreover it should not be forgotten that the young father had his three children, Agathe, Greta, and Franz, to look after, and a fourth child was already on the way.
Duties of quite another sort arose for the doctor in consequence of his permanent status in the military reserves, for he had to go on field maneuvers for
some weeks every year, which time always had to be reconciled with the rest of his calendar.
Jung knew from experience that conflicts could not always be avoided, for instance when in the midst of his conference preparations, on 8 March, he
was called to Chicago for about a week by his patient Harold McCormick-a second trip to America.
Of course he arranged for a substitute: the young Dr. Honegger took over his patients, and Emma Jung stepped in to do all that could be asked of the head secretary of a doctor with an international clientele.
The experiment succeeded, plunging the master in Vienna into distinct agitation.
He was anxious for Jung’s prompt return and confided in the Swiss clergyman Oskar Pfister: “What will happen if my Zurichers forsake me?”
A word of ill omen!
But things did not-yet-go so far as this.
In fact the psychoanalytical conference took place as planned on 3 0 and 3 1 March 1910 in the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg, Freud made some introductory remarks on the future prospects of psychotherapy; Abraham, Honegger, Ferenczi, Adler, Stekel, and Maeder gave reports.
Jung reported on the Clark conference, as one who had just completed his second, albeit very short, stay in America, thus providing the virtue of immediacy.
One notable result of the Nuremberg Congress was the establishment of the International Psychoanalytic Association, with C. G. Jung as its president and its headquarters at the president’s home, and thus not in Vienna but-for about four more years-in Zurich and Kusnacht.
In addition the existing Jahrbuch was supplemented by the monthly newsletter Zentralblatt for Psychoanalyse-Medizinische Monatsschrift fur Seelenforschung.
What went on behind the scenes has been preserved in differing versions and sheds light on the predicament in which Freud found himself.
His concern was that he would be forced by necessity into having to represent psychoanalysis to the world without the Zurich contingent.
In order to be able to present a personality as well-known as he was circumspect, and who was furthermore not of Jewish descent, the choice fell as one might expect on C.G. Jung, for an initial term of two years.
A few days after the congress Freud wrote to Ferenczi, one of the very few-next to Jung-in whom he placed his undivided trust:
“With the Nuremberg meeting our movement’s infancy comes to a close; this is my impression. I hope that now there will come a rich and handsome youth. ”
All in all, it was a hope that was belied by the actual developments of the next few years.
For the psychoanalytical movement these years were marked by the famous secessions, the withdrawals first of Alfred Adler and then Wilhelm Stekel.
The correspondence between Freud and Jung, for the most part with great candidness, documents the persistent tensions that existed especially within
the Vienna group, but also in the wider ranks of the young psychoanalytic movement, which despite furious assaults gained ground continually in the psychiatric profession as well as in public opinion.
On European soil, alongside Vienna and Zurich, local groups sprang up in Berlin, Munich, London, and Budapest, and they were joined by psychoanalytic associations in the United States.
Jung’s qualifications to hold the office of president were universally acknowledged, but Ferenczi’s proposal in Nuremberg, that his widely esteemed
colleague from Zurich should be immediately entrusted with this leading role for an indefinite period, was bound to provoke the opposition of Adler and other Vienna members.
On this account Freud saw himself compelled to make some compromises.
The delegation of Adler and Stekel to edit the Zentralblatt represented one such concession, as did Freud’s transferring the leadership of the Vienna Association to Adler-measures, as it turned out, that remained in effect for only a very limited time.
While Jung informed Vienna in the spring of 1910 that psychiatrists and authorities of the prestige of Emil Kraepelin were labeling the Zurich group-with Jung at their head-as “mystics and spiritualists,” and that therefore only limited confidence could be placed in them, at the same time he
reported the liveliness of his “mythological dreams.”
About these, he said, only a little was divulged even to friends, and he was consciously curbing his desire for publication.
On the subject of his secret-enshrouded inner experiences, Jung’s impression was:
“It often seems to me as if l have been hauled alone into a strange land, and see wondrous things that no one has yet seen and which no one else even needs to see.”
Reading the letters of the years from 1910 to 1912, one feels that Jung, who elsewhere was so communicative, when it came to discussing his mythopsychological investigations, made use of a decidedly theatrical technique of allusion, quotation, and intimation, along with a tactic of concealment.
But this was clearly prompted by the subject matter itself and by the still wholly unfinished process of discovery and probing whose end he himself could not yet foresee.
Repeatedly he lamented that he could not express himself adequately in written form.
Nevertheless the process of development of his inquiries is visible:
In May of 1910 Jung presented a lecture in Herisau “on symbolism … , mythological stuff which got the greatest applause.”
Freud, answering on 26 May, was already looking forward to reading “a fine piece soon” from Jung’s pen.
Then, in early June, “My mythology is oscillating in an inner motion of its own, and here and there meaningful pieces are ‘proffered up.”‘
The mystery cult of Mithras, the ancient Persian light-religion that once offered serious competition to Christianity, had stirred Jung’s interest.
On this he gathered important comparative religious data from such works as those of Albrecht Dieterich, which had appeared a few years earlier.
Freud was by no means disinclined to such interests; on the contrary, his own study “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood” already pointed in this direction and was completed at the same time, in the summer of 1910.
Jung was not only pleasantly surprised, but he remarked in it a transition to mythology, and this “out of inner necessity.”
Moreover this was the first writing of Freud’s to which Jung felt himself “perfectly in tune” from the start.
Freud was gratified to note this affirmation.
For his part the master in Vienna took satisfaction in observing that his spiritual “son and successor” worked exactly as he did himself:
“You lie in wait to see where your inclination draws you, and leave the obvious straight way untrodden. I believe this is the right thing too; afterward one is astonished at how logical all these detours have been. ”
So it was only natural that “coincidence” should play into his hands with material showing similar motifs, for when Jung undertook a bicycling tour to Italy in October, he discovered in the Museo Civico in Verona a purportedly Mithraic sculpture, depicting a bull grasping a snake in its forefoot, like a Roman stele of Priapus, with the snake’s bite aimed at the penis.
Jung connected the phenomenon with the sacrificial notions that he thoroughly interpreted later in Symbols of Transformation.
His correspondence with Freud, particularly in the summer of 1910, also affords glimpses into the development of his thinking and theorizing with regard to the libido.
