When Sigmund Freud first met Carl Jung, they
talked non-stop for 13 hours.
This was 1907 and for the next six years the
friendship blossomed.
Freud was famous already for his psychoanalytic method, and Jung was a young Swiss psychiatrist.
It was a passionate and surpassingly weird
relationship, which given the people involved
perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Freud called Jung “the Joshua to my Moses,
fated to enter the Promised Land which I myself
will not live to see.”
High praise and lots of pressure, to be sure.
In 1909, they traveled together to America
in order to give lectures on psychoanalysis.
When they disembarked in New York harbor,
Freud said to Jung “They don't realize that
we are bringing them the plague,” - which has always struck me as a particularly badass thing to have said.
Their trip to the US was a success and they spent lots of time together analysing one another's dreams.
It was around this time that Jung wrote to
Freud, “Let me enjoy your friendship
not as one between equals but as that of father and son.”
This is undoubtedly an odd thing to say in any friendship, but especially this one,
when your friend is the originator of the Oedipal complex,
the idea that the son, on some unconscious level, wants to kill the father.
This did not go unnoticed by Freud, and he
freaked out a little.
One day, chatting in a German café, Jung
started talking about mummified corpses.
Freud interpreted this as Jung wanting to
kill his father – in this case, Freud himself.
He fainted and had to be revived.
Not longer after that it all began to unravel.
Not just because of their strange relationship,
or because they got sick of each other
(although they clearly did).
No: there was a real intellectual disagreement.
Freud was all about sex:
The libido, and its repression, is the most
basic cause of human behavior and human failure.
The unconscious is where all these dangerous,
messed-up emotions and desires are stored
away under lock-and-key, inaccessible except
through psychoanalysis.
Freud saw sex everywhere; Jung thought that
that was a bit much.
The other wedge in their friendship was Jung’s
interest in religion and myth.
Jung believed in the ‘collective unconscious’,
a sort of humanity-wide reservoir of universal
symbols that make up the stuff of culture.
Freud rejected the idea as flatly “unscientific.”
Freud thought Jung betrayed psychoanalysis
by becoming a mystic.
Jung hoped that a statue would fall on Freud’s
head.
At last Freud ended it all in a letter from
1913: “But one [meaning Jung]
who while behaving abnormally keeps shouting that he
is normal,
gives ground for the suspicion that he lacks insight into his illness.
Accordingly, I propose that we abandon our
personal relations entirely.”
And that was that.
‘The rest is silence,’ Jung noted in his diary. Only it wasn't...
Freud’s output increased in his later years,
reaching for more shibboleths to demolish.
Jung’s later writing proliferated, as his
ideas of archetypes and the collective unconscious
hoovered up everything from mythology to flying
saucers.
Jung inspired artists, like Jackson Pollock
and Jorge Borges, and existentialists like Viktor Frankl.
But who triumphed in the end?
Which thinker can lay claim to greater influence?
Of course, it’s the one that told us that our conscious life is only the tip of the mental iceberg,
that found sex and death to pervade our behavior, that described parental relationships
as rather more complicated than
they seem, and that, most of all,
gave us the theories of psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud.
