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Sigmund Freud-“The First Man of Real Importance”
Freud was the first man of real importance I had encountered; in my experience up to that time, no one else could compare with him. There was nothing the least trivial in his attitude. I found him extremely intelligent, shrewd, and altogether remarkable. And yet my first impressions of him remained somewhat tangled; I could not make him out.
These lines from the elderly C. G. Jung’s Memories express both the high esteem for the founder of modern research into the psyche that the young psychiatrist felt, still just at the beginning of his own great career, and a hint of the difficulties that attended the two men’s relationship from the outset, becoming greater and greater until they finally led to their inevitable breakup.
Decades later-Sigmund Freud died in exile in London on 2 September 1939-Jung extolled the master of Vienna and his work as “epoch-making.”
The intellectual history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, said Jung in his obituary in the Sunday supplement to the Basler Nachrichten of 1 October 1939, 2 could no longer be imagined without the name of the founder of psychoanalysis.
The Freudian paradigm, whatever opinion one might have of its fundamentals or its details, had “touched nearly every Sigmund Freud sphere of contemporary intellectual life, with the exception of the exact sciences.”
The gravity of this judgment can only be appreciated if one considers the time of its publication: National Socialism and Fascism-the system that had declared war on “Jewish psychoanalysis”- now ruled supreme in Europe.
The Second World War had just begun, with the invasion and subjugation of Poland. And although Jung had departed from Freud’s position decades earlier, he now referred to the latter’s work as “probably the boldest attempt that has ever been made to master the riddles of the unconscious psyche upon the apparently firm ground of empiricism.”
And, referring to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams:
“For us, then young psychiatrists, it was … a source of illumination, while for our older colleagues it was an object of mockery.”
This testimonial from the year 1939 is thoroughly confirmed by the positive assessment he had already made of psychoanalysis around the turn of the century, a generation before.
Even in 1900, at twenty-five, he had seen the newly published Interpretation of Dreams.
But at that time the young doctor was not in a position to recognize the pioneering efforts of his colleague from Vienna, nineteen years his senior:
At the age of twenty-five I lacked the experience to appreciate Freud’s theories. Such experience did not come until later. In 1903 I once more took up The Interpretation of Dreams and discovered how it all linked up with my own ideas.
As Jung was becoming better acquainted with psychoanalytical research just after the turn of the century, it was still impossible to foresee how it was going to develop.
After Studies on Hysteria (1895), published in collaboration with Josef Breuer, and the epochal Interpretation of Dreams (1899, 1900), other fundamental works by Freud appeared, such as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (revised edition 1901), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (both 1905).
Among Freud’s discoveries was the fact “that human affairs are more strongly directed by unconscious motives than … was earlier held to be possible; that repressed tendencies, rejected by the conscious mind and locked up in the unconscious, play an unsuspectedly large role in human life; that neuroses are not the result of small so-called functional changes in the brain tissue, but the outcome of complex psychic processes and powerful emotional conflicts, and that the knowledge of these facts can enable a doctor to understand psychic illnesses and in favorable cases even to cure them.”
Freud’s scientific accomplishments had found the recognition they deserved, even if grudgingly, from both academic and public quarters; since 1885 he had been teaching as a Privatdozent in neuropathology at the University of Vienna.
His appointment as a university lecturer was belated, to be sure, but at the request of Krafft-Ebing, among others, Emperor Franz-Joseph put his signature to the nomination papers on March 1902.
With this Freud achieved public legitimacy, although general acceptance would not come for some time. There was still no psychoanalytical organization, but the first steps had been taken: since 1902 a small circle of psychoanalysts had been meeting on Wednesdays in Freud’s lodgings at
Berggasse 19. Besides Freud there were Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler, and within a year they were joined by Paul Federn.
From 1910 on, this Wednesday club was designated the “Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.”
As it turned out, C. G. Jung was to become a vigorous supporter of this movement and of the whole subject of psychoanalysis, if only for the limited time of little more than a decade.
In a letter from 1908, Freud saw in Eugen Bleuler the “earliest and most important” of his adherents, whom he sought to interest in a leading role.
This high evaluation can be attributed to deliberate reflection, for Bleuler was a duly installed full professor and not merely a lecturer, a universally recognized practitioner and head of a respectable clinic.
Furthermore, he and his Zurich coworkers, chief among them C. G. Jung, were non-Jews.
This would serve to disarm the objections of those who considered Viennese psychoanalysis merely a more or less marginal Jewish sectarian doctrine within neurology and psychiatry.
Thus, Freud must have said to himself, if psychoanalysis was to become a worldwide movement, it could only be with the support of the Zurich group.
That Eugen Bleuler would soon dissociate himself, renouncing his membership within a few years (on 28 September 1 911), was hardly expected at the time of this letter in 1908, least of all by Freud himself.
In the beginning, though, an extremely positive relationship, both professional and personal, developed between Vienna and Zurich.
Bleuler began his correspondence with Freud in 1904.
By all accounts, however, the Zurich professor left his Viennese colleague in no doubt that he could not consent to be bound to any dogmatic regulation dictated from Vienna.
Thus contact with those in Zurich-among whom were the Burgholzli coworkers Ludwig Binswanger, Franz Riklin, and Alphonse Maeder-devolved more and more onto Jung, who then became the de facto inheritor of the leadership role in the incipient psychoanalytic movement that had been intended for Bleuler.
Freud learned with satisfaction from Bleuler that they had been working with his word-association method at Burgholzli for some two years, since 1902, and that Dr. Jung had not only applied it successfully, but largely affirmed the psychoanalytic approach.
This was shown not only by his early review of The Interpretation of Dreams as an intern, but by his public references to Freud, for example in his dissertation.
In the Foreword to his study on “The Psychology of Dementia Praecox,” written in July 1906, Jung commented on the origin of his work on schizophrenia, as Bleuler called it, at the same time revealing his attitude toward Freud:
My observations are not spun from some brooding fancy, but thoughts that have ripened in almost daily contact with my respected supervisor, Professor Bleuler. For the considerable enlargement of my empirical material I owe special thanks to my friend Dr. Riklin in Rheinau. Even a superficial glance at the pages of my work will show how much I have to thank to the ingenious conceptions of Freud. As he has still not received due recognition and appreciation, but will be opposed by even the highest authorities, I hope I may be permitted to clarify somewhat my position with regard to Freud …. I can assure my readers that from the first I naturally made all the same objections to Freud that have been adduced in the literature. But I said to myself that Freud could only be refuted by one who had repeatedly applied the psychoanalytic method and actually inquired as Freud did, considering daily life, hysteria, and dreams from his point of view, patiently and at length. Whoever did not or could not do this should not pass judgment on Freud; otherwise he would be like the famous men of science who disdained to look through the telescope.