After his return from Italy it was back again “full steam” to the “mythology work,” and along with his practice in Kusnacht the beginning of the upcoming semester created a further distraction for the Zurich lecturer.
The bright tone of Jung’s letters of the summer and fall of 1910 was not lost on his correspondent in Vienna.
There were definite reasons for it: his family was getting on splendidly; his third daughter, Marianne, had just been born.
This of course did not prevent the Jung family from also feeling a growing concern over “the blessing of too many children.”
“For”-as he once confided some months later to the fatherly Freud-“one seeks, with little confidence, every possible trick to stem the tide of this
unstoppable blessing somewhat.
One muddles through, so to speak, from one menstrual period to the next …. ”
But on the whole the father from Kusnacht’s love for his children won out.
His good mood was further prompted by his growing clientele, which had long since assumed international dimensions.
The house on Lake Street was filled “with the babble of German-French-English voices that my bloodsuckers raise.”
Amid all this yet another quick consultation abroad was required, this time in London.
Of course, this was only for patients who could also afford to pay their psychiatrist’s fee.
Thus in Jung’s case the need to make money, of which Freud so often spoke, was hardly a problem.
Further variety, besides family, research, teaching, and practice, was provided by Swiss medical Captain Jung’s annual two-week military exercises.
As a passionate sailor with his own jolly-boat, built in 1907, he was also able to obtain the relaxation he needed, as for another fortnight during this autumn he cruised about Lake Constance under sail.
Then, before the year’s end, there came an incidental announcement that was bound to stir Freud’s interest anew, concerning the growing mythology manuscript:
“It seems as if had hit the bull’s-eye this time, or come very close, because the material is falling into place surprisingly well.”
He did not reveal any more, but an explicit and eloquent warning for the further course of the two men’s relationship went with it.
Freud, Jung said, should be prepared for something strange, “the likes of which has never yet been heard from me.”
And, with a twinge of insecurity or worry, there followed his assertion that his conscience was clear.
He had after all worked honestly and done nothing offhandedly-as if his “father” could have entertained any doubts on that score!
When Jung saw a performance of Goethe’s Faust in January 1911, he said regarding the mythology-steeped second part that his “respected great-grandfather” (Goethe) would have approved of what he was writing, because the great-grandson had “continued and extended his ancestor’s thinking.”
Although the self-mocking tone of this note should not be overlooked, it reverberated too with the satisfaction that with this work he could now stand up to Goethe.
The analyst was certainly conscious of the fact that he needed this assurance, should criticism come from those in Vienna or from Freud himself, and
the presentiment was not unfounded, for the book being prepared, its scope continually growing, was to bear the title Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, “Transformations and Symbols of the Libido,” translated as Psychology of the Unconscious.
Part 1 appeared in the Jahrbuch fitr psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen in 1 911, Part 2 in 1912.
In the same year the separate book edition was published by the firm of Franz Deuticke of Leipzig and Vienna, which had also produced other psychoanalytical writings.
At the age of seventy-five, offering the substantially revised, partly shortened and partly expanded work under the new title of Symbols of Transformation, Jung commented:
This book was written in 1911, in my thirty-sixth year.
The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs. I was acutely conscious, then, of the loss of friendly relations with Freud and of the lost comradeship of our work together. The practical and moral support which my wife gave me at that difficult period is something I shall always hold in grateful remembrance.But to return to the time when the first version of the work originated: Along with mythology, psychology of religion, and investigation of the manifestations of unconscious fantasies came a renewed interest in the occult. The motto was, “We shall also have to conquer occultism.”
It dawned on Jung how informative the consideration of astrological aspects could be for the understanding of mythology as well as for psychotherapeutic practice.
Thus he spent many an evening poring over horoscopic calculations, tracking down the true psychological content of astrological results.
In the signs of the zodiac Jung recognized symbols of the libido, which indicated the typical qualities of the libido or character at a given time.
There was one patient, for example, whose star chart tallied exactly with a definite character sketch, including a number of detailed predictions.
But it turned out that one particular feature fit not the patient but her mother.
The analyst’s diagnosis, which could also serve as a clarification of the apparent contradictions, was that the patient was suffering from an extraordinary mother complex-undoubtedly an interesting problem for both psychologists and astrologers.
For the most part, though, the Vienna master was willing to let his younger friend intoxicate himself “on magical fragrances for a while.”
After this, he thought, he would return in due time from the land of secrets with a rich booty for the knowledge of the human soul.
From previous experience Freud had long known of Jung’s inclinations and talents with respect to parapsychology, and he had no doubt that he would “return home with a rich cargo.”
On the basis of what he had attained so far, he would not have to incur the “disgrace” (!) of having turned into a mystic.
Freud even promised “to believe everything that can be made to seem the least bit reasonable. As you know, I do not do so gladly. But my hubris has been shattered.”
But on the other hand he could not forbear to offer a serious admonition as well:
“Only don’t stay too long away from us in those lush tropical colonies; it is necessary to govern at home.”
Under no circumstances-so he told Jones-could Freud participate in such “dangerous expeditions.”
Be that as it might, Jung’s report on his lengthy work in the psychology of religion could not fail to have its effect on Freud, for he was working around the same time on related themes, which he published as Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913).
The preface, written in Rome in 1913, mentions at least in passing pertinent works of the “Zurich school of psychoanalysis.”
But during the book’s composition, which was not entirely without problems, At the Weimar Congress, September 1 911.
Emma Jung is seated at center, with Toni Wolff at the far right and Lou Andreas-Salome at the far left. C. G. Jung is standing behind his wife, with Sigmund Freud to his right.
Freud once let the remark slip out to Jung, “why the devil did I have to let myself be incited to follow you into this field?”
There are many convincing indications of the high degree of intimacy and personal closeness in the years-long friendship between Freud and Jung.
One of these is surely the repeatedly expressed need they both felt, busy as they were, for face-to-face meetings and deep conversation.
Of course this was also made necessary by the manifold troubles Jung was having in Zurich with Bleuler and the Burgholzli clan, and Freud with the “Adler gang” in Vienna.
A brief encounter took place at the beginning of the Christmas holiday in Munich, and after this meeting Freud gave Ferenczi his opinion of Jung:
“I am more than ever convinced that he is the man of the future.”
But for how much longer?
