CHAPTER 11
The International Psychoanalytic Association

Our psychology is a science that can at most be accused of having discovered the dynamite terrorists work with. What the moralist and general practitioner do with it is none of our business, and we have no intention of interfering. Plenty of unqualified persons are sure to push their way in and commit the greatest follies, but that too does not concern us. Our aim is simply and solely scientific knowledge, and we do not have to bother with the uproar it has provoked. If religion and morality are blown to pieces in the process, so much the worse for them for not having more stamina.

—“Marginal Notes on Wittels, The Sexual Need,” Jung, 1910

BY THE TIME of their exchange on the Herisau lecture, Freud and Jung had other, pressing matters to worry about. At the Nuremberg congress held on 30–31 March 1910, they had founded the International Psychoanalytic Association.

Ernest Jones later claimed he had been party to a discussion of forming an official organization during the Clark congress, but the extant correspondences tell quite a different story. To begin with, there is no mention at all of such a plan in the letters between Jones and Freud in the months prior to the Nuremberg congress. The extant Freud-Jung letters, meanwhile, make it clear that though Jung was expected to call another meeting like the one held in Salzburg two years before, neither a specific date nor a specific agenda had been selected. Moreover, the available documents indicate that Freud was initially concerned less with forming his own organization than in allying himself and his adherents with one or more existing organizations. In this connection, he had asked Alfred Adler to prepare a memorandum on whether psychoanalysts should enroll themselves in the Social Democratic party.

The first known reference to a specific organization for psychoanalysis occurs in Freud’s letter to Ferenczi of 1 January 1910. Freud also asked Ferenczi to consider whether an organization of this kind might need stricter internal discipline than was usual for a scientific society. The following day, Freud wrote to Jung to suggest that much had changed since the Salzburg meeting and that the coming congress might usefully “be devoted to other tasks such as organization.” Even so, Jung continued to behave as though he were only calling another scientific meeting like the one two years earlier, and initially his biggest priority was to get Freud to lecture again on case material. It was not until early February of 1910 that Jung first heard from Freud the news that Ferenczi would be lecturing about “organization and propaganda” and would shortly be contacting him directly about it. Moreover, nowhere in his subsequent letters to Freud does Jung acknowledge that he knows he is to be made president of the planned association. Indeed, Jung was so cavalier about the proposed organization that one may well wonder if he even knew what his role in it was supposed to be. One of Freud’s letters, a mere three weeks before the congress, is missing, but from Jung’s startled reply—“How could you have been so mistaken in me?”—we can surmise that Freud finally called him to task for his coy ways and asked him point-blank: Did he want to be president for life or not?

That Jung was so silent about it in his letters to Freud suggests that he considered forming an official psychoanalytic association a less drastic step than it turned out to be. Which brings us to the obvious question: What did Freud and Jung feel they would gain by this step? Surveying their letters for the six months between the American visit and the March congress, one sees that they were principally concerned with the low quality of psychoanalytic publications and secondarily concerned with the poor tactics being used by their camp followers in medical politics.

Again and again the topic of the low quality of psychoanalytic publications came up in their letters in the fall of 1909. Freud was furious with Binswanger for what he elected to hear as a condescending tone in Binswanger’s latest publication. Both men were concerned with a critical discussion of psychoanalysis being prepared by Bleuler. (Jung had the happy thought that if Bleuler were allowed to print it in the Jahrbuch, he would be forced to restrain his pen.) Riklin had finished a manuscript on Goethe’s “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” but Freud found it “so dull and colourless that I hesitate to include it in the Papers.” And that was just the usually reliable Swiss. The Viennese were, if anything, worse. Stekel, who had not allowed any changes in his most recent Jahrbuch piece on dreams, had recently topped that performance with a paper on obsessions that Freud found “absolutely frivolous and faulty in method.” As for Isidor Sadger, the other prolific Viennese, Freud was hopeful Jung could keep him out of the Jahrbuch altogether: “Sadger’s writing is insufferable, he would only mess up our nice book.” In Freud’s opinion, Adler was “the only one who can be accepted without censorship, though not without criticism.”