Was Freud a modern-day Galileo?
There is much to be said for this idea, at least as far as the stance of those in authority once the church, now the scientific community-is concerned, but Wilhelm Weygandt, a professor of psychiatry and private consulting physician, expressed it perfectly on the occasion of a medical convention in Hamburg in 1910:
“Freud’s theories have nothing to do with science; they are more a matter for the police.” (Three years earlier Jung had said of this “scholar”: “I know Weygandt personally, he is a hysteric par excellence, stuffed with complexes from top to bottom, so that he can’t get a genuine word out of his throat …. I would never have thought German scholarship could have produced such meanness.”
In his text of 1906, however, Jung emphasized explicitly that doing justice to Freud by no means meant that one had to surrender oneself to a dogma.
He himself was not even willing to grant the exclusive significance that Freud apparently saw in infantile sexual trauma.
To be sure, “the undoubtedly powerful role of sexuality in the psyche” might suggest this, but Freudian therapy was at best just one of the possibilities, and perhaps does not always offer what it is theoretically supposed to.
But all these are minor issues that vanish in the face of the psychological principles whose discovery we owe to Freud, and to which his critics have paid far too little attention.
In the long term, Jung remained true to this same statement of his position toward Freud and psychoanalysis in 1 906.
And, conversely, the strength of the young psychiatrist from Zurich was that he distinguished from the outset between the fundamental accomplishments of the Freudian theory and its critical shortcomings.
But for the moment the bond of collegial solidarity with Freud outweighed the majority of the profession.
And Jung was not lacking in this commitment.
According to his Memories, he first entered the lists in defense of Freud in 1906, at a conference in Munich, although in fact it was probably at the conference of Southwest German neurologists and psychiatrists in Baden-Baden in May, where the psychiatrist Gustav Aschaffenburg of Heidelberg attacked Freud’s “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.”
In the same year, in the Munchener medizinische Wochenschrift, Jung took up what was admittedly a rather cautiously defensive position:
Freud was probably subject to many human errors, he said, but this by no means excluded the possibility that “beneath the tangled exterior lies hidden a kernel of truth of whose significance we can as yet form no adequate conception.”
Furthermore, he claimed, written statements were incapable, even approximately, of reproducing the reality of psychoanalysis Jung wrote “psychanalysis”) sufficiently for the reader to understand it without any difficulty.
It had been no different for him, Jung said, at his first reading of Freud; he had only been able to scribble question marks in the margins.
And yet his experiments in word association were replicable, and their outcome agreed with Freud’s results.
There was no shortage of reaction from the authorities.
Two German professors made it known in correspondence that anyone who defended Freud in this manner and persisted in working along this line was risking his academic future.
Jung’s answer was clear:
“If what Freud says is the truth, I am with him. I don’t give a damn for a career if it has to be based on the premise of restricting research and concealing the truth.” And I went on defending Freud and his ideas. But on the basis of my own findings I was still unable to feel that all neuroses were caused by sexual repression or sexual traumata. In certain cases this was so, but not in others. Nevertheless, Freud had opened up a new path of investigation, and the shocked outcries against him at the time seemed to me absurd.
When Studies in Word Association reached print in 1905, Jung sent a copy of his new work to Freud, in order to show his colors to him as well.
It turned out that Bleuler’s references to his energetic assistant had not failed to have an effect on Freud, for on 11 April 1906 he informed his “very esteemed colleague” in Zurich that he had already procured a copy of the study” out of impatience.”
With this began the voluminous-and as Jung later said, “accursed”-exchange of letters which continued until April 1914 (not counting one straggler in which Jung referred a patient to Freud in 1923).
Almost six months elapsed until Jung’s first letter.
On 5 October he had occasion to thank Professor Freud for his “collection of monographs on studies of neurosis.”
His gratitude gave way immediately to practical discussion arising from the current controversy.
Significantly, Jung made no secret in this first letter of his own position with regard to the Freudian sexual theory.
Apart from his clinical observations, the schooling of Pierre Janet may have been at work here, which ad similarly taken a stand rejecting psychoanalysis.
Freud’s rejoinder took up this point by return mail.
That his sympathizers in Zurich reported such reservations cannot have gone overlooked in Vienna.
But Freud was hopeful:
“I have long suspected from your writings that your regard for my psychology does not fully extend to my views on questions of hysteria and sexuality, but I have not given up the expectation that in the course of the years you will come much closer to me than you now think possible.”
Freud did not omit to remark incidentally that he himself would have judged his opponent Gustav Aschaffenburg “somewhat more harshly” than Jung had done, and that he could find in his statements nothing but silliness and an “enviable ignorance of the matters on which he is passing judgment.”
Thus the differences between the two men were quite clearly marked-in all collegiality and good will, of course even in the comments made in their first letters to each other.
At that point there was-as yet-no cause to dig trenches between the two.
For the younger man the dominant factor was his admiration for the pioneer of the investigation of the psyche, Jung’s respect (“very esteemed Herr Professor”) for “the first man of real importance” in this field; the older was stirred by the hope of a faithful following and even strict succession, such as one can only hope for from an adopted son and “crown prince.”
And Freud made use of just this title in a letter from the year 1909 that was also informative in other respects.
Perhaps the master was not quite sure of his hopes in his obviously rather independent “disciple,” for as early as the eleventh of the 2 5 9 letters, we find the exhortation, dictated with Freudian clairvoyance,” … do not deviate too far from me, when in reality you are so close to me, otherwise we will yet see how they will play us off against one another.”
The validity of his statement from 1 January 1907 is well known!
During the next seven years the correspondence between the two men became astonishingly massive.
There was hardly a week-except for the last stage-in which one and often more letters were not sent back and forth between Vienna and Zurich.