More opportunity for an exchange of thoughts was afforded by the Third International Psychoanalytic Congress, which took place on 21 and 22 September 1911 in the Hotel Reprint in Weimar by way of Zurich.
Jung picked up his visitor at the railroad station in Zurich early on the morning of 16 September.
James Putnam had arrived from the United States.
After seminars and receptions as well as intensive discussions in Jung’s home, they departed from Zurich on the nineteenth. Together with Eugen Bleuler and eight or ten colleagues, the Zurich contingent represented a respectable delegation, making up about a fifth of the entire congress.
The roster of participants numbered fifty-five persons.
About a dozen lectures and brief reports covered not only psychopathological topics, but for the first time also interdisciplinary ones, including for example philosophy (Putnam) and mythology and symbolism (Otto Rank and C. G. Jung).
Undoubtedly a novelty at the Weimar Congress was the participation of several women, as documented by the impressive group photo with the ladies included.
The fact that Emma Jung took her place in the first row not only as her husband’s wife but also as his colleague was justified, for example, by her etymological contributions to Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. Jung introduced as a “charming American lady” Dr. Beatrice M. Hinkle, one of the first woman psychiatrists; as a student of Freud and Jung she later translated his book into English as The Psychology of the Unconscious.
Dr. Sabina Spielrein, Jung’s erstwhile patient and sometime friend and student, is missing from the photo.
In her place had come, as Jung customarily referred to her, “a new discovery of mine,”
Antonia (Toni) Wolff, his other close female friend and closest collaborator for some forty years.
Finally, wrapped in a great long fur, Lou Andreas-Salome appears in the picture, a youthful-appearing woman in her fifties who had once been courted unsuccessfully by both Nietzsche and his friend Ree, and who was the lover and traveling companion of the young Rilke.
The Swedish physician and analyst Poul Bjerre, also a very close friend, had brought her with him to Weimar when he came from Stockholm.
Anyone who might entertain the suspicion that Frau Lou was there merely to make an appearance, the avant-garde pioneers of psychoanalysis
being just what she needed for the purpose, must stand corrected.
A few months after the Weimar meeting, Abraham reported to Vienna how highly he regarded the professional abilities of this fascinating woman:
“One attendee of the Weimar Congress, Frau Lou Andreas-Salome, was recently in Berlin for some time. I have become closely acquainted with
her and must say that I have never met with such an understanding of psychoanalysis down to the last and smallest detail. ”
Thus Lou brought the best qualifications with her when she found acceptance as a colleague “in the Freudian school.”
And this was not all, for when it came-shortly after Weimar-to the first psychoanalytic secessions, Freud allowed her, as a rare exception, to be a regular visitor to the internal Wednesday gatherings at Berggasse as well as to Alfred Adler’s circle, and so she was able to evaluate independently
the contributions made by both.
Jung’s efforts, especially his “disastrous recent work,” found little favor with Frau Lou, and the two remained strangers.
From 1912 we turn back again to the fall of 1911: While Freud looked back in a radiant light on the days in Zurich and Weimar, and Jung was snatched away on military service in the mountainous regions of the Swiss interior in October of that year, Freud received some unexpected mail from Kusnacht.
In her husband’s absence Emma Jung was writing to discuss her view of the state of affairs between the two men.
It had occurred to her at any rate that the friendship that was valued so highly on both sides concealed an obviously deep-seated problem, which might well come into the open as a result ofJung’s Psychology of the Unconscious.
Thus the young wife advised the master in Vienna that the two men should “just talk this over quite thoroughly,” much more thoroughly than had been the case-so far at least-of late.
We do not have the “nice kind letter,” as Emma found it, with Freud’s answer.
But from Emma’s second writing, which immediately followed, we know how anxiously Jung was awaiting Freud’s opinion of his latest work.
And sure enough, the plucky correspondent reached into the arsenal of psychoanalytical concepts to interpret the phenomenon.
In her husband’s case, she said, it was the remnant of an unresolved father or mother complex, for (so went her pointed argument): “actually Carl,
when he thinks something is right, has never been able to care about any other opinion”-and thus not even Freud’s.
This is followed by a series of suggestions and bits of advice that attest impressively to the young woman’s mature personality and her ability to stand up to the father of psychoanalysis.
Finally this new letter ended with an emphatic recommendation:
“Think of Carl not with the feelings of a father … , but as one person does of another, who like you must follow his own law.” For the rest, she hoped the wise old master would not be angry with her.
How could he!
About a week after this pregnant epistle, the unsuspecting (of these events) Jung had Freud’s reaction to Emma’s letter in hand.
According to it, the new volume was “one of the nicest works … of a well-known author,” as Freud wrote to this very same author.
It was, he said, certainly the best thing he had produced so far, though not the best that he would accomplish an extremely cautious critique, to the extent that it was one at all.
Freud’s letter was dominated by the “many points of agreement” that he attested to.
He even worried about how he, a successful master in the realm of the psychology of religion, could avoid appropriating relevant ideas from his more competent “successors” in these spiritual regions.
One might have wondered where such scrupulous solicitude would end.
After all, Part 2 of the work had not yet been finished in November 1911, and thus Freud had not seen it.
It was this section that dealt with the controversial libido theory, the touchstone of all classical psychoanalysis.
In his letters Jung revealed only that the purely sexually defined concept of libido, as it had been established in Freud’s fundamental Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), would have to be extended to include the “genetic factor,” that is that the exclusively sexual motivation should be given up-the depths of heresy, and nothing less!
The chosen crown prince must have forgotten what the elderly autobiographer recalled so vividly, the earnest commandment that Freud had impressed on him at their first meeting: “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.”
Yet this very chosen successor was about to raze the bastions and relinquish the dogma.
Emma Jung appealed to Freud with two further letters in November 1911.
Mirrored in these lines we see the anxious and uncertain side of C. G. Jung, who put the finishing touches on the portentous second part of his study only after grappling with hesitation and great inner resistances.
Finally the young woman broached the problem she faced at the side of her (almost) universally respected husband, basking in the early glow of his fame as a doctor: “From time to time I am plagued by conflict as to how I can be noticed next to Carl; I find that I have no friends, but that everyone who comes to visit us really only wants to see Carl, aside from a few boring people who are totally uninteresting to me.”
