Yet more

Jones seemed to think Jung was guilty of an even more egregious sin, that of not gratifying “Freud’s more personal wishes,” because he was “at all times a somewhat erratic correspondent; his absorption in his researches made him increasingly remiss in this respect.” Absorption in independent research also made Jung an increasingly formidable threat to Freud, but Jones either care fully avoided making any such observation or was not astute enough to see it. 

It did not seem to matter to Freud, nor did Jones acknowledge it when he wrote about Freud’s life, that Jung had become internationally known and respected as a leading figure in experimental psychiatry when he was in his early thirties. The word association test brought him initial renown, but his important book The Psychology of Dementia Praecox brought scholars and scientists to the Burgholzli because they specifically wanted to observe him at work. They came in the same numbers long after he left the Burgholzli, so that as much of his time was taken by private lectures and seminars as it was by Freud’s administrative demands. The years Jung served as Freud’s crown prince and heir apparent can well be described as an administrative detour that kept him from his real work. 

As early as 1907, when he published the studies on dementia praecox, Jung realized that psychosexuality could not be held accountable for all psychoses, and that there had to be another cause, perhaps an organic genetic factor, which he called “anomalies in the metabolism- toxins, perhaps” and which he believed were responsible for psychotic states. It was a belief he had been expressing in greater or lesser degree ever since but had little research time to pursue. His frustration frequently made him curt and abrupt with other doctors, and he often addressed them in terms that earned him a reputation for behaving with the overbearing disposition of a bully. 

Alphonse Maeder, who had known Jung and worked with him ever since he became an assistant at the Burgholzli in 1906 and who also knew and had corresponded with Freud since 1909, had ample time to observe the unfolding dynamics between the two men: “Jung was, in his own way, as authoritarian as Freud; he had no understanding of not taste for exchanging points of view with collaborators. He was very short with them.” And as Freud increasingly sought to plug Jung firmly into a tight little slot of his devising, he did not hesitate to display short temper and irritation. 

When Freud finally got around to telling Jung what he thought of part one of Wandlungen, he referred to it coyly: “[It is] one of the nicest works I have read (again) [by] a well known author.” Nonetheless, he had reservations, that Jung’s approach had been “too narrowed by Christianity”’° and seemed more “above the material than in it.” He damned it With faint praise as Jung's best work to date, “though he will do still better.” Freud again claimed primacy, pleased that Jung had agreed with “things [he had] already said or would like to say.”

Freud abandoned obliquity to make the direct admission that he was worried he might inadvertently appropriate an idea Jung originated, or vice versa. His plain: was genuine, as was his explanation of how their research was likely to proceed: “Probably my tunnels will be far more subterranean than your shaft; and we shall pass each other by.” 

Recognizing the possibility of serious conflict, Jung did not let this letter sit for several weeks but answered it immediately. He told Freud that if he continued his investigations into the “psychology of religion,” he would become “a dangerous rival -if one has to speak of rivalry.” Freud was well along with Totem and Taboo and had no intention of putting it aside, which Jung foresaw as an inevitable clash. Successful resolution of the dilemma would come only through the “personal differences” that distinguished each man’s thinking. Jung explained that Freud unearthed “precious stones,” while he worked by “degrees of extension . . . the whole to the part.” Freud criticized Jung for relying too heavily on outside sources. Using them gave Jung’s writing an air of learned authority but detracted from the purity of his thought. Jung countered that it was “too upsetting to let large tracts of human knowledge lie there neglected.” Freud insisted the differences in how they researched would no doubt cause them to “meet from time to time in unexpected places.” Whether Jung believed this or whether he was being conciliatory, he conceded that Freud would remain the leader because he had “anticipated by far the greater part already.” Jung found it “difficult only at first to accustom oneself to this thought. Later one comes to accept it.” 

Jung claimed to be working “diligently” on the second part of his article, but the test of the letter belies the statement, filled as it is with a gloomy recitation of time-consuming psychoanalytic politics. He ended on a “note of imprecation," to which he was emotionally incapable of adding a “heart-felt,” as Freud had done in his previous letter. Curtly, he bid Freud “adieu” with the cool “best regards” instead of his usual “most sincerely yours.” 

Jung was a prolific writer to whom ideas came easily. Words flowed from his pen, and the only time he was ever at a loss was when he found himself blocked and unable to complete part two of the Wandlungm. When he first began to write, he stumbled upon the technique that best suited his temperament and used it from then on, despite the confusion it sometimes inspired in his readers and the many criticisms it garnered from scholars. As an old man in his eighties, he felt the need to explain it, trying repeatedly in every extant version of the interviews and rough drafts that were eventually refined and edited to become Memories, Dreams, Reflections'. In each of these Protocols (as the early drafts are called), he begins with an apology to his readers similar to this one: 

I am sorry that I repeat certain things. I always did that in my books. I regarded certain things again and again, and always from a new “angle” because my thinking is circular. I circle around the same question again and again. That is the method that appeals to me. In a way it’s a new kind of peripatetic [word missing]. It just works best for me to write this way. 

This circularity compounds the difficulty of reading not only any particular work but also Jung’s oeuvre in its entirety. Often he revisited an original text to modify or add to it, or he elaborated upon the initial point while introducing other related points to support his original contention. These points may have required separate discussion within the same work or, if they raised issues too large to be dealt with there, in a future work yet to be formulated. There were times, for example in his last decade of life, the 1950s, when he was still refining ideas developed as early as 1912. Traces of earlier work are always present, for not only did he expand and develop ideas, he sometimes contradicted them. “That is what I thought then,” he would respond when asked about a discrepancy, “but this is how I think about it now.” 