An extremely rich and varied conversation unfolded in these letters, providing a glimpse into the thought processes, the joys and cares of two doctors of thoroughly remarkable human and cultural stature.
“There are in our century not many such first-rate records of human struggle, human error, human comedy, and human conflict,” as Joachim Kaiser pointedly summed it up in his review of the excellently edited publication.
Going into more detail, Martin Grotjahn has said, “Freud seems to have been especially happy to have found in Switzerland a non-Jewish academic who was prepared to align himself with psychoanalysis as an ally and organizer.
Both men candidly exchanged their views on their colleagues and the further steps by which the “cause” should be advanced.
They spoke of their experiences with patients and discussed questions and details of theory and practice, bringing to light a particular interest in schizophrenia, mythology, anthropology, and occultism. The early stages of many of Freud’s later ideas can already be seen here, along with the genesis of psychoanalytical journals and the preparations for visits and international and local meetings.”
The younger man asked the older for advice, but increasingly revealed an ever greater self-confidence and professional maturity.
The degree of intimacy between them grew.
From October 1908 on, Jung was to Freud “my dear friend,” while Jung used the salutation “Dear Professor,” until finally the last letters stiffened into formality and ran out into silence.
But none of Freud’s correspondence with any of his other colleagues-be it Bleuler, Binswanger, Pfister, Abraham, Groddeck, Lou Andreas-Salome, Reik, Reich, Weiss, Putnam, Ferenczi, Federn, or Rank-rivals that which he carried on with Jung in range, human depth, and forcefulness of expression.
Special mention may be made of a few letters scattered here and there in the collection from Emma Jung, who here also acted not only as the wife of her famous husband, but spoke for herself, standing on her own feet while at the same time taking sides with her spouse.
With great maturity the young woman turned her attention to the problematic situation that had long been developing between the two men.
Partly thanks to her feminine intuition, but also through the practical application of psychological understanding, she noted the complications that stood between “father” and “son” and searched for a humane solution.
“Indeed, one can certainly not be the child of a great man with impunity, considering how much trouble it already takes to get away from even ordinary fathers.
And then when this eminent father also has a patriarchal streak in him, as you said yourself “-this last in reference to Freud’s family circumstances.
And, regarding Jung, “You can imagine how pleased and honored I am at the confidence which you place in Carl, but it would almost seem to me that sometimes you give him too much; do you not see in him more of a successor and fulfiller than is necessary? Doesn’t one often give much because one wishes to hold much back?” A revealing question! Finally she made an urgent appeal: “Please think of Carl not with the feelings of a father: ‘He will grow, but I must fade away,’ but as one person to another, who like you must follow his own law.”
So she wrote, at twenty-nine, to the father of psychoanalysis, who was fifty-five-spirited words from a mature woman!
After a few letters containing discussions of problems of work and dreams, a meeting in person was envisaged for early 1907.
As the wish to visit America had appeared to Jung in a dream, Freud answered jokingly, why not Vienna first-“It is closer!”
After some discussion back and forth, their first conversation in Freud’s home was scheduled for Sunday, 3 March, at ten in the morning. Jung was accompanied by his wife and his colleague from Zurich Ludwig Binswanger.
Sunday was chosen because by his own report Freud was in harness from eight to eight Monday through Saturday, practicing therapy on the average ten hours a day.
Thus only Sunday was free, and also evenings after eight o’clock, which were also considered-for example Wednesday, the habitual meeting time
for the colleagues from Vienna, whom Jung likewise met for the first time on this occasion.
Naturally the main issue came up during the face-to-face conversation between Freud and Jung:
“We met at one o’clock in the afternoon and talked virtually without a pause for thirteen hours.”
Jung acknowledged that Freud at first seemed to him, as he did to many of his contemporaries, “a rather strange phenomenon.”
He had to discover the Austrian’s peculiar mentality, to examine how far the already suspected lines of division were valid and where he would be able to follow the founder of psychoanalysis.
Regarding the opposition of Freud and Jung, it should also be made clear that the particular atmosphere of Vienna during the last decades of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, represented by a member of the Jewish intelligentsia, must have had a singular effect on Jung, who as a Swiss had been influenced by entirely different cultural traditions.
To these dissimilarities of environment was added the difference in character and temperament which Jung later expressed by describing himself,
according to his own typology, as an “introverted” type and Freud as a distinctly “extraverted” type.
“But you must not think I am frantically out to contrast myself with you by holding the most divergent views possible,”
Jung had already said in his letter of 29 December 1906, in which he declared his upbringing, his environment, and his scientific premises to be “utterly different” from Freud’s.
How serious the differences between the two personalities were became evident on the objective and scientific level.
There was as always Freud’s sexual theory:
What he said about his sexual theory impressed me.
Nevertheless, his words could not remove my hesitations and doubts.
I tried to advance these reservations of mine on several occasions, but each time he would attribute them to my lack of experience.
Freud was right; in those days I had not enough experience to support my objections.
I could see that his sexual theory was enormously
important to him, both personally and philosophically.
This impressed me, but I could not decide to what extent this strong emphasis on sexuality was connected with subjective prejudices of his, and to what extent it rested upon verifiable experiences.
Then, too, Freud’s view of the spirit seemed questionable to his visitor.
The master tended to designate as “psychosexuality” whatever could not be explained as an outpouring of sexual libido.
Although this hypothesis can in no way be dismissed as solely Freud’s invention-one need only think of Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis (1886), or of Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, and even further back in religious and intellectual history!-Jung shrank from the thought that the whole of human culture could be thought of as the morbid product of repressed sexuality.
Was not sexuality to a thoroughly numinous phenomenon, an unfathomably religious power that far surpassed human capacity?
Some two years later this first impression of Jung’s appeared to be confirmed, as Freud enjoined him with great urgency:
“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.” And when Jung asked him in astonishment, a bulwark against what?, he answered, “Against the black tide of the mud … of occultism.”
In his Memories, Jung commented:
First of all, it was the words “bulwark” and “dogma” that alarmed me; for a dogma, that is to say, an indisputable confession of faith, is set up only when the aim is to suppress doubts once and for all.
But that no longer has anything to do with scientific judgment; only with a personal power drive.
This was the thing that struck at the heart of our friendship. I knew that I would never be able to accept such an attitude.