And where in the previous letter Emma Jung had asked for discretion vis-à-vis her husband, adding expressly, “things are hard enough on me
already,” now she became somewhat more explicit, for she complained:
“Naturally the women are all in love with him, and to the men I am off limits immediately, like the wife of one’s father or friend. But I do have a strong need for people, and Carl also says I should stop concentrating as I have up to now on him and the children, but what am I supposed to do?”
Naturally she was careful to avoid naming names in her complaint.
But apart from the general crowd of women who accompanied Jung’s life out of personal as well as professional interest, there were especially the two “affairs,” first with Sabina Spielrein and then the very much longer one with Toni Wolff.
But this was hardly a revelation to Freud; on the contrary, he had been quite well informed for some time, at least in the case of Spielrein, especially since Jung had taken him into his confidence.
Here a brief flashback to the year 1908-1909 is necessary.
The young Russian Sabina Spielrein, some eleven years Jung’s junior, had been studying medicine at the University of Zurich since 1905.
Jung cured her of a severe neurosis and presented her case in his lecture at a conference in Amsterdam in 1 907.
With her dissertation, “Concerning the Psychological Content of a Case of Schizophrenia (Dementia Praecox)” she earned the medical doctorate in 1 911, showing herself in this as in a number of other works to be a gifted student of C. G. Jung, although late in 1911 she went to Vienna and attached herself to the Psychoanalytic Association there.
Jung mentioned Spielrein’s works several times in his own books.
Eventually she made a name for herself as an analyst and later as a lecturer at the North Caucasus University in Rostov-on-Don, and while she was in Geneva, from 1921 to 1923, the famous child psychologist Jean Piaget underwent analysis with her.
Hence there was no question about her high professional qualifications.
The transference that occurred during her own analysis with Jung (while he was at the Burgholzli) meanwhile led to an intense love affair.
At the critical phase in this event he wrote to Freud on 7 March 1909-at first without mentioning any names:
A patient whom I extricated years ago from the most severe neurosis has betrayed my confidence and my friendship in the most offensive way imaginable. She has caused a nasty scandal for me, simply because I chose to forgo the pleasure of begetting a child with her. I have always remained a perfect gentleman toward her, but before my somewhat too sensitive conscience I still do not feel clean, and that is what hurts the most …. These painful and yet extremely salutary realizations have gnawed at me hellishly, but because of this they have, so I hope, ensured moral qualities in me that will be of the greatest benefit in my later life.
His relationship with his wife, he said, had not been damaged at all; it had actually gained in depth and security.
But he did have to admit that despite all his self-analysis it was only through the Spielrein affair that he first discovered his “polygamous components.”
Not unsympathetically, but with the requested sobriety, Freud answered: “Being slandered and singed by the love with which we operate are our occupational hazards, but we are not really going to give up the profession on their account.”
And a few weeks later, on 7 June 1909:
“Such experiences, although painful, are necessary and hard to avoid. Only with them does one really know life and the thing he has got hold of. I myself have never actually been taken in quite so badly,” asserted the fifty-three-year-old, adding, “but I have been very close several times and had a narrow escape.”, matter in analysis one was of course “invariably” faced with the so-called countertransference; that is, the analyst was in a position not only to become the object of the patient’s emotions, but in turn to develop feelings of personal sympathy and affection, if not love, toward the analysand.
It is true of course that this touches on only one side of the phenomenon, the side that Jung later referred to and set forth in more detail as the problem of a man’s anima.
This problem was posed in no less painful and significant a way for those concerned here.
Sabina Spielrein, as we know today, kept a careful diary of her encounter with Jung.
Emma Jung, an extremely sensitive young wife and mother (some of her pregnancies fell during the time of the Spielrein affair), had a double burden to bear, especially with her knowledge of the tension that existed between Jung and Freud, which in loyalty to her husband she wished to help reduce.
And just at this moment, when Sabina Spielrein had barely left the stage in Kusnacht, a new arrival came on the scene, the twenty-three-year-
old Toni Wolff of Zurich (b. 1888), who became Jung’s patient because of a severe depression after the sudden death of her father in 1909, and only two years later, of course, took part in the Weimar Congress of Psychoanalysts.
But in the case of Toni Wolff it would certainly be a mistake to speak of a mere transference and countertransference in the analytical sense, or to proceed from the simple formula of “cherchez la femme.”
Such a superficial view is precluded especially by the larger biographical context, although Jung did make it extremely difficult for his biographers to shed any light on this intimate relationship.
He destroyed his letters to Toni Wolff, which were returned to him after her death in 1953, together with those she had written to him.
On the other hand it is surely no coincidence that Emma Jung devoted a study to the anima- and animus-problem in men and women; certainly it was an opportunity for her to work out the difficulties in this regard which she faced in her own marriage.
But between the composition of this text and Emma Jung’s exchange of letters with Freud there was a gap of at least two decades.
Only after his break with Freud did Jung himself gain an insight into the nature of the so-called soul-images of animus and anima.
As far as the relationship between Freud and Jung is concerned, this much at least is certain:
It was not any affair with a woman-here that with Sabina Spielrein-that prompted their split, as has occasionally been suggested, for example by
Bruno Bettelheim.
For Spielrein, who had been discussed from a professional and collegial point of view, was long out of the picture when the tensions arose which were to lead to the eventual break between Freud and Jung.
And Freud would hardly have been considered a potential rival with regard to his much younger colleague.
Far more weight must be given to the wider professional and theoretical differences between them.
Thus, four weeks after the Weimar Congress, the suspicion surfaces in one of Jung’s letters “that so-called ‘early recollections of childhood’ are not individual memories at all.” Jung spoke of “phylogenetic reminiscences” and informed Freud of his conviction that it would be seen that
“unbelievably many more things than we now suppose” could be traced to such nonpersonal or super personal recollections.
From here it was no longer a great step from Freud’s personal unconscious to the “collective unconscious.”
As yet the growing discrepancy between the two men’s views remained unseen.
And although, another four weeks later, Jung did see in Freud “a dangerous rival” in matters of the psychology of religion, this assessment was considerably mitigated by the context.
Freud meanwhile remained anxious about what Jung really meant in practice by his occasional announcement of a widening of the sexually determined concept of the libido, and just this was to be the subject of the already mentioned Part 2.
Tension was foreseen; an entire chapter would be devoted to the outcome of several years of deliberation.
Jung attempted to forestall trouble by advising Freud, “You must allow my interpretation to work as a whole. Fragments are hardly intelligible.”
For sometimes it is precisely the context of a statement that makes clear its scope and significance.