In large part, this was how he approached his differences with Freud over the theory of the libido. He circled around the material, trying to perceive it from every angle, trying to make his thesis conform to Freud’s and finding in the end that he simply could not reconcile himself to a monocausal point of view. A prime example was Freud’s insistence that a definition of libido began with the primacy of a sex drive that dated from an individual’s infancy, and Jung’s contention that the definition had to be broadened to include universal patterns of behavior common to many different historical cultures throughout historically different times." Freud described Jung’s definition as a “demonstration of unconscious heredity in symbolism” that proved “the existence of ‘innate ideas.” He admitted it merited further investigation, even though it was outside “the original limits of WA,”48 limits Freud insisted upon because of the neatly empirical manner in which they supported his theory and proved it true.’ 

All his life, Jung remembered how passionately Freud implored him, “promise me one thing: look after sexuality!” He never forgot the expression on Freud’s face, or his tone of voice as he said it.” It convinced him that Freud was a “scientific materialist”l and that was what “made his view so unwieldy, namely the biological mode of expression. . . . The man simply had a biological attitude.” When Freud criticized his divergence, Jung responded that it was “a good thing to make occasional incursions into other territories and to look at Our subject through a different pair of spectacles?” This exchange occurred after Sabina Spielrein read a paper to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society called  “On Transformation.” In a discussion with “the little girl,” Freud found her idea “to subordinate the psychological material to biological considerations” (his emphasis) as wrongheaded as Jung’s reliance on “philosophy, physiology, or brain anatomy.“ Then he launched a stinging critique of Jung, saying he showed no discernment when he used mythology indiscriminately. He chastised his use of derivatives rather than originals, saying that only the original, could be subjected to “psychoanalytic elucidation,” using the Book of Genesis as a prime example of distortion through variant renderings of the same information.

Freud penned this when he was writing Totem and Taboo and was beset with metaphorical “rapids, waterfalls, sandbanks, etc.” Even as he decried his dis. agreement with Jung, he remained doggedly insistent that his original position was correct and offered no possibility of compromise. As far as he was concerned, there were “two basic drives,” and only “the sexual drive can be termed libido?” 

Jung was equally firm about the “booming reverberations” that beset him after he read Freud’s study of the German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber. Freud, who never met Schreber, wrote an analysis based entirely on Schreber’s autobiography, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which Jung had urged him to read during his stay in the Burghtilzli. Freud maintained that this book alone was proof that the single cause of Schreber’s psychosis was his sexuality, a conclusion he then used to vindicate and support his general theory of the libido. Jung had been the first to use Schreber’s autobiography, in his 1907 study of dementia praecox. He disagreed with Freud then and had continued to do so ever since. Now he knew he could no longer offer lip service to Freud’s theory: “The loss of reality function in D. pr. cannot be reduced to repression of libido (defined as sexual hunger). Not by me at any rate.” 

Something in these dissenting exchanges lifted the writer’s block that had kept Jung from finishing part two of the Wimdlungen. Using his typical roundabout, all-inclusive technique, he was able to “put together all the thoughts on the libido concept that have come to me over the years,” and to structure them into a separate, complete chapter. Wary of discussing his conclusions by mail, Jung did disclose his “essential point . . . that I try to replace the descriptive concept of libido by a genetic one” (Jung’s emphasis). His concept would in' dude “all those forms [of libido] which have long since split off . . . a wee bit of biology was unavoidable here?” And he, too, closed on a note of insistence, that Freud had to consider everything within his thesis, and to “feel its full impact. Mere fragments are barely intelligible.” 

Freud soft-pedaled in his reply, choosing to concentrate on Bleuler’s “opposition” as the necessary force that kept their common ties strong. His note was all conciliation, as he was entirely in favor of Jung’s addressing the libido concept. He expected “much light” from Jung’s conclusions.”

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In the first of the three letters, written on December 17, Freud thought Frau C. incapable of benefiting from therapy, but he was still so eager to treat her that he planned to turn some of his other patients over to his Viennese cohorts to make room on his schedule.6 When he saw her on December 28, he bluntly contradicted Jung’s prior analysis, saying she and Pfister had no other choice but to consult him.7 On New Year’s Eve, he leveled a full blast, saying if Jung harbored any offense toward him, he did not need to use Frau C. as an excuse to express it.8 Freud apparently believed her version of events, that Jung and Phister (but primarily Jung) were in some sort of unspecified collusion against him.9 

His letters are notable for two other admissions as well. In the first, he chides both Jung and Pfister for how they conducted treatment, “giving a good deal of yourselves and expecting the patient to give something in return.” He was objecting to one of the most distinct differences in their therapies: Freud’s patients lay on a daybed draped with a Persian carpet and covered with velvet cushions in muted earth tones, while he sat behind them silently, out of sight in a forest~ green velvet armchair. Jung and his patients sat on chairs placed close, faced each other directly, and engaged in an interactive dialogue. One of his patients described a typical session: “He sat at one side of the window and the person interviewed sat on the other. The window was alongside you, the light being full on his face and full on your face so that you saw him. . . . You didn’t lose anything of the facial expressions or the feelings that he had.” Freud thought Jung’s technique “ill-advised. . . . We must never let our poor neurotics drive us crazy. 

Freud’s second notable admission was yet another example of his need for ultimate authority. He hinted at it by telling of a recent disagreement with Ferenczi, who accused him on more than one occasion of distancing himself and withholding affection from colleagues as well as patients. Ferenczi had since admitted he was wrong and Freud had been “well advised.” 

“I don’t deny that I like to be right," Freud continued, calling it a “sad privilege” of old age and accusing “younger men” of not knowing how to cope with their “father complexes.”

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ALTHOUGH he told no one at the time, the terror and trauma of writing part two were so great that he began to practice yoga to gain the courage necessary even to approach it, let alone write it. Years later, he tried to describe what happened to him throughout the final months, but even with distance and time he could not express it in a logical and coherent manner. He said part two, in which he categorically denied the primacy of sex in the libido theory, poured out in a language that he thought must have corresponded to how the archetypes spoke. It was the first time it happened to him. The doctrine it made him espouse was quite literally earth-shattering, but he chose to describe it with a curious term: he said it “embarrassed” him because it went against his grain, referring to all his medical training and the previous writings that his peers considered models of scientific objectivity. But he had no choice and was compelled to write it down as he heard it spoken inside himself, so he listened to the inner voices. It was as if, beneath the threshold of his consciousness, emotions and images rose spontaneously and refused to bow to his outward, conscious control. He was afraid the voices he obeyed would cause an involuntary slide into neurosis: “They would have torn me up, or I could have been split off. . . . After all, I lived in a quiet world then and there were no personal entanglements.” 