As far as “occultism” was concerned, Freud understood by this practically everything that philosophy and religion-and especially the parapsychology that was coming into fashion around the turn of the century-had to say about the human spirit.
But this was by no means his final word on the subject; his skepticism did begin to give way.
For Jung, in a peculiar way, it was precisely Freud’s universally applied sexual theory that seemed “occult,” an unproven hypothesis or a scientifically embellished dogma.
Yet Jung could have no doubt of Freud’s greatness, his intelligence and sagacity.
Thus his first impressions of him remained “unclear and partly not even understood.”
Only after they had gone some way together was he able to achieve the necessary clarity.
In terms of Jung’s life this meant that the parting of ways, the turning point, would only come when Jung had reached the critical stage of his own middle life, in which it became both possible and necessary for him to form a clearer idea of his own intellectual and above all existential point of view.
As far as the meeting of the two men in general is concerned, clearly there was a combination of two factors here.
On one hand there was the unenvious recognition of Freud’s professional qualities and experience, and indeed his geniality and human greatness, while on the other hand considerable contrasts were evident, which could be traced to their difference in type, and also in large measure to the disparity
in intellectual standpoint of the two researchers.
These contrasts in any case could not have been entirely suppressed, as Jung of course recognized rightly from the outset.
Born in 1856 and thus about nineteen years older, Freud was too settled in the intellectual prejudices of his century, as revealed in its one-sidedly materialistic natural science and the worldview built on it.
Jung believed he had observed in Freud “the eruption of unconscious religious factors.”
Deeply impressed, he wrote later in his autobiography:
Freud, who had always made much of his irreligiosity, had now constructed a dogma; or rather, in the place of a jealous God whom he had lost, he had substituted another compelling image, that of sexuality. It was no less insistent, exacting, domineering, threatening, and orally ambivalent than the original one. Just as the psychically stronger agency is given “divine” or “daemonic” attributes, so the “sexual libido” took over the role of a deus absconditus, a hidden or concealed god.
Strong as Jung’s resistance was to an interpretation that was to his mind monotonously reduced to sexuality, nevertheless within a few years the personal relationship became quite intimate and friendly, including the two men’s families (Freud’s interest in Jung’s family was much stronger than Jung’s in that of Freud).
Many things contributed to this, among them external pressure, which demanded solidarity of the small band of those who fought for the cause of psychoanalysis.
Another reason was the time they spent together, although distance and professional duties severely restricted the frequency of their meetings.
Freud made his first return visit to Zurich between 18 and 21 September 1908, when the Jung family still lived at the Burgholzli.
As the lady of the house and the children were away and Eugen Bleuler had granted his senior doctor the necessary time off, the two men were able to concentrate completely on their topic.
“I was not alone until late at night; we walked and debated until eight o’clock every day,” Freud reported to Abraham in Berlin on 29 September.
“As for Jung, he has so overcome his hesitation that he belongs to the cause without reservation, and even plans to go on working on the question of dementia praecox energetically along our lines. This suits me supremely.”
Thus Freud wrapped up his stay in Zurich with relief and satisfaction.
From 25 to 30 March 1909, Carl Gustav and Emma Jung stayed with the Freuds in Vienna for a second time.
At the time his relationship with the Burgholzli was due to end at the close of the month, although the family were forced to stay in their apartment at the clinic until the end of May because their own ,house in Kusnacht was not finished on time.
This second stay in Vienna was marked by a spectacular occurrence, for, on the last evening the two men were together, as the conversation turned to matters of parapsychology and precognition, and Freud resolutely denied the existence of such things, Jung was possessed by a peculiar sensation, which he described thus:
It was as it my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot-a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud:
“There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.”
“Oh come,” he exclaimed. “that is sheer bosh.”
“It is not,” I replied. “You are mistaken, Herr Professor.
And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment there will be another such loud report!” Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase.
To this day I do not know what gave me this certainty. But I knew beyond all doubt that the report would come again.
Freud was astounded, particularly at this exact prediction of something that could not have been known.
At any rate there was no room in his philosophy at that time for any such phenomena.
That he had to admit in the end that they did occur, and indeed-to his further astonishment-even after Jung’s departure, appears unmistakably in their subsequent correspondence.
His colleague from Zurich seemed to him a bit uncanny, and his dissertation On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena suddenly appeared to him in a new light.
“I do not deny that your comments and your experiment made a powerful impression on me”-Freud actually spoke of an experiment, as if his visitor had intended to demonstrate some psychic ability, although this cannot have been the case. ”
After your departure I determined to make some observations, and here are the results.
In my front room there are continual creaking noises, from where the two heavy Egyptian steles rest on the oak boards of the bookcase, so that’s obvious. In the second room, where we heard the crash, such noises are very rare.
At first I was inclined to ascribe some meaning to it if the noise we heard so frequently when you were here were never heard again after your departure.
But since then it has happened over and over again, yet never in connection with my thoughts and never when I was considering you or your special problem,”
Freud added explicitly. Of course the subject itself had become his special problem some time ago.
Still, in this connection Freud had to recognize the “spell” of Jung’s personal presence.
Jung, who had long been familiar with such “synchronistic” manifestations from his own experience, did not dwell any further on the phenomenon per se.
But because at the time he had a patient in whose case apparitions of ghosts played a role, the event in Vienna prompted Jung to think further along psychoanalytic lines.
He came to the conclusion that “if there is a psychanalysis [sic], then there must also be a ‘psychosynthesis’ which creates future events according to
the same laws.”
In particular, the Italian Roberto G. Assagioli (1888-1974), whom Jung met in the summer of 1 909, had devoted his dissertation in Florence to psychosynthesis.
What Jung tried to make palatable to the master in Vienna was a final-prospective point of view, one oriented to the future development of the psyche, and which at the time had in fact already received due consideration-even in his own dissertation Jung had contrasted a final-prospective alternative to the causal-analytical approach to psychic data.
In Jung’s view the real profit from the second meeting in Vienna was represented by something still different.
Immediately after that ominous last evening he had begun to feel, “most happily, inwardly freed from the oppressive feeling of [Freud’s] fatherly authority.”
Freud, however, obviously did not share this opinion.