From his return letter of 17 December 1911 it can be gathered that Freud even seems to have felt that Jung would be helping to illuminate “an obscure point” of psychoanalytic theory.
But it was precisely the point on which Freud, in his quasidogmatic commitment, had no intention of retreating.
The rest of the news Jung sent from Zurich was positive.
“The Psychoanalytic Association is thriving and growing,” he said in mid-February 1912.
He reported on successful lectures, one before six hundred Swiss teachers, another to 15 0 students.
As an agitator for psychoanalysis he compared himself proudly with “Roland’s Horn,” probably referring to the Roland who figures as one of the paladins of Charlemagne in the Karlssaga.
It would not have been hard for the analyst, thinking as he did in metaphors and analogies, to make the association that the nearly six-foot-one Carl from Kusnacht, whom his Jewish colleagues especially, including his friend Sabina, used to call the “blond Siegfried,” was himself really a
“Carlus Magnus.”
In view of the strides that the psychoanalytic movement was making in Zurich, disagreement was unavoidable.
Now it was set in motion by a publicity campaign that gave the Jungians, and Jung himself, the opportunity of placing their goals and methods in an accurate light, as opposed to popular vulgarizations and corruptions.
In any case, the controversy showed that not only did people object to the Freudian sexual theory on the grounds of a Victorian pseudo morality, but a role was also played by a fear of wider circles that psychoanalysis was a materialistic and atheistic worldview comparable to the scarcely overcome monism of the likes of Ernest Haeckel.
And because the real opposition in such movements so often forms within their own ranks, Jung once remarked:
Our real opponents will be those who commit the greatest atrocities with psychoanalysis, as they are already doing, according to their strengths, with all the means at their disposal. Woe to psychoanalysis in the hands of these fleecers and fools!
The further progress of the relationship between Freud and Jung was determined by various factors.
At the center, becoming ever clearer to Freud, stood the discrepancy in the question of the nature of the libido, which Jung could no longer see
as restricted to the sexual drive.
For him libido was more and more a universal psychic or life energy, whose “transformations” or ability to be altered he was striving to show in the
work in question.
The beginnings of such a new conception of energy were of course already found in his writings on dementia praecox, and in the above-mentioned publicity campaign he gave the impression that his own approach was equally universal:
I have asserted consistently for years in my courses and writings that the concept of libido should be understood in an extremely general way, somewhat in the sense of the preservation of the species, referring, in psychoanalytical terminology, not to “local sexual excitation” but to all the
urges and desires reaching beyond the area of self-preservation, and should be applied in this sense.
But right here he came into conflict with Freud, who on 23 March 1912 voiced “strong antipathy” toward such innovations or extensions.
At the same time he detected a fatal similarity to one of the theorems of Alfred Adler, who had finally withdrawn from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society after the Weimar Congress and was in the process of developing his
own psychology of the individual.
Jung expressed sorrow, but in no way did he wish to emulate Adler’s disloyalty, as he explicitly asserted.
In the same letter in which Freud expressed his displeasure still as ever with the salutation “Dear friend”-we also find a note that he would be in Constance during Whitsuntide to visit the sickbed of their mutual colleague and friend Ludwig Binswanger, and thus would be rather close to Jung.
But a meeting, which up to now they had both always tried hard to achieve, did not come about this time.
Whereas Freud, in his letter of 13 June, was able to offer good reasons for this failure, Jung voiced the suspicion that he had to attribute
Freud’s forgoing a meeting “to your displeasure with my development of the theory.”
Of course, he said, he hoped they could come to an understanding later on the controversial points, but he also invoked his national mentality: “With the Swiss obstinacy which you know so well, it seems I must travel a longer stretch of road alone,” reads his letter to Freud of 8 June.
Jung wrote these lines as he was engaged in the preparation of lectures that were about to bring the internal controversy in the profession out in the open.
He had been invited for a second time to speak in the United States, this time on his own, at the Jesuit-run Fordham University in the Bronx.
There were to be nine teaching sessions, which he took as an opportunity to present and defend in detail his most important divergences from Freud.
Thus to the discord and partial distancing already mentioned was now added public criticism, even though in this presentation of “The Theory of Psychoanalysis” Jung still felt gratefully indebted to his “revered teacher Sigmund Freud.”
Jung’s criticism, he said, had resulted not from academic reasoning, but from experiences that have forced themselves upon me through ten years of serious work in this field.
I know that my experience in no way rivals the extraordinary experience and insight of Freud, but nevertheless it seems to me that certain of my formulations express the empirical facts more aptly than is the case with the Freudian model.
In this preface to the first German edition, written in the fall of 1912, Jung did not fail to add two further notes.
One was the asseveration:
I am far from seeing modest and sober criticism as a “defection” or a schism; on the contrary, through it I hope to further the continued flourishing and growth of the psychoanalytic movement, and also to open up an avenue to the treasures of knowledge of psychoanalysis for those who … have been unable before now to master the psychoanalytic method.
In the other comment, Jung made the statement with regard to Alfred Adler’s work The Neurotic Constitution, which had appeared in the meantime, that “Adler and I have at various points arrived at similar results” -an additional confirmation of Freud’s suspicion, which under the circumstances Jung must have set down in writing with some satisfaction.
Jung could count his eight-week stay in America, beginning on 7 September, as a complete success.
This time his lectures were translated into English, and thus his audience was not limited to the small circle of German-speaking participants and colleagues.
Since the Clark conference in 1909 the young psychoanalytic movement had undergone a remarkable development, and this time the press was looking for further publicity.
The New York Times, in its Sunday edition of 29 September, published a full-page interview with a photograph under the headline “America Facing Its Most Tragic Moment-Dr. Carl Jung.”
Further lectures, for example at the New York Academy of Medicine, as well as visits to Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D. C., rounded out this tour of America. For letters, to Freud for instance, there was ostensibly no time during these two months, and above all there was “no desire,” as Jung informed Freud with calculated boldness on 11 November.
“I had an audience of about ninety psychiatrists and neurologists …. Naturally I also made room for my own views, which differ in places from previous conceptions.
”
He said he did not want to run away from Freud, but preferred direct confrontation, and he was, after all, only fighting for what he believed to be the truth.
Their personal relationship he wished to maintain.
For all that, he wanted objective judgment and no resentment.