He did not know from what place within his creative consciousness this work originated that would take further research into the concept of the collective unconscious. He only knew that he believed in the correctness of what he wrote, that he would have to publish it, that he would have to stand behind it. And that by choosing the role of truth seeker rather than defender of Freud’s faith, he would be in for a rocky time. 

He admitted to Freud that he had finished the book only when Freud sent him an article he wrote to be published in Image. Jung said offhandedly that it was “a pity” part two was already with his publisher, because he could have used it to make “a number of improvements” in Freud’s essay. He stayed calm when Freud raged at his effrontery and demanded that he clarify his remarks. Jung explained that he interpreted “the incest problem . . . primarily as a fantasy problem.” His explanation was unsuccessful, and a week later he wrote a second letter. Freud made “three observations . . . not refutations” that reflected his doubt about Jung’s “conception of incest.” Jung tried to explain a third time.“ At last Freud saw how Jung’s conception of libido differed from his, but he still could not accept it. He harbored “strong antipathy” for two reasons: first because it was “regressive,” and second because it carried a “disastrous similarity to a theorem of Adler’s,” though he quickly added that he was not condemning “all Adler’s inventions.” No further letters were required, and he Would await Jung’s manuscript itself. He appreciated Jung’s advance ‘warning” about what it would say.“ 

and

I knew that Freud never will agree with any change in his doctrine. And this is really the case. He is convinced that I am thinking under the domination of a father complex against him and this is all complete nonsense. 

It would break me, if I were not prepared to see it through, the struggle of the past year where I liberated myself from the regard for the father. If I will go on in science, I have to go on through my own path. He already ceased being my friend, understanding my whole work as a personal resistance against himself and sexuality. Against this insinuation I am completely helpless. I only can regret that I am not able to express myself so clearly that Freud can understand it. 

When Jones described this letter to Freud, the roiling emotionalism he attribued to Jung bore no relation to what Jung actually wrote. Jones ended his impassioned account, created out of whole cloth, by telling Freud he now understood a remark Jung made to him three years previously, of how Freud would eventually destroy his own work by his extremism, but how he, Jung, “Would save it (or words to that effect)” If this were true, one wonders why the faithful Jones waited three years to alert Freud to Jung’s alleged double-dealing. 

Jones used innuendo, gossip, and slander all the intrigue fostered by the minor characters who surrounded the two major players -to his own lasting advantage. Earlier that summer, he began to build on a casual remark of Ferenczi’s. that a select group of Freud’s followers should submit to being analyzed by him so they could be sure of representing his theory in all its purity. To do this would have been impossible as they were so geographically dispersed, so Jones proposed instead that “a small group of trustworthy analysts” agree to form “a sort of ‘Old Guard’ around Freud." In Jones’s conception of the group originated in “stories of Charlemagne's paladins from boyhood, and many secret societies from literature.

More Jung

On the same day Freud wrote this to Jung, he wrote to Abraham, instructing him that even though he was “in the right,” he must defer to Jung on everything and their “inevitable” rivalry had to stop. He told Abraham to discuss with Jung everything he intended to write before he put a word to paper, to listen to Jung's objections, and then to change his arguments accordingly. It was imperative that Jung “should find his way back to the views that he has now abandoned.“ Just as he had played on Jung’s emotions over Bleuler, Freud now played on Abraham‘s with the same words: such an “act of courtesy” would be “a great personal favor” and give him “great pleasure.” Freud cheerfully concluded that this was only a “small self-sacrifice,” and Abraham should not “make too heavy going" of it. 

The last paragraph of Freud’s letter has been debated by nearly everyone who has studied his brief alliance with Jung, for it gives one of the earliest examples of the Christian/Jewish undercurrent that plagued it. Freud said it was easier for Abraham to follow his ideas because of “racial kinship,” whereas Jung, “A Christian and a pastor’s son, finds his way to me only against great inner resistances.” He needed Jung: “I nearly said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psycho-analysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair.” 

“I hope you will do as I ask,” he concluded firmly. Six days later, when Abraham had not replied, Freud wrote again to “reinforce” his “request.” Abraham acceded to all his demands. Jung still felt “undisguised contempt” for Abraham’s continuing appropriation of the ideas of others, but he accepted Freud’s dictum that Abraham be entrusted with preparing abstracts and editing German submissions for the first jahrbuch. Abraham was “simply not a gentleman” in Jung’s view, which was “just about the worst thing that can happen to anyone.” 

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JUNG BEGAN immediately to tie up the many loose ends that needed his attention. One he had been working on for several months took precedence, a paper based in part on his analysis of Otto Gross that he wanted to publish in the first jahrbuch. He called the essay “The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual,” and like much of his earlier work, it gave expression to previous theoretical beliefs and hints of those to come. Starting with a brief explanation of the tightness of Freud’s regression theory, Jung’s thesis was that a father’s influence, both hereditary and psychological, was far more lasting and had far more impact upon a family than a mother’s. He supported his contention by citing the reaction-time experiments of his pupil Dr. Emma Furst and, “more particularly, in an analysis carried out conjointly with Dr. Otto Gross.” 