He was convinced that something rather unfortunate had happened, when he replied on 16 April 1909:
“It is remarkable that on the same evening that I formally adopted you as an eldest son, anointing you as my successor and crown prince-in partibus infideium-that then and there you should have divested me of my paternal dignity, and that the divesting seems to have given you as much pleasure
as investing you~ pe!’~9-1! gave me. Now I am afraid that I must fall back again into the role of father toward you in giving you my views on poltergeist phenomena …. I therefore don once more my horn-rimmed paternal spectacles and warn my dear son to keep a cool head and rather not understand something than make such great sacrifices for the sake of understanding.”
And on the question of the purported psychosynthesis, Freud said, he shook his wise old head; thus there would be no discussion of a subject that Jung had no intention of losing sight of. Moreover Freud, as always, considered Jung’s researches into the “spook complex” a “lovely delusion.”
And all this was amiably wrapped up “With cordial regards to yourself, your wife and children, Yours, Freud.”
The need for an exchange of ideas and continued critical development of the psychoanalytic approach led its practitioners to establish a psychoanalytic association, beginning in Vienna with the “Wednesday society,” and in Zurich drawn from the circle of coworkers at the Burgholzli under the rubric of the “Freudian Society.”
This existed from late September 1 907 under the chairmanship of Ludwig Binswanger, a participant in Jung’s association experiments and later the
director for many years of the private Bellevue Clinic in Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance, who was also known as a cofounder of existential analysis.
“Things are going very well.”
Jung reported to Vienna on 10 October 1907, “generally great interest, lively discussion. One has the enjoyable feeling of being involved in an endlessly fruitful work.”
According to the same letter, he had also “converted” his first theologian.
Above all, the common cause attracted further small groups. Karl Abraham, who had worked at the Burgholzli for some years, put together a psychoanalytic working group in Berlin, with Freud’s lasting support.
The American Abraham A. Brill, who had also been a student under Bleuler and Jung, brought the psychoanalytic doctrine to the United States, especially with the help of his translation of Freudian and Jungian writings into English.
At the same time two other Americans, Charles Ricksher and Frederick -~· Peterson, beat the drum of publicity there, seeing to it that Jung’s association experiments became known in the States.
In London a psychoanalytical society was formed by Freud’s later biographer Ernest Jones; in Hungary Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s strictest students, collected a group of sympathetic doctors.
Eventually it was also Ferenczi who stirred up the desire for the first great convention of psychoanalysts.
That the “First International Psychoanalytic Congress” was able to take place in Salzburg in April 1908 was unquestionably thanks to the strong organizational and intellectual commitment of C. G. Jung.
The designation “First Congress for Freudian Psychology” was his idea; such at least was the heading over his draft of the written invitation, sent to Vienna for approval late in January.
With forty-two participants altogether, who gathered on 26 and 27 April 1908 in the Hotel Bristol on Makartplatz in Salzburg, the attendance was greater than had been anticipated, greater even than Freud wanted it.
For because he was only too aware of the sometimes quite limited abilities of his colleagues in Vienna, who nonetheless energetically desired to express their opinions, from some of them he would rather have had refusals than acceptances to Jung’s signed invitations.
Since Freud had informed him of this, Jung once stated that Freud had no, or only a few, adherents of any importance in Vienna; rather he was surrounded there by a “degenerate gang of Bohemians” who did little credit to the common cause. Behind this disparaging remark Ernest Jones saw nothing but blatant anti-Semitism.
The letters, however, reveal how unjustified was this supposition, which was also made against the non-Jewish Jung in other circumstances.
In fact, in the face of the upcoming Salzburg Congress, it was Freud who was afraid he might “all too obviously look ridiculous” in front of the Swiss, “for not all of them are anything to write home about.
I am making do with very little here,” he said prophylactically, confirming Jung’s assessment in a letter from Vienna dated 17 February 1908.
The hint that Jung might therefore consider limiting the time allotted for each speaker and politely reject “certain contributions” as unsuitable also
came from Freud himself-in fairly clear language.
A bit later, in contrast, he set Jung apart: “You are really the only one who even has anything original to offer.”
And Freud once again:
“It is enough trouble for me to see that not too much incorrect and hasty comes out in the contributions of my Viennese companions.”
So the worst of the Vienna circle were not included among those who were invited to present papers, namely Isidore Sadger, Wilhelm Stekel, and Alfred Adler.
They were flanked by the foreigners Ernest Jones, Karl Abraham, and Jung himself.
That Freud, with his contributions of case material, came first and received unlimited time to speak goes without saying.
And after Eugen Bleuler, who was also present, had declined the flattering invitation to preside over the first congress of psychoanalysts, it fell to Jung to
take over the office.
This remained so for the subsequent congresses, and C. G. Jung officiated as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association until his resignation.
With this his representative role at the founder’s side was clearly defined for all to see.
Thus dissensions that could not be avoided, whether of a factual or a more temperamental and atmospheric nature, could always be smoothed over.
Freud also performed no little service in resolving and reconciling the “quarrels” that began to arise here and there among his colleagues.
His assessment of the Salzburg Congress, with which Abraham as well as others were in agreement, was extremely positive-on Jung’s address he said:
“It was very refreshing and left a pleasant aftertaste with me. I was glad to find you flourishing so well, and whatever resentment there might have been melted away as soon as I saw you again and understood you,” expressing the father’s delight in his “son and heir.”
One outcome of the Salzburg gathering was a resolution to begin producing a proper annual journal, in which
exemplary works on psychoanalysis would be published.
Freud and Bleuler were designated publishers, while the editorship of the new Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen went to C. G. Jung; thus once again two of Freud’s colleagues from Zurich and none from Vienna figured as custodians both inward and outward.
As Freud had to admit-even after the two great secessions under Adler and Jung (1914)-“The Zurich contingent were the picked troops of the little army fighting for the honor of analysis.
They provided the only opportunity of acquiring the new art and working at it. Most of my adherents and coworkers today came to me by way of Zurich, even some who were geographically much closer to Vienna than to Zurich …. In the union that was formed between the Vienna and Zurich schools, the Swiss were by no means only on the receiving end. They had already produced respectable scientific work in their own right, the results of which benefited psychoanalysis.”
Freud stated openly that these contributions from Bleuler’ s camp were connected above all with the name of C. G. Jung.
The first Freudians, Jung among them, could not complain of a lack of publicity.
Certainly attacks from official academic circles were predominant, especially in the German-speaking world.