I think I deserve this much, if only from the standpoint of expediency, for the psychoanalytic movement is indebted to me for its promotion more than Rank, Stekel, Adler, and the rest of them put together. I can only assure you that there is no resistance on my part, unless it be that I refuse to
be judged as a complex-laden idiot … ,
Is this not an expression of the fact that Jung had now thoroughly completed his detachment from his “father” and was willing to generously renounce his claim to the “succession” to Freud that had been offered him?
The whole letter exudes self-confidence: he had lectured, performed demonstrations, and analyzed fifteen Negroes in several clinics; on the return
trip he had presided over the founding of a local group in Amsterdam; and above all he had found that his own Jungian conception of the psychoanalytic libido theory had won a great many friends. In a word, triumph all the way down the
line.
And Freud?
It goes without saying that his dark suspicions had been more than realized.
For hardly had Jung set out on his trip to America when Emma Jung sent the painfully awaited second part of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido to Vienna.
Hence there was no more room for further illusions.
With suitable yet nonetheless restrained sobriety the first letter in response arrived from Vienna, now with the more distant salutation
“Dear Doctor Jung”-“I greet you on your return from America no longer so affectionately as the last time in Nuremberg; you have successfully weaned me of that, but still with sufficient sympathy, interest, and gratification over your personal success.”
And in the way of countercriticism, Freud added, “the fact that you have reduced a good deal of resistance with your modifications should not be entered on the credit side of the ledger, for you know that the further you try to distance yourself from what is new in psychoanalysis, the surer you will be of applause, and the smaller will be the resistance.”
Of Freud’s objectivity and their continued relationship, however, Jung had no need for concern, he said.
His commentary on the long-awaited Part 2 of the libido book proved, understandably, extremely brief: some details had pleased him, the whole had not; he had not been able to extract from it the desired clarification of Jung’s innovations.
The general business of the International Association, of which Jung continued as president, made a conference of its chief spokesmen necessary.
It took place on 24 November in a small group at the Park Hotel in Munich; along with Freud and Jung, Franz Riklin, Ernest Jones, Karl Abraham,
Leonhard Seif, and J.H.W. van Ophuijsen attended.
Among other things on the agenda was the advance planning of the next Congress, which was also to take place in Munich.
It says something for the personal effect Freud and Jung had always had on one another that after what had happened the two remained by no means as distant as might have been expected.
Rather they took advantage of a two-hour afternoon walk to put aside at least the more emotionally and atmospherically
caused obstacles.
There was even something of a reconciliation.
But at the end of a dinner that was described as cheerful, when Freud was reproaching the Zurichers for having avoided mentioning his name in their publications of late, he fainted just as he had in Bremen three years before-and fell to the floor.
Jung recounted how he gave first aid: “I picked him up, carried him into the next room, and laid him on a sofa. As I was carrying him, he half came to, and I shall never forget the look he cast at me. In his weakness he looked at me as if I were his father.”
As nearly five decades lay between the event and the recollection, shifts and errors are possible, of course-for example, Jung was confusing this presidents’ conference with the Munich Congress of 1913-but his appraisal of it was undoubtedly right.
For in fact a significant psychological turning point had been reached; for Jung, Freud’s “fatherhood” seemed to be over, but not-not even yet-his friendship, for when Freud wrote on 28 November 1912 to James Putnam, who for his own part had voiced some criticism of Jung, he recorded his own immediate impressions of the gathering in Munich, writing:
“My colleagues behaved charmingly toward me, Jung not least of all. A personal conversation between us cleared away a multitude of unnecessary sore spots.”
Freud looked forward to further successful cooperation, untroubled by the theoretical differences that continued to exist.
As for the libido question or even the problem of incest, however, he would be unable to accept any modification, for all his experiences argued against this conception.
This was doubtless a powerful argument, but would it be able to carry any weight-with Jung-in the long run?
That such a short meeting and conversation should have disposed of every one of the points of disagreement seems
remarkable not only from our point of view today.
Yet the letters exchanged immediately after the summit conference endeavored to confirm this impression of Freud’s.
Jung wrote on 26 November that he had “for the first time really understood” Freud despite all differences.
He changed from the self-confident tone of one full of success to that of a humble mea culpa, hoping that Freud would forgive his previous
errors and there would be no lack of good will.
Instead, he said, he wished to make “the insight that has at last been gained the guiding principle of my own conduct.”
And in complete contrition: “It pains me that I did not gain this insight earlier. I could have spared you so many disappointments.”
Freud was touched.
He hoped for the best for their further cooperation and even informed his friends, such as Karl Abraham, what an extremely kind letter Jung had written him.
Naturally it also had not failed to include an expression of concern about how Freud had survived his trip home to Vienna after his momentary collapse.
How deeply Freud was moved is shown by his thoroughly unusual admission that such a fainting spell had occurred before, in the same place, as
long as six years ago.
And then his self-diagnosis: “Thus a bit of neurosis that one really ought to attend to.”
Even more astonishing is Freud’s claim that he himself was “slowly coming to terms” with Jung’s work on the libido. ”
It seems that you have solved the riddle of all mysticism, which rests on the symbolic utilization of complexes that have been deactivated” -all too bold a conclusion, one would have to say. Freud’s signing this letter of thanks on 29 November with “Your untransformed friend” was ambiguous, although qualified by his conviction that “We must really also lay in a fresh store of good will toward each other” -and this only ten
months before the end of their relationship as friends and colleagues!
Thus the harmony of their reconciliation could not last long, as the next few letters already show.
Jung continued to find his Psychology of the Unconscious undervalued by Freud.
Then on 18 December came Jung’s criticism that the techniques with which Freud treated patients and students alike constituted an interference, that he was begetting “slavish sons” for himself, who out of pure submissiveness did not dare to discover themselves and tug the prophet’s beard.
Publicly, of course, Jung would continue to support Freud, but with due recognition of his own views.
With this Freud felt it impossible to continue their private relationship. Indeed he would lose nothing by it, he said, for-despite their reconciliation and reciprocal confessions the earlier disappointments he had suffered were always before him.
At bottom, then, nothing had changed, wrote the “untransformed” Freud to the ever more changing Jung.