Jung offered case histories of three patients (a man and two women) to support his thesis before turning to Gross himself, his fourth and most extensively detailed case. In their mutual analysis, Gross had gone into great detail about his lifelong homosexual fixation on his father, which from his earliest childhood led him to masturbate obsessively. He also told Jung how he adored his mother, feared his father, and resented his parents’ sexual relationship (mutually satisfying, as Jung interpreted it). Jung included this information and Gross’s reactions to it to demonstrate his contention that, whether male or female, the individual was never able to surmount the influence of the father and was shackled forever by what the relationship had been before the child became adult. He argued that neurotic sufferers struggled to free themselves from the imagined “demon” who guided their destiny, and that they chose to believe their “steps had been guided by a power foreign to us.” He quoted Shakespeare as cited by Schopenhauer to support his contention that “fate,” not God or the devil, was responsible for “our misfortunes and their consequences.” Throughout his life, Jung continued to believe this thesis had theoretical validity, and he revised the paper twice, in 1926 and 1948, both times to refine his argument and incorporate new thinking. In the last revision, the concept of fate had become “the archetype.” Clearly, in 1908 he was headed toward his theory of the collective unconscious. 

By using biblical analogies and references in the essay, he was also making his first exploratory gestures toward mythology in general rather than (as he had done earlier) simply enlisting a particular myth to support the evaluation of a patient. He had been interested in myth ever since Riklin wrote about fairy tales, and now others were, too. Abraham announced that he was working on a new project to investigate the symbolism and numerous analogies between dreams and myths. Freud joined in, telling Jung offhandedly that his thoughts had turned toward mythology, and he was starting to suspect that myth and neurosis had much in common. Everyone, it seemed, would publish on the subject while Jung was still chafing at how to begin his own investigations.

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Tensions lay just beneath the bonhomie from the moment Jung joined Freud and Ferenczi in Bremen. Jung had been responsible for introducing Ferenczi to Freud shortly after he and Fiilép Stein came from Budapest to observe procedures at the Burgholzli. Jung was impressed with Ferenczi's eagerness to learn about psychoanalysis and considered him one of his earliest pupils and first therapeutic analyses.Their work together as “a teaching analysis in the Freudian spirit" so pleased Jung that he gave Ferenczi a glowing letter recommending him to Freud.

Freud took to Ferenczi as he had earlier taken to Abraham, finding a kinship based in large part on their mutual Jewishness and Ferenczi’s willingness to extend unquestioning intellectual homage. A friendship began that lasted many years, so close that Ferenczi, whose devotion and allegiance never wavered, was often invited to share the Freud family’s holidays and vacations. By the time they got no Bremen, the friendship was already forged, and thus the interpersonal dynamics among the three men had already shifted. Years later, Jung insisted that he was always “the crown prince . . on top,” but he did face competition on this trip from Ferenczi, who behaved as if he were Freud’s loyal, devoted servant and busied himself anticipating all of his master’s needs. Freud quietly but firmly exploited the situation for all it was worth. 

Freud and Ferenczi were both short, slight men, and both were riddled with masses of insecurities. Freud worried endlessly about everything, from not having the proper wardrobe for every possible occasion to the sheer size of the American continent. He feared American “prudery” and particularly what he saw as the overweening crass commercialism of American culture and society. He was prepared to dislike and disapprove of everything even before he departed. Freud was so timid that he never allowed himself to be in any situation where there was the slightest possibility that he might be confronted or bested. The moment he accepted his invitation to Clark, he insisted that someone he trusted had to accompany him as both buffer and amanuensis. Freud not only expected Ferenczi, a man of modest income who had to pay his own expenses, to go along to guard one of his flanks, but he also expected his brother Alexander to guard the other -and at his own expense as well. When Alexander Freud proved unable to make the trip, Freud had to settle for his one true disciple, Ferenczi. He could not really count upon Jung to play a subservient role for a variety of reasons, especially because Jung had received his own invitation and at the age of thirty-four would be likely to receive a great deal of attention as the youngest scholar among the twenty-nine honored guests. 

In Bremen, Ferenczi, with a worn-out Baedeker and a huge bundle of American money that Freud thought looked “dirty,” played both host and tour guide until Jung appeared and rushed, “beaming as he always does,” to greet the sardonic Freud. Exuding confidence and well-being, the big brash Swiss immediately took charge by hiring an expensive private car for a tour of the city and booking a table for lunch at Bremen’s most famous and expensive restaurant, the Essighaus. Freud ordered wine, and to his surprise and “satisfaction,” Jung drank copiously. It was Jung’s first alcoholic beverage since he had entered the Burgholzli in 1901 and taken the vow of abstinence Bleuler (and before him, Forel) demanded of all the assistant doctors. 

Whether it was the wine or the excitement of the journey, Freud became flushed with perspiration and felt faint. He stopped eating and said Jung would have to drink his share of the wine. Freud blamed his feeling faint on the salmon and lack of sleep the previous night, but Jung thought it was directly related to the topic of their conversation, the Moorleichen, mummified corpses found in the swamps and peat bogs of northern Germany and Sweden. When they toured the Bremen Cathedral, Jung confused them with corpses that had been mummified there by the sheets of lead under which they were buried in the Bleikeller; or lead cellar. 

Jung thought he was making interesting mealtime conversation about what they had seen on their tour that morning, when Freud suddenly turned on him: “What is it with you and these corpses? Wouldn’t it be better if you admitted that you wish I would drop dead?” And then he promptly fainted, for the first of two times on two separate occasions several years apart. After each fainting spell, Freud blamed Jung for causing it through an “act of resistance against the father” and a “death wish” against him. 

Jung was stung by the accusation and denied the charge strongly, but he was ultimately frustrated when Freud was incapable of or unwilling to accept his explanation. He was distressed that Freud could even harbor the suspicion, an emotion that gradually hardened into anger. Jung was furious that despite all the work he had done for Freud’s “cause,”lo more than all his other “students” put together, Freud could still accuse him of “personal motives that did not exist at all.” For the time being, he consoled himself that no matter what he did, Freud “always had to find something wrong,” when there was never any factual basis for it: “In the years we were together, it was always pure projection.” Once they boarded ship, tensions simmered further. Freud caused a scene when he spotted Jung engaged in animated conversation with the philosophy professor William Stern, who relied heavily on Jung’s use of word association tests in the courtroom and planned to incorporate it when he lectured at Clark about the uses of testimony. Freud brought their conversation to an abrupt end by shouting at Jung: “Sit down with me! Bad company ruins good manners” Later, and with evident satisfaction, Freud recorded in his travel diary that “the shabby Jew [the distinguished Professor Stern] . . . in embarrassment departed." 