So it was all the more surprising when an invitation came from the United States, where Freud’s and Jung’s output was being followed with intense interest and the necessary lack of prejudice. “In no other country was psychoanalysis adopted as early and as readily, and nowhere did it become as
popular as in the U.S.A.,” wrote Ulrike May.
This invitation from America arrived in the same year in which Jung withdrew from his fatiguing work at the Burgholzli, moving into his home in Kusnacht and establishing his equally extensive private practice from there.
Stanley Hall, himself a psychologist and president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, invited Freud, and a few weeks later Jung, to deliver a number of lectures in German on their field of research, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of its founding.
The recipients were surprised at these invitations, considering the ingrained puritanism of the New England states, even though Jung was optimistically inclined to hope for great interest in psychoanalysis in the United States as early as 1907-1908.
That there was nevertheless a certain willingness, in medical circles to accept Freud’s work, despite its sexual underpinnings, goes along with the general
American readiness to become acquainted with new scientific, medical, and psychological achievements and make them more generally useful.
As far as the new path of research and therapy of the psyche initiated by Freud was concerned, the conference’s organizer had informed himself rather thoroughly about how its methods were evaluated and practiced.
No less a figure than William James, author of the famous Gifford Lectures (Edinburgh, 1901-1902) on The Varieties of Religious Experience, had spoken of the “marvelous investigations of Binet, Janet, Freud, Mason, Prince, and others into the subliminal consciousness”; he had followed Freud’s early works with benevolent interest and kept his compatriots up to date with them through his reviews.
, James Jackson Putnam, a well-known doctor in Boston and professor of neurology at Harvard, had begun to do psychoanalytical experiments.
Brill’s return to the States from Zurich and Ernest Jones’s appointment to head the university psychiatric clinic in Toronto, both in 1908, provided for at least sporadic dissemination of the new ideas.
Writing to Freud on 10 December 1908, Jones was not short of admonitions toward restraint: “The Americans are a peculiar people with customs
all their own. They show curiosity, but seldom genuine interest (a distinction like that between the craving of the neurasthenic and the true desire of the normal lover). Their attitude toward progress is lamentable. They want to hear all about the ‘latest’ methods of treatment, with one eye firmly fixed on the almighty dollar, and they think only of the esteem, ‘kudos’ as they call it, which these will bring them. Many articles have recently been written in praise of Freudian psychotherapy, but they are absurdly superficial, and I fear they will judge it harshly as soon as they hear about its sexual foundation and grasp what it means. The best we can hope for are a few genuine converts who may be won for us and broaden their experience. Still we must do what we can in order to smooth the way for the future.”
Not just a cautious warning, then.
Sobering experiences with American partisans were also exchanged in letters between Jung and Freud at this time.
The correspondence shows how highly, on the whole, Jung rated the upcoming trip to America, and indeed not least for the positive reverse influence
it might have on work in Europe.
For when Freud had originally received the invitation, and had actually turned it down at first on account of the date and his finances, Jung had
not neglected to point out all the potentially positive aspects to his friend in Vienna.
As it turned out, the hosts shifted the arrangements to September, and Freud now promised to go.
He was elated when a little later Jung was also asked to present some lectures, for the long ocean crossing and the stay in America itself would mean plenty of opportunity for the conversation between them that had been so painfully limited until then.
On 20 August the small party of travelers, which had been joined by Sandor Ferenczi, embarked in Bremen, and the next day the steamer George Washington of the North German Lloyd line put off, beginning a journey of some seven weeks, all told.
Jung left no doubt about the importance of this event:
“We were together every day, and analyzed each other’s dreams,”
he reports in his Memories. Important dreams of all sorts appeared, but because of their collective and symbolic content the master of dream interpretation hardly seemed equal to them-the riddles were too much for Freud.
It was a human failure, and I would never have wanted to discontinue our dream analyses on that account. On the contrary, they meant a great deal to me, and I found our relationship exceedingly valuable. I regarded Freud as an older, more mature and experienced personality, and felt like a son in that respect.
Thus Jung himself fully affirmed the father-son relationship.
But even this harmony did not remain undisturbed, and it was in their analytical dream work together during the voyage that serious personal and practical problems began to reveal themselves.
Jung also had trouble understanding certain elements in the dream life of his analysand, and as usual he asked about certain details in Freud’s private life, which in view of the openness and unreservedness they had always shared, both in person and in their letters, was nothing out of the ordinary.
But suddenly now there was a remarkable block on the elder man’s part, justified by the remark “But I cannot risk my authority!”
Jung’s reaction described the situation:
At that moment he lost it altogether. That sentence burned itself into my memory; and in it the end of our relationship was already foreshadowed. Freud was placing personal authority above truth.
Hardly less significant, in terms of its content, is a dream that Jung had at this time:
He found himself in an unfamiliar two-story house.
Upstairs in a kind of living room there were beautiful old pieces of rococo-style furniture, and one floor lower, furnishings from the fifteenth or sixteenth century.
Much older still were the cellar and the rest of the basement,
which seemed to date back to Roman times.
Finally he lifted a stone slab to reveal narrow stone steps, leading still farther down into a cave like depth where bones, broken pottery, and two very old and partly disintegrated human skulls were lying.
Naturally, according to psychoanalytical dream theory, Freud sought to find out what secret “wish” was being fulfilled here, what wish fulfillment might be reflected in the dream.
Now it was Jung’s turn to feel resistance.
On the one hand he was convinced that the assumption of mere wish fulfillment did not fit in this case, but on the other hand his own divergent dream interpretation was still quite uncertain at the time.
So he only pretended to respond to Freud’s further analytical questions-certainly just as questionable a tactic!
At any rate, such a thing was clearly bound to lead to error.
Obviously these differing approaches to the interpretation of dreams must be viewed within the existential and psychological contexts in which they were developed.
And in Jung’s case this means that one must always take into consideration his strong historical interest, which included archeology and ancient history.
He himself referred to the intensely historical atmosphere that surrounded him during his school days at the end of the nineteenth century.
Hence, understandably, when I thought about dreams and the contents of the unconscious, I never did so without making historical comparisons; in my student days I always used Krug’s old dictionary of philosophy. I was especially familiar with the writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century ….By contrast, I had the impression that Freud’s intellectual history began with Buchner, Moleschott, DuBois Reymond, and Darwin.
