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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.”
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