The final break was now more a matter of time, a very short time. Jung’s letter of 6 January 1913, on the letterhead of the International Psychoanalytic Association, is of a brevity that speaks for itself:
Dear Professor Freud, I shall submit to your wish to discontinue our personal relationship, for I never force my friendship on anyone. For the rest, you yourself know best what this moment means to you. “The rest is silence.” [Followed by one sentence concerning a business matter, then the closing:] Yours sincerely, Jung
With this the days of the detailed and friendly epistles they had kept up were gone forever.
Their formal association still existed, along with Jung’s presidency and his editorship of the Journal, including the preparation of the Munich Congress.
Besides this, Jung was in great demand in addition to his lecturing activity and his private practice.
From March until early April he traveled a third time, for about five weeks, to lecture in the United States.
The journey was planned so that he could go to Naples on the return trip and make an excursion to Pompeii.
This trip to America was one of the many events of his life that remained unmentioned in the Memories, but his encounter with the world of Greek and Roman antiquity challenged his receptivity to a very high degree:
I was able to visit Pompeii only after I had acquired, through my studies of 1910 to 1912, some insight into the psychology of classical antiquity. . . . Certainly Rome as well as [Paris or London] can be enjoyed esthetically; but if you are affected to the depths of your being at every step by the spirit that broods there, if a remnant of a wall here and a column there gaze upon you with a face instantly recognized, then it becomes another matter entirely. Even in Pompeii unforeseen vistas opened, unexpected things became conscious, and questions were posed which were beyond my powers to handle.
This third lecture tour ( counting the quick consultation in 1910, it was Jung’s fourth trip to America) is as poorly documented as is a trip he made to England in August, during which he was to hold two lectures on “General Aspects of Psychoanalysis” before the Psycho-Medical Society in London.
This was the first time that Jung referred to his own newly originated psychological science, as distinct from that of Freud-which to a great extent he continued to endorse-by the new term “analytical psychology.”
Along with “complex psychology” this later became the standard designation for the Jungian orientation.
Thus the child whose baptism he had sponsored long ago had at last been christened, although the name hardly stood in sufficiently clear contrast
to that of psychoanalysis, considering that in Jung’s work it was not only the analysis but the “psychosynthesis” that was to become at least as important. In the often-revised elementary text “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” (1917/1926/1943) Jung accorded particular attention to his synthetic or constructive method.
Here we find the avowal:
I had first to come to the fundamental realization that analysis, insofar as it is reduction and nothing more, must necessarily be followed by synthesis, and that certain kinds of psychic material mean next to nothing if simply broken down, but display a wealth of meaning if, instead of being broken down, that meaning is reinforced and extended by all the conscious means at our disposal-by the so-called method of amplification. The images or symbols of the collective unconscious yield their distinctive values only when subjected to a synthetic mode of treatment. Just as analysis breaks down the symbolical fantasy-material into its components, so the synthetic procedure integrates it into a universal and intelligible statement.
Jung had encountered this synthetic method already in the early period of his psychoanalytic work, specifically in the psychiatrist Dumeng Bezzola of Graubtinden and in Roberto G. Assagioli, the Italian analyst whom Jung came to know and to think highly of in 1909.
When the Seventeenth International Congress of Medicine gathered in London from 6 to 12 August of 1913, Jung was once again on the list of
speakers.
He repeated the lecture “On Psychoanalysis,” which he had given some ten months earlier in New York.
Here as before he sought to do justice to the Viennese founding father, but without disavowing his own perspective on the questions of libido and the interpretation of dreams.
To outsiders, then, there was as yet no trace of a developing split within the movement.
Outwardly, this impression would still be corroborated by the subsequent Fourth Congress (the “Fourth Private Psychoanalytic Meeting”), although by the participants-who by this time reached the impressive figure of eighty-seven members and guests-the considerable tensions that had arisen in the meantime did not go wholly unnoticed.
The affair took place in the Hotel Bayrischer Hofin Munich on 7 and 8 September 1913.
As in the previous congresses of the psychoanalytic movement, this time too there was an extensive program of events to be completed within a relatively short time.
In the two days no fewer than seventeen speakers were to take the podium, among them Ernest Jones, Hanns Sachs, Karl Abraham, Franz Riklin, Poul Bjerre, Sandor Ferenczi, and J. von Hattinberg. Hence the time allotted for discussion was limited to between twenty and twenty-five minutes each.
Freud spoke on the problem of the choice of neurosis, whereas Jung considered the question of psychological types.
This paper at Munich in 1913 represented his first preliminary contribution to the subject of typology, the theme that would be treated thoroughly in his work Psychological Types (1921), starting from the idea of two opposite orientations of the libido or psychic energy, which Jung termed extraversion and introversion.
Already at this point Jung made it clear that his approach should be seen in the context of other philosophical and psychological parallels, such as Binet and William James, Schiller’s distinction between naive and sentimental types, or Nietzsche’s demonstration of the opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian. Even Otto Gross did not go unmentioned, a psychiatrist who had distinguished two forms of inferiority.
Finally, Jung’s lecture went on to make a typological comparison of the reductive-causalistic viewpoint of Freud with Alfred Adler’s more final- and future-directed standpoint. ”
It will be a difficult task for the future,” Jung said in closing, “to create a psychology that will do justice equally to both types. ”
Here too his endeavor was clear: it was not a rejection, but a widening, and in part also a transformation, of the results that had been gained so far from work in psychoanalysis, or depth psychology.
With this the speaker set a great task for himself and for the analytical psychology he represented, whose beginnings were now starting to become visible.
Moreover, it brought to light a further aspect ofJung’s unorthodox position.
But the increasing need for a separation between the diverging orientations could no longer be kept quiet.
At the Munich meeting this had already become evident through the fact that Freud and Jung, with their respective sympathizers, sat at separate tables.
One participant who had already put in with the party of her choice some time ago, and who mentioned this in her report, was Lou Andreas-Salome.
As Poul Bjerre had once brought her along as a guest to the Weimar Congress, so had she, having become a Freudian herself in the meantime, followed his lead.
This time, on her way from Vienna, she had imported her young friend Rainer Maria Rilke and introduced him to Freud.
The poet, the same age as Jung and by this time well known, among other things as the author of the Book of Hours, New Poetry, and Malte Laurids Brigge, had long been a famous personality and thus was able to provide the Congress with some glamor, even though he was only to become better acquainted with psychoanalysis through his companion.
With some pride Frau Lou noted how well he and Freud understood each other, and that they were together until late at night.
The gentlemen also exchanged greetings later.