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Schwyzer (the solar phallus man) thought of himself as a God and because he was the LOrd became particular agitated by his obligation to distribute his semen since otherwise the world would perish. What made him unique for Jung was his delusion that he could produce the weather by looking at the sun with eyes half shut and moving his head from side to side making the sun's phallus move thus creating the wind. Jung diagnosed Schwyzer as suffering from a 2 decade incurable mental illness that could neither be cured nor degenerate any further. 

Jung's diagnosis may have been his unstated partial agreement with Bleuer's most recently published research wherein he used the term schizophrenia for the first time. Bleuler coined it as a way to distinguish a subcategory of mental illness from the previously accepted term, the catchall “dementia praecox,” first used by Emil Kraepelin in 1893 to indicate psychotic disorders that were progressively degenerative and usually life-ending. Bleuler now believed there was a subgroup within this classification of clearly psychotic patients whose symptoms seemed to reach a stage beyond which no further degeneration would occur. He also believed that in some few cases, symptoms could actually be remitted and patients discharged as cured. Schwyzer’s early patient history paralleled his theory up to a point, but there it seemed to end. Nevertheless, Jung asked Honegger to keep Bleuler’s investigations into schizophrenia in mind as he observed Schwyzer.” 

From the beginning of his interest in Schwyzer’s case, Jung wondered if the content of the patient’s delusions had a connection to a myth he might have encountered before or even during his various hospitalizations. He thought the former unlikely because of the Schwyzer family’s lack of education and impoverished circumstances. They were peasants who lived in one of the meanest sections of Zurich, isolated by poverty and so riddled with suspicion that they were convinced persecution and harm lay on every front. It was doubtful that any printed matter ever found is way past their hovel’s door.“ 

Even so, despite his brief and incomplete grammar school education, Schwyzer must have possessed a certain degree of intelligence and ambition, for he did, after all, learn English and get himself to London. In his delusions, he appears to have had a sophisticated knowledge of geography (referring to, among other places, Monaco and Australia) and the global conflicts of his time (the Greek-Turkish war, the slaughter of Armenians, Russo-Japanese engagements). He was fascinated by European royalty and had fantasies concerning Queen Maud of Norway (that she was in love with him), Queen Victoria (that she was his mother), and the Duke of Clarence (who he thought he was).

With the exception of his belief in the sun’s gigantic phallus, none of Schwyzer’s known experiences or his delusions indicated that he had even a rudimentary familiarity with literature or folklore. Jung checked his previous hospitalizations and ascertained that there had been no patients’ library in any of them. Even if there had been printed matter, Schwyzer‘s inability to concen‘ trate or speak coherently indicated that his reading would have been as haphar ard as all his other behavior. Nevertheless, it is this single aspect of Sehwyzer’s delusions -that he could create the weather by causing the sun to move a phallic appendage that has caused controversy since Jung first cited the case in his 1912 book Wandlungun and Symbol: der Libido. 

Jung does not name Schwyzer in his book. but he describes his perplexity that he could not interpret a schizophrenic patients delusion: if he moved his head from side to side, he could make the sun’s phallus move as well, and “that was where the wind came from" Jung said the “bizarre notion” remained “unintelligible” until he read Albrecht Dieterich’s 1903 book, Eine Mitbmvliturgie, shortly after it was published in a second edition in 1910 and, at about the same time, G. R. S. Mead’s A Mithraic Ritual.” Dieterich described in the Mithraic liturgy “a so-called tube, the origin of the ministering wind . . . hanging down from the disc of the sun.” In related research, Jung uncovered a painting by an unnamed early German artist showing “a sort of tube or hose-pipe” descending from heaven, where the Holy Ghost, represented as a dove, flies down it and up beneath the robes of the Virgin Mary to impregnate her. Seeing these and “other experiences like them” convinced Jung that a “universally human characteristic” was involved, and that humankind possessed “a functional disposition to produce the same or very similar ideas.” Later, he called it the “archetype” of the collective unconscious and said it was akin to “the pattern of behavior” in biology. 

These thoughts coalesced further in a dream that Jung had during the trip to the United States, which he tried to discuss with Freud during a walk in Central Park. It was important to Jung, who introduced it into several of their subsequent conversations. It eventually became a signpost for differences with Freud that Jung was trying to explain away, and later, when he assessed Honegger’s use study of Schwyzer, he realized it was one of the most important dreams he would ever have, for it provided the basis for what he termed the “collective unconscious.”” 

In his dream, Jung was on the upper floor of a two-story house, in a living room filled with baroque and Renaissance furniture that was both beautiful and uncomfortable. He remembered thinking that the historical period when the furniture was made must have been sometime between 1650 and 1750. Then he looked at paintings hanging on the walls and realized suddenly and with astonishment that this was the contemporary house in which he lived. He was further astounded that he should be on the second floor with no knowledge of how he got there or what, if anything, was on the ground floor. He descended and found everything was Medieval: dark wood, no fabric, and heavy stone floors. He felt obliged to investigate the rest of the house and thus came upon an old door that led to a basement. The stairs were made of ancient stones that descended into a vaulted room whose walls were built of Roman brick. Jung’s curiosity reached its peak when he found a huge metal ring embedded in the floor.
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Honegger did as Jung asked, dating his verbatim recordings of Schwyzer’s testimony from December 31, 1909, until the end of February 1910. He amassed approximately 240 hand-written pages of Schwyzer’s delusional ramblings that he then buttressed with his own marginal observations and interpretations. These were followed by what can best be described as early drafts of what Honegger probably intended to become his dissertation, all of which amount to another hundred or so pages of critical analysis. Even before he read them,Jung was so convinced of Honegger’s brilliance that he sang his praises to Freud, saying Honegger showed such “great understanding” of the Schwyzer project that Jung intended to “entrust to him everything I know so that something good may come of it.” He began to goad Honegger to work faster toward compiling “scientific observations” for presentation at the Second International Psychoanalytic Congress in Nuremberg March 30-3 1, 1910. 