Disregarding for the moment the fact that this characterization of the master was at least an unwarranted inference Freud’s study, for instance, was filled with ancient relics of all kinds-Jung’s dream must certainly be said to have had great significance for the further development of his thinking.
According to his own interpretation, the various stories of the house, down to the cave like hollow, symbolized dimensions of the human psyche.
Thus the living room upstairs most likely corresponds to everyday consciousness, while beneath it lie levels reaching back into archaic spiritual
pasts that are always present in every person all the way back to our animalistic roots, even though we are not always consciously aware of this.
Therefore the meaning was not to be found in some kind of wish fulfillment (for example, that the dreamer unconsciously desired the deaths of two men), but in a fundamental insight:
[The dream J was my first inkling of a collective a priori beneath the personal psyche. This I first took to be the races of earlier modes of functioning. Later, with increasing experience and on the basis of more reliable knowledge, I recognized them as forms of instinct, that is, as archetypes.
Of course the way to the archetypal dimension was still far from clear.
But this dream presented Jung with an important stimulus to pursue further research in this area by recalling his old interests in archeology and immersing himself in the “symbolism and mythology of ancient peoples,” for example with the help of Friedrich Creuzer’s work of that title.
These interests, though, a field of investigation all its own, were at the time of his journey to the United States still far removed from the topics that were to be discussed there.
On the evening of 29 August, after a nine-day voyage, the three traveling companions arrived in New York.
Brill had come to welcome them, and two days later Jones arrived from Toronto.
Before the journey on to Boston and Worcester began, the five men had time to tour New York. From Jung’s letters to his wife we are rather well informed about his immediate impressions from this first trip to America.
The gigantic size and bustle of this city of over a million inhabitants left the Swiss visitor breathless.
A walk of several hours in Central Park did him good. Dinner at the Brills’: “Imagine, a salad made of apples, cabbage, celery, nuts, etc., etc.
But it was good anyway.”
Then from ten to twelve P.M., an automobile ride through Chinatown, “into the most dangerous part of New York,” Jung thought. His letter went into vivid detail:
It was filthy and exotic. The Chinese are all dressed in dark blue and wear their long black queues. We went to a Chinese temple that was in a horrible dump called a Josshouse. One could smell a murder in every corner. Then we went to a Chinese teahouse, where we had a really excellent tea, along with which they brought us rice and an unbelievable dish of chopped meat, which appeared to be completely covered with earthworms and onions. It looked frightful. The worms, though, turned out to be Chinese potato; I tried some of it and it wasn’t bad. Otherwise the rowdies who were loitering about looked more dangerous than the Chinese. In Chinatown there are nine thousand Chinese men and only twenty-eight women. But because of this there are masses of white prostitutes, who have just now been cleared out by the police. After that we went to a real Apache music hall, where it was dismal. A singer got up, and people threw money on the floor in front of him for payment. It was all strange and terribly unpleasant, but interesting.
And so that his wife at home in Kusnacht would not worry about him enjoying the New York night life, he added: “Furthermore, like a true American woman, Mrs. Brill went everywhere with us. We finally got to bed at twelve o’clock. This morning-the thirty-first of August-the activity started up again.
This activity included a visit to an insane asylum, then to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for several hours, and in the evening to Coney Island, the “largest seaside holiday resort on the Atlantic coast.” And all in fine weather and a pleasant breeze. There were pangs of homesickness, “and sometimes not small ones. I miss you, and I am always thinking how much you would like it here. It does not suit me terribly well, it is just extremely interesting.”
So said the psychologist, who nonetheless was so busy viewing the paleontological collection with its huge fossils, “Lord God’s anxiety dream of creation,” that he put off preparing the details of his three lectures until he got to Worcester.
But this real purpose of the journey was threatening to turn into an incidental episode, for in the same letter he mentioned his further plans: Niagara
Falls, an excursion to Canada if possible; they would not be able to make it to Chicago-and by the way he would be on his way home again on 21 September.
Another voyage by steamer was in the offing, from the Hudson River around the point of Manhattan with its innumerable skyscrapers, and up the East River under the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges.
On 5 September they reached Fall River, Massachusetts, and on the same day took the train on to Boston and from there to Worcester, the goal of their journey.
Jung took pleasure in the ever-changing scenery with its forests, meadows, and small lakes, partly dotted with tiny villages of wooden houses, whose construction and appearance reminded him of Holland.
All in all it was “a refreshing relief after the life in New York.”
Jung stressed in his letters the kindness with which the travelers had been welcomed.
He and Freud lodged with Professor Stanley Hall, “a refined, distinguished old gentleman close on seventy.”
Once again, thanks to her husband’s description, Emma Jung could imagine a colorful picture of his stay in Worcester.
The house is furnished in an incredibly amusing fashion, everything roomy and comfortable. There is a splendid studio filled with thousands of books, and boxes of cigars everywhere. Two pitch-black Negroes in dinner jackets, the extreme of grotesque solemnity, perform as servants. Carpets everywhere, all the doors open, even the bathroom door and the front door; people going in and out all over the place; all the windows extend down to the floor. The house is surrounded by an English lawn, no garden fence. Half the city (about a hundred and eighty thousand inhabitants) stands in a regular forest of old trees which shade all the streets. Most of the houses are smaller than ours, charmingly surrounded by flowers and flowering shrubs, overgrown with Virginia creeper and wisteria; everything well-tended, clean, cultivated, and exceedingly peaceful and congenial. A wholly different America!
Jung was unquestionable fascinated.
But he too did not neglect to display his own charm, particularly in the company of the ladies.
He had just had “a talk” with two very cultivated elderly ladies, he wrote to Kusnacht, adding that they had proved to be very well informed and even “free-thinking.”
Another five ladies crowded around the doctor from Switzerland to delight in the way he attempted to make jokes in English.
In any event, all of his terror of his first lecture at the University was removed, “since the audience is harmless and merely eager to learn new things.” This observation must certainly have applied to two personalities at least who made a lasting impression on Jung.
These were, for one, Stanley Hall himself, who deserved much of the credit for the formation of the relatively small Clark University, and of course William James.