Initially, Freud and Jung planned to vent their displeasure in a special review section in the Jahrbuch. The first targets of this review section were to be Bleuler and Stekel. The review section was Jung’s idea, but Freud seconded it strongly:

I suggest that you and I share the work on this critical section, you will rap the Viennese on the knuckles and I the Zurich people when they start producing versions of their own. These reviews must be the expression of our very personal convictions; this is an attempt at literary dictatorship, but our people are unreliable and need discipline.

That was in November of 1909, shortly after the Clark congress. By the following March, the two men had decided to make their “literary dictatorship” explicit. We naturally tend to view the fledgling International Association in terms of what it has become, a professional organization chiefly concerned with training and certification. Certainly part of the attraction of forming such an organization was that it would help make psychoanalysis appear to be a legitimate medical specialty. But the animus for the association was at least equally literary. What Freud wanted to control was the appearance of both scientific and polemical papers by his followers in journals other than the Jahrbuch. The office of the president was to be the clearinghouse for all such papers. That is, they would have to first receive the president’s imprimatur before they could go out. This is what was entailed in the codicil in Ferenczi’s proposal on organization stating that the president was to have responsibility over all “external matters.” Given that Jung was Freud’s candidate for the office of the president, and that the Jahrbuch was already in Jung’s hands, the effect was to give Jung complete control over all psychoanalytic publications. Between his two jobs, Jung could serve as official spokesman against the critics while having the clout internally to raise the scientific quality of psychoanalytic writing. As for Freud, by officially moving the seat of psychoanalysis to Zurich he could hope to capitalize on the prestige of the Zurich school, and on the institutional resources that Jung and Bleuler commanded. It seems never to have occurred to Jung, or to Freud, or to Ferenczi, how the arrangement would appear to their fellow analysts.

In historical retrospect, the decision to found the International Psychoanalytic Association, and to anchor it on the personal prestige of the two principals, Freud and Jung, can only be called rash. To be sure, the organization, or rather the skeleton that was left of it some years later, proved useful, perhaps even decisive, in propagating psychoanalysis in the period after the First World War. From this perspective, one could say that Freud was unusually farsighted. But the immediate consequences of the decision were unfortunate, very nearly ruinous, and before the following summer was out, both Freud and Jung would agree that they had acted precipitously and were now paying the price.

Whatever judgment we come to about the two men’s actions, we should keep in mind that it was indeed a time for international movements in general. Forel had just banded Europe’s psychotherapists together in a new group. An apothecary named Knapp was forming a new international ethical fraternity (another organization which Freud considered aligning psychoanalysis with). And the Darwinian biologist Ernst Haeckel had started what amounted to a new religion (“Monism”) based on his theories, with the result that Haeckel Bunds were springing up all over the continent. (The Catholic church, more than a little concerned, had quickly countered with Thomisten Bunden, named of course for the great scholastic saint, and in short order yet another network, the Kepler Bunds, had been started by those who sought a middle way between the Haeckelians and the Catholics.) All this was in addition to the various organizations for sexual reform centered in Germany, numerous European youth groups, the abstinence movement headed by Forel, Bleuler, and Kraepelin, and, of course, the burgeoning professional societies in psychiatry, neurology, experimental psychology, and pedagogy. Indeed, in this climate of diverse organizational activity, it was not always clear where the lines of division lay, and one of the problems the psychoanalysts failed to resolve was to decide exactly what kind of group they wanted to be.

Freud’s group got off to a very bad start. Even the countdown went badly. To begin with, the three collaborators (Jung, Ferenczi, and Freud) decided on total secrecy. The handout describing the association’s proposed bylaws, which was to be distributed during Ferenczi’s talk, bears the mark of a Nuremberg printshop. Apparently it was run off the morning of the first day of the congress. Freud himself arrived at Nuremberg several hours early for the express purpose of meeting Abraham, who had come down from Berlin. The best guess is that this is when Abraham was told. From all other available correspondence, there is absolutely no evidence that any other participant was let in on the plan. The secrecy constituted very bad tactics. When the Viennese saw what was afoot, they readily guessed that the three visitors to America were in cahoots.