It was important for Honegger to present this material so Jung could stake his claim to preeminence in the sudden spurt of interest in mythology among other psychoanalysts. All the attendees would assume that, as Jung’s protégé, Honegger produced work that was the direct expression of Jung’s views and, as such, an important indicator of his original thought and research. Jung wanted no he the first to present a direct connection between a specific patient and the mythology of other societies and cultures, but most of all, he wanted to be the first to identify and define what was still only the roughest formulation of the collective unconscious and stake his claim to it. He put tremendous pressure on Honegger to work harder and faster, even as the trajectory of both their lives from October 1909 through the summer of 1910 became filled with professional stress and personal strain.

Jung

Like Paul, the Antistes Samuel also began his career as a student of languages, in his case Hebrew, and Old Testament theology. His grandson C. G. wrote that Samuel Preiswerk originally learned Hebrew because he believed it was the language spoken in Heaven and he wanted to be able to read the celestial newspapers once he got there.” 

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Augusta Faber’s family came originally from Niirtingen in Wiirttemberg, descendants of French Alsatian Protestants who moved to Germany in 1685 after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.‘9 Called Gustele within the family, she became the mother of the Antistes Samuel’s other twelve children and a Well-lmown character in her own right. She was credited with bringing “the occult strain” into the family, and was the first to speak of “No. l and No. 2 personalities.” Jung later described No. l as conscious or conventional, that is, “innocuous and human”; and No. 2 as unconscious, that is, “uncanny . . . unexpected and frightening.” In Gustele’s case, her two personalities were repre.sented by two monks she called the Good Monk and the Bad, who, she insisted, accompanied her everywhere. She also prefigured her grandson C. G.’s conception of the collective unconscious, that portion of the unconscious that is not “personal” and particular but, rather, an “omnipresent, unchanging and every. where identical quality or substrate of the psyche per se.” Gustele earned her husband’s respect when she described various incidents that befell her when in the monks’ company in past lives and he verified them in various historical accounts that she could not have read. Jung remembered this when he began his own investigations into the collective unconscious. 

Outspoken, feisty, and determined not to be suffocated by the overwhelming personality of Antistes Samuel, Gustele did not hesitate to tell anyone in Basel who came into her house that she was not happy about the special chair he kept in his study, where no one could sit but the ghost of his dear dead first wife. To Gustele’s chagrin, Antistes Samuel retired to his study each week at a specific hour to have “an intimate conversation” with Magdalena’s ghost. Even more bothersome was his habit of taking each of his four daughters away from household chores, training each in turn to sit behind him while he studied or wrote his sermons. Their task was to make occasional swatting motions to chase away the ghosts who, he insisted, tried annoyingly to scramble his thoughts.63 Emilie, who became C. G.’s mother, regaled her son with tales of this and of her parents’ other eccentriciu'es. She was ten years younger than her next eldest sister, who married young to get away from home, so it was Emilie who spent the most years sitting behind her father, hating every boring minute of it. 

One of the reasons Antistes Samuel was first attracted to Gustele Faber was her “second sight.” Perhaps because of it, Gustele’s mother chose her from among her many siblings to be the disposable daughter and sacrificial nurse for an elder brother who had scarlet fever, a highly contagious disease and at the time nearly always fatal. As the brother’s illness ran its course, the eighteen year-old Gustele fell into a trance of unknown origin, leading the doctor to pronounce her dead as well. For the next several days, even though she was actually laid in her coffin and the funeral was imminent, Gustele’s mother refused to believe herdaughter had died and held a hot iron to her neck, reviving her.

Afterwards Gustele became a seeress whose prognostications surprised everone and as Antistes Samuel had waking hallucinations they were a perfect match. Their daughter Emilie grew up thinking visionary experiences were ordinary

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 All three then talked through the night about how best to continue Riklin’s research while putting it to immediate practical use.Jung instantly took control of the project as primary researcher and radically changed its direction, conducting tests mainly with Riklin under the ostensible supervision of Bleuler. Initially they followed Freud’s research on free association, in which the investigator merely offered words to the subject-patient, who responded or not in any given time. They changed the procedure to one of rigorous, controlled empirical investigation in which a subject was presented with a list of one hundred words selected for the possible associations they might raise and then instructed to respond with the first word that came to mind. Their refinement was to concentrate instead on the disturbances the subject exhibited in response to certain words said by the investigator and to measure the degree of distress by the amount of time it took the subject to formulate a reply. In most cases, these disturbing words could be grouped into a related cluster that Jung called “stimulus-words,” which had much to do with either something in the patient’s conscious knowledge or with information unconsciously repressed. In the former, the patient was embarrassed by or ashamed of circumstances or experiences that produced emotions ranging from fear to self-loathing; in the latter, the task was to make the patient aware of behavior or experiences that had been unconsciously buried within his or her memory. 

Jung found that patients differed in the amount of time they took to formulate responses to the stimulus-words, usually hesitating before those that had something to do with distressing personal information. Together with Riklin, he coined the term “complex” to stand for “personal matter” that was “always a collection of various ideas, held together by an emotional tone common to all“ 

The investigators measured precisely the time it took the subject to answer, which they believed determined the underlying complex,“ or, the root cause of the patient’s distress. As Jung later elaborated in an essay on the analysis of dreams, the investigator’s task was “to establish the context [of the association] with minute care” Words such as “marriage” or “mother,” for example, often provided striking insights into the subject’s mind. 

Besides the actual time it took the subject to answer, they measured other factors, which included prolonged delay or an outright inability to respond. They sought reasons that might possibly underlie superficial or spurious reactions and paid careful attention to the reasons that the subject expressed some responses in highly charged and emotional language. Jung adapted and encapsulated Theodor Ziehen’s term gefilblrbetanter vorstellungskomplex (usually translated and explained as an emotionally charged complex of representations of which the patient was probably unaware) into the single word: “complex.” In his terminology, he used the word to designate detached fragments of personality that maintained an independent, autonomous function within the unconscious, and from which they (i.e., one or more complexes) were capable of exerting an influence upon the conscious mind. Jung described the complex as an “agglomeration of associations” that were “rather difficult to handle.” 

