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.”

and

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.”

and

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.