Freud had the poet, who was surrounded, informed via Lou that he had a daughter (Anna) who read Rilke’s poems and could recite some of them by heart.
Under these circumstances any contact between Jung and Rilke was clearly out of the question.
Nevertheless, with regard to Rilke, Jung had by his own admission always been conscious of “how much psychology is hidden in him,” and
that he as empiricist and Rilke as poet or visionary had ultimately drawn from the same source, the collective unconscious.
After what had happened, the mood of the Munich Congress ranged from “disagreeable” Gones) to “fatiguing and unedifying” (Freud).
The atmosphere was mentioned several times in letters between the various participants.
Freud’s circle tried somehow to get rid of Jung and his followers.
Since the reelection of the president was due and Jung had previously already announced his intention to resign, his removal from office was expected.
But only twenty-two out of the total of fifty-two voting members in attendance abstained from voting for Jung, and thus he was effectively reelected as president of a society against whose theoretical basis he had voiced fundamental criticism.
“The Jew endures,” wrote Freud to his designated new successor, Karl Abraham, in Berlin.
In his notes “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” Freud felt himself compelled to point out vaguenesses and insincerities of the new secessionist movement, because it was opposing things that it had formerly defended on Freud’s behalf.
He continued: “At the Munich Congress I found myself obliged to illuminate this semi-darkness, and I did so with the explanation that I do not recognize the Swiss innovations as a legitimate continuation or further development of the psychoanalysis that started with me …. Abraham
is correct in saying that Jung is in total retreat from psychoanalysis.”
But Jung took the final step only when he heard through his colleague Alphonse Maeder that Freud had called his good faith (“bona fides”) into question.
Further hesitation was no longer possible, and on 27 October Jung wrote to the
“Most esteemed Herr Professor”: I would have expected you to have imparted something as weighty as this to me directly. Since this is the most serious accusation that can be made against a person, you make further collaboration with you impossible for me. Therefore I am resigning from the editorship of the Jahrbuch with which you entrusted me. I have also informed Bleuler and Deuticke [ the publisher J of my decision. Most respectfully, Dr. C. G. Jung
Volume 5, number 2 of the Jahrbuch, then, also carried Jung’s notification that he had found it necessary to step down as editor.
As Jung could not help seeing that his views stood “in such stark contrast to the ideas of the majority of members of our Association,” on 20 April he also tendered to the board of directors his resignation as president.
With this the “new era without Jung” had begun for the psychoanalysts.
The majority of the local Zurich group joined ranks behind him and resolved to withdraw from the Association.
“I cannot suppress a hurrah,” Freud exulted in a letter to Abraham on 18 July. “And so we have gotten rid of them.” And again a week later in the classic expression: “So we are finally rid of them, the brutish Saint Jung and his yes-men.”
The comments of other analysts from Freud’s circle also bear witness to their happy relief at this separation.
Already in April 1914, by telegraph from Berlin, Abraham and Eitingon had expressed their joy over the “tidings from Zurich” of Jung’s resignation.
How the central figures concerned perceived the break, responded to it, and ultimately evaluated it for themselves is another matter.
While Freud took a cool, reproachful, and aggressive stance in the Journal, declaring Jung’s conduct an abandonment and a defection from analysis
in his article on the history of the psychoanalytic movement, Jung pointed out to his Zurich colleague Maeder the impossibility of further collaboration with Freud:
I have by no means fallen into Freud’s trap, for I consider it no advantage of Freud’s if he disgusts me …. The outward impression will be very bad. But inner successes carry more weight than the howling of the crowd.
In any case Jung’s opponents could not deny the reaction he continued to excite in wider circles.
Thus in late July 1914, on the occasion of the annual meeting of the British Medical Association in Aberdeen, Scotland, he spoke “On the Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology.”
On this occasion there was no mention of psychoanalysis; the term was not used.
But Jung did not hesitate to point out Freud’s pioneering accomplishments in the field of dream interpretation.
Thus he continued along the line which he had announced regarding Freud, namely of outward loyalty even though their personal relationship had ended.
Jung held fast to this rule-cum grano salis-even in his autobiography, writing there:
… my main concern has been to investigate, over and above [ the J personal significance and biological function [ which Freud attributed to sexuality], its spiritual aspect and its numinous meaning, and thus to explain what Freud was so fascinated by but was unable to grasp.
How much the factor of human association was involved became clear in various letters, for example in 1949, ten years after Freud’s death, in a letter to the son of his friend Theodore Flournoy, in which Jung said:
[To Freud] belongs the honor of having discovered the first archetype, the Oedipus complex. This is a motif that is as much mythological as it is psychological.
Or to a doctor in 1957:
In spite of the astonishing lack of appreciation I incurred on the part of Freud, I cannot fail to recognize his significance as a cultural critic and pioneer in the realm of psychology, even considering my own resentment. A correct assessment of Freud’s efforts reaches into areas that concern
not only the Jews but all European people, areas which I have tried to shed light on in my works. Without Freudian “psychoanalysis” I would have entirely lacked the key.
But Freud, too, had not lightly forgotten the intensity of his many years of friendship with Jung.
In those situations where he did not have to stand before the public primarily as the founder of psychoanalysis, some of this became visible, as for
example in a letter to James Putnam in 1 915:
“He Jung] was someone who was sympathetic to me, so long as he went along blindly and quietly as I did. Then came his religious and ethical
crisis with its high morality, rebirth, and Bergson, together with lies, brutality, and anti-Semitic presumptions against me.”
Or to Lou Andreas-Salome in March 1914:
“Naturally I also know that adversaries, popularizers, and distorters also serve an important purpose, in that they prepare otherwise unpalatable material for the digestive systems of the masses. But that should not be acknowledged aloud, and I support them only in the proper fulfillment of this mission, while I continue to curse the taint that the pure thing suffers through this procedure. ”
A singular note was surely sounded by a brief remark Freud made at the age of seventy-six to an American visitor, the physician E. A. Bennet, who visited him at his home in Vienna in 1932.
Asked what effect the departures of Adler and Jung had had on him, Freud said that Adler’s separation had not been a loss that he regretted, but that “Jung was a great loss.”
All in all, it was the end of a “simple tragedy” so says Alexander Mitscherlich on the relationship
between Freud and Jung.
Only a simple tragedy? ~Gerhard Wehr, Jung: A Biography, Pages 127-160.