From the beginning of his medical training,Jung’s interest was the individual patient rather than a group suffering similar manifestations of the same illness. Instead of seeking physical evidence from which to generalize, he concentrated on the “possibility of demonstrating the presence, the influence and the structure of those ‘partial souls’ which he now called ‘feeling-toned complexes.’” Although his language was vague and his intentions not yet clearly defined, hindsight shows that he was taking another step toward a recognition of the unconscious, one he began with his dissertation. In this case, it was clearly the personal unconscious, for the collective unconscious was still to be formulated. 

Bleuler was involved in the early stages of the experiment, and he composed a list of 156 stimulus-words for experimentation on “all types of psychosis” Jung noted that Bleuler immediately encountered the problem of how to qualify and quantify responses, particularly how to separate the normal from the abnormal. His initial variation upon Bleuler’s work was to shorten the list to one hundred words, to select thirty-eight “normal” subjects to participate in the first round of experimentation, and to note that “the concept of normality must be very elastic.” As the tests progressed during the years 1901 to 1904, the list was expanded to four hundred words, and subjects were broadened to include epileptics, schizophrenics, and hysterics, among others. To quantify reaction time accurately, Jung invented a variation of a “galvanometer” (later called a psychogalvanometer), which measured the subject’s response to stimulus-words through a “psychogalvanic effect,” that is, by measuring breath rate, pulse, and perspiration. 

All these techniques were formulated and refined during Jung’s first three years at the Burgholzli, and he remembered both the experiments and the time as a period of personal psychological upheavals. The experiments were the main focus of his life, and he covered the walls of his rooms with graphs, charts, and lists, so thickly that his mother, visiting one day from Basel, looked at his “wallpaper” and asked what it was all about. Jung told her proudly that it was the experiment he was working on, when, in her deepest oracular No. 2 voice, Emilie, “standing there like a judge . . . the Delphic oracle,” said, “Well, do you think that’s something.” Jung was stunned. He was unsure if Emilie meant that he assessed his work too highly, or perhaps not highly enough. As she reverted back to her ordinary No. 1 voice and spoke of ordinary everyday things, he was unable to elicit her true meaning.

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Ludwig Binswanger had come to the Burgholzli in 1906 from his family home the Bellevue Kuranstalt (asylum) in Kreuzlingen. In the years when the Burgholzli staff included doctors who later became psychoanalytic luminaries (among them Karl Abraham, Hans Maier, and Max Eitingon), Binswanger’s pedigree placed him one rank higher than the rest. He and Jung soon became friends because both shared the view that Freud introduced “the psychological question into psychiatry.” They were cooperating on how to adapt Freud’s theorizing into a treatment based primarily on careful attention and response to a patient’s case history. Until Jung became familiar with Freud’s writing, his experience was based on what he learned in psychiatry classes, of “abstracting from the experience with the patient to the statistic . . . labelling the patients and putting them aside with a diagnosis. One never asked why does this patient have this idea and someone else another.” Freud became “crucial” to Jung because he offered “a way toward the further examination of the individual cases.” And as Jung’s career progressed, it was the individual who attracted and dominated his most sustained research. 

Binswanger and Jung built a close friendship based on shared ideas, so Jung entered into Binswanger’s testing with a relaxed openness that he might not have bad if another doctor had been the administrator. Moreover, because Binswanger was privy to so much of Jung’s personal life before the two separate tests (the first in January, the second in February), his analysis was more nuanced and incisive than a relative stranger’s might have been. Their rapport led to a curious “doubling” factor within the text of Binswanger’s written commentary, as Jung was both the subject of his experiment and the supervisor and authority whose research he used to prove his conclusions. 

Binswanger first described Jung/subject as “a married doctor well acquainted with the association experiment,” and then as the supervisor whose previous writings provided authoritative documentation and support for his conclusions.” Speaking of test subjects in general, Binswanger wrote that “the relationship of the subject to the experimenter has a particular influence which produces its effect throughout the whole experiment.” He then cited Jung as the authority who “has brought this out very clearly [in The Psychology of Dementia Praecox].” What is most remarkable about the tests is how precisely they depicted Jung’s life at the time. In one telling instance, Binswanger noted that “the action word have . . . only occurs in definite complex places,” and Jung/subject gave it as his reply to five different key words: manners, money, fame, salary, and child. Binswanger also noted that Jung/supervisor called “such stereotyped reaction-words complex representatives,” then added that for Jung/ subject “the complex is quite unconscious here.” 

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What makes Martin Freud’s account especially interesting is that it contradicts what every other biographer or friend of Freud has written about mealtimes in the Freud household.Freud never permitted any conversation other than family news at the midday table (he usually took his evening meal alone, long after the family had consumed its light supper). Even when “learned men" were present, Freud expected them to make polite conversation with his family, If they tried not to, he led them back into generalities with such explicit force that they knew better than to cross him. So it seems unlikely that Jung behaved badly (at least at their first luncheon; perhaps he did transgress later), especially since Emma was with him, and in those days he was always exceedingly deferential to her in public. Also, Binswanger’s memory of the luncheon was that “the flock of children” behaved well, and “a completely unconstrained tone dominated” 

Emma and Binswanger excused themselves after lunch, and Jung was finally admitted no the inner sanctum of Freud’s office, where professional conversation began in earnest. According to Ernest Jones, Jung had so much to tell Freud that “with intense animation, he poured forth in a spate for three whole hours,” leading the bemused Freud to suggest they group the subjects under discussion into systematic categories and proceed accordingly. Jung wanted to know what Freud thought about parapsychological phenomena and precognitions. In Jung’s old age, when he was writing Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he attempted repeatedly to explain what happened between him and Freud at their first meeting.’ Freud never offered a sustained account, but in Jung‘s version. he “absolutely rejected” both, which caused Jung to accuse him of “materialistic bias” and to persist stubbornly in describing his own personal experiences. When he told of the knife that shattered, Freud “expressed such a flat positivism” that Jung found it difficult “not to respond in a way that would have been a bit too biting". Jung found “such an absence of philosophical consciousness" in Freud’s comments that “it actually turned [his] stomach.” Freud continued to talk, and Jung’s stomach felt as if it were “made of iron and would be aiming red hot, a red hot diaphragm vault.” 