“I spent two delightful evenings with William James alone and I was tremendously impressed by the clearness of his mind and the complete absence of intellectual prejudices. Stanley Hall was an equally clear-headed man, but decidedly of an academic brand,” wrote Jung a generation later to an American
who was engaged in writing a doctoral thesis on this Clark conference of 1909.
After Freud’s very positively received lectures, which were really five extemporaneous addresses, it was Jung’s turn.
His three lectures dealt with the association experiments, the investigations carried out at the Burgholzli through which he had eventually become known in the United States.
A further lecture was devoted to “Psychic Conflicts in a Child.”
One of the basic assumptions of the thesis maintained in this paper was that the interest in sexuality plays a not inconsiderable causal role in the developmental process of the child’s thinking.
Understandably, the presenter avoided going any further into the tension that existed between himself and Freud on this very point.
This minor work, which later appeared in print and was included in the publication of the collected works, showed that even here Jung was referring to his own experience, as the father of a four-year-old child.
Thus the assertion that these were the observations “of a father versed in psychoanalysis about his then four-year-old daughter” was a veiled reference to himself and his little daughter Agathe, a suspicion confirmed by statements to this effect in his correspondence with Freud.
The great recognition accorded to Freud and also Jung at Clark University culminated in the award of an honorary doctorate of law.
Thus his communication to Emma Jung on 14 September 1909:
Last night there was a tremendous amount of ceremony and fancy dress, with all sorts of red and black gowns and gold tasseled square caps. In a grand and festive assemblage I was appointed Doctor of Laws honoris causa and Freud likewise. Now I may place an L.L.D. after my name. Impressive, what?
Freud, for his part, considered his and Jung’s appearance in the United States significant in another sense, as a recognition of the new science and the friendly reception of its representatives.
In his own “Self-Portrayal” we find the lines:
“The short stay in the new world was exceedingly good for my self-respect; in Europe I felt like an outlaw, but here I found myself accepted as an equal by the best. It was like the realization of an unbelievable daydream. . . . Thus psychoanalysis was no longer a flight of fancy; it had become a valuable piece of reality. Since our visit it has never lost ground in America.”
Before the travelers could begin their return trip they had a final sightseeing program to complete, which was a welcome change much less for Freud than for Jung, who thirsted for primitivity-although after the turbulent previous days he, too, had become “weary of America” and was, as he said
in a letter to his wife, “looking forward enormously to getting back to the sea again.”
This time their host was J. J. Putnam, who owned a camp in the Keene Valley in the Adirondack Mountains where one could camp close to nature, in a peculiar, primitively elegant manner, away from the confusion of the city and society.
Jung wrote to Kusnacht, the evening of 16 September:
I am sitting in a large wooden cabin consisting of a single room, and before me is a mighty fireplace roughly built of bricks with huge wooden logs in front of it, and masses of tools, books, and the like on the walls. Around the cabin runs a covered porch, and when you step outside you see nothing at first but trees-beeches, firs, pines, and cedars, all a bit strange, with the rain softly rustling beneath them. Through the trees you see a mountainous landscape, all covered with trees. The cabin stands on a slope, and a little farther down there are about ten small wooden cottages over there the women live, there the men, over there is the kitchen, there the dining cabin, and in between cows and horses are grazing …. ”
His description of a primitive landscape with wild animals of all kinds goes on in this way, and one gains the impression that the American traveler from Kusnacht is already thinking of building a similar retreat in addition to his recently finished comfortable country home; at any rate it was a dream that was to come true a decade later.
Psychoanalysis around a campfire in a secluded corner of an American mountain-it is very easy to imagine Jung in this setting, but far less so Freud.
The unregulated and improvised life thoroughly disagreed with him; he was irritated and developed an inflammation of the cecum and other such complaints.
And so his dictum, reported by Jones, is also understandable:
“America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake to be sure, but a mistake all the same.”
Freud’s biographer noted explicitly that it was very difficult for the master to get along at all with the easy and unforced manners of the New World.
Jung meanwhile was enthralled with the wild forested mountain scenery, the “primitive virgin forest from the time of the glaciers, the bears, wolves, deer, moose, porcupines, and snakes of all kinds.”
And the contrasts could not have been greater: one day atop a rocky peak almost 5600 feet high, with a view open to the blue infinities of America, and the next day back in Albany, the bustling capital city of New York State.
What remained with him, though, were his meetings with people and impressions of nature.
Here, Jung said, “an ideal of what is possible in life” had been realized.
He wrote further to his wife, two days before his departure:
We have seen things here that inspire enthusiastic admiration, and things that make one ponder social evolution deeply. As far as technological culture is concerned, we lag miles behind America. But all that is frightfully costly and already carries the germ of the end in itself …. I shall never forget the experiences of this journey. Now we are tired of America.
The next notes came from the North German Lloyd steamer Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse of Bremen, on which the three travelers put to sea from New York Harbor on the morning of21 September 1909.
Once again Jung surrendered himself to the “cosmic grandeur and simplicity” of the sea, which compels man to silence when the ocean is alone with the starry sky[.]
One looks out silently, surrendering all self-importance, and many old sayings and images scurry through the mind; a low voice says something about the age-oldness and infinitude of the “far-swelling, murmurous sea,” of “the waves of the sea and of love,” of Leukothea, the lovely goddess who appears in
the foam of the seething waves to travel-weary Odysseus and gives him the pearly veil which saves him from Poseidon’s storm. The sea is like music; it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over. The beauty and grandeur of the sea consist in our being forced down into the fruitful bottom lands of our own psyches, where we confront and re-create ourselves ….
And then came the day-long storm the next day, which Jung –watched from an elevated spot beneath the bridge.
Into his description of the outer drama of the elemental forces flowed the happenings of the soul, just as they were portrayed in the myth of storm-tossed Odysseus.
Thus the real events on the sea and the mythical drama matched the experience from his own depths, pointing far beyond the personality to the transpersonal and the spiritual.
Could anyone who was in the grip of this power be satisfied with a “psychoanalysis” limited to the ego and its instinctive fate, without opening up to the
superoperon and collective unconscious?
But with this the conflict with Freud was predestined, for he was such a person.
What Jung had always wondered about-the philosophical and scientific premises on which Freud’s entire psychoanalysis really rested-would have to come to light. ~Gerhard Wehr, Jung: A Biography, Pages 96-126