Suddenly, there occurred such a noise from the glass-fronted bookcase in front of which they were sitting that both jumped, fearing it would fall on them. “Now this is a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon,” Jung insisted. “Oh, no, that is complete nonsense,” Freud replied. To prove his point, Jung insisted there would be another noise, and immediately there was “an indescribably terrible noise in the cabinet!” 

“Freud looked at me with horror then,” Jung remembered. “This raised a distrust of me in him, for you see, something like that isn’t possible, something like that doesn’t exist in his world view. Consequently, for him, I had to be absolutely out of kilter somewhere. Later I had the definite feeling that I had done something to upset him.” They never spoke of this incident again and the conversation moved to other subjects chosen by Freud. From here on, he was in charge of the agenda. 

At 1 A.M., both men looked at the clock and were astonished to discover how much time had passed since they began to talk. “A world happened then,” Jung told the distinguished Freudian Dr. Kurt Eissler many years later during an interviewing compared his day with Freud to the act of giving birth: “At birth everything is already there! In reality there is no time! Time is, is nothing! That’s what one realizes on such occasions. Those are, there are moments, that are completely timeless.” 

“Yes,” he replied in agreement with Dr. Eissler, “that was really an intense encounter.” It impressed him most of all because it showed “what depth [Freud] had!" “God,” Jung added poignantly, “if he had only gotten over himself, you know! But there was this neurotic element. If he had gotten over that, yes, that it would have been crazy you know, to ever want anything other than to work with him.” 

BUT THE red flag of danger was there from their first extant exchange of letters, when Jung expressed his reservations about the primacy of sexuality in Freud’s theory and Freud replied with the hope that Jung would accept its significance. In their first meeting, Jung expressed his continuing reservations, arguing that Freud had substituted sexuality for what he loosely termed “the mystical.” In a tone Jung described as spoken “very passionately," Freud implored him, “Promise me one thing: look after sexuality!” Jung was struck by Freud’s tone, which seemed the same as if he were saying “‘and promise me one thing, my dear son: go to mass every day!,’ or ‘make Sure that the Eucharist is always being celebrated.’ ” Jung later consigned Freud’s view to “scientific materialism a which he said “always amounted to the game of cats and dogs,” Jung's editor’s English translation of the German idiom for comparing apples with oranges, 

Nevertheless, “everything." about the day was such an incredible, stimulating experience that Jung believed he had finally found what he had been looking for ever since his first six months at the Burghélzli, when he studied the Allgemeine Zeitschrift Psychiatric to learn how best to conduct his profession. Now here was Freud, offering so much collegiality that Jung was willing, indeed eager, to suspend his disbelief and substitute instead a modest degree of doubt. Freud wanted to be the kind of father Jung had always wanted, so why not become his “son and heir” and enjoy the opening of the professional door, that such a relationship would bring? 

The first was the door to the weekly gathering of Freud’s small band of followers, then known as the Vienna Group, later called the Wednesday Psychological Society, and finally the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Jung’s admiration for Freud did not extend to the group, which then had about seventeen members, all of whom were elected by unanimous consent. A paid secretary, Otto Rank, took detailed minutes of the talks, which on Jung’s visit included one by Alfred Adler on anal masochism. Jung and Binswanger attended and sat quietly, as neither was impressed. Jung “deplored” the “medley of artists, decadents and mediocrities” who surrounded Freud.“ Binswanger was more circumspect, citing Freud’s “keen” dismissive assessment of his followers rather than quoting his observation: “Well, now you have seen the gang.” 

EVERYTHING JUNG experienced on the Vienna trip, but especially the Wednesday evening gathering, coalesced into an admission he made to Freud that had far-reaching consequences for his lifelong views of politics and culture. Vienna was a “reasonably small” city but one so “rich in culture and creativity” that the “intelligentsia produced innovations that became identified throughout die European culture sphere.” It was as different from Zurich as the proverbial night from day, and everything about Vienna melded into a barrage of overwhelming sensations. He was a man in his thirties who had no experience with the kinds of conversation one had in the cultural salon or the coffeehouse, and he wanted to describe his impressions of Viennese public social life to Freud. On several occasions during this first visit, Freud analyzed Jung’s dreams (and occasionally Binswanger’s). In a session that followed the Wednesday meeting, Jung offered an interpretation for his dream of the previous night. He told Freud he thought it represented the “trouble” he had adapting to life in Vienna.“ “I felt so foreign before this Jewish intellectual society," he said. “That was something completely new to me. I had never experienced that before . . . I found it very difficult to adjust, to adopt the right tone.” The coffeehouse atmosphere was “so foreign,” the conversations all contained “a certain cynicism,” and Jung felt like a country bumpkin in the face of such sophisticated banter. 

“You wouldn’t be an anti-Semite now, would you?” Freud asked. 

“No, no!” Jung replied. “Anti-Semitism is out of the question.” 

Not for Freud, however, who continued to level such charges in subsequent meetings and throughout the several years of their collaboration. Jung countered the first accusation by saying that if Freud insisted on branding him as such, he would call him “anti-Christian,” because his “every second word was always a quote from Voltaire.” Freud dismissed it, preferring his own interpretation of Jung as an “anti-Semite.” He turned the conversation to the Wednesday group and began to “rant,” calling them “those damn Jews.” Jung felt “independent” enough to contradict Freud, praising the “virtues” of the Jews, who he said were famous for their sense of family unity. “There you are mistaken,” Freud insisted. “They only stick together by their common hatred.”