Then there was the problem of marshalling the Swiss. Ferenczi’s bylaws called for Zurich to be the permanent seat of the association. Perhaps Freud meant to surprise the Swiss. In the event, they surprised him. First of all, Bleuler, still a most important patron of the movement, decided to spend the last week of March having elective surgery rather than attending the Nuremberg congress. Then there was the business of Max Isserlin, an assistant at Kraepelin’s clinic, who wanted to attend as a silent auditor. Isserlin had been following the development of psychoanalysis with interest and was at the time preparing a critical but respectful paper about it. But his private views were occasionally much sharper, and Jung had heard of him through the network of students passing back and forth between Munich and Zurich. Isserlin would not have been exactly welcome in any case, but in light of the specific character of the congress, Freud decided that it would be best simply to refuse him admission. This was a most unusual step for a scientific congress, treating an assistant at the Munich clinic as though he were a crank. Kraepelin was understandably furious. Jung considered it all a “bad joke,” but the joke was going to have important repercussions—Kraepelin began to wonder publicly what was going on at the Burghölzli and he personally tore into Bleuler the next time they met—and it would have been wise for Jung to start the damage control immediately. Then at the last moment, Jung decided he could not refuse a consultation in America with the McCormick heir. Instead of seeing to the final preparations, and warning Bleuler that Kraepelin might be coming to town for something more than a consultation, Jung dashed back to the United States and left it to Mrs. Jung and young Honegger to make the final arrangements. Jung’s disappearance on the eve of his coronation—the steamer for the return voyage was due to dock but one day before the congress began—was not welcome news to Freud. Next, Pfister wrote to say that he wasn’t coming, either. Freud became anxious:

I still have not got over your not coming to Nuremberg. Bleuler is not coming either, and Jung is in America, so that I am trembling about his return. What will happen if my Zürichers desert me?

Jung did make it back in time, but Freud’s troubles were only just beginning. His own keynote address, “On the Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” was perhaps the most militant thing he ever wrote, and he clearly meant it to rally the troops to the cause. It seems to have succeeded, however, through a kind of deferred action, only in galvanizing the response to Ferenczi’s subsequent proposal on organization. Once they heard the Hungarian speak, those assembled grasped what Freud’s subtext had been and what the overall plan looked like. Among Freud’s points was the claim that the practice of psychoanalysis would become easier in the future as the prestige of psychoanalysis increased, for then the analyst would acquire greater suggestive authority in the eyes of his patients. In short, the association would make treatment easier. This good news was balanced by a warning that henceforth a self-analysis was to be required of one and all—“Anyone who fails to produce results in a self-analysis of this kind may at once give up any idea of being able to treat patients by analysis.” In short, the association was going to have internal discipline. Freud closed by speaking of the cultural mission of psychoanalysis. In short, the association was to be a movement:

I should therefore like to let you go with the assurance that in treating your patients psychoanalytically you are doing your duty in more senses than one. You are not merely working in the service of science, by making use of the one and only opportunity for discovering the secrets of the neuroses; you are not only giving your patients the most efficacious remedy for their sufferings that is available to-day; you are contributing your share to the enlightenment of the community from which we expect to achieve the most radical prophylaxis against neurotic disorders along the indirect path of social authority.

Ferenczi’s talk on organization was scheduled for the afternoon of the first day. The discussion that followed it was so acrimonious that the meeting had to be adjourned, with decisions postponed for the next day. It is said that for a basically sweet man, Ferenczi had a terribly dictatorial streak and that on this occasion it was too much in evidence. Perhaps, but it is hard to see how any tone, no matter how conciliatory, could have rescued the text of his address. He began by dividing the history of psychoanalysis into two periods, the “heroic age,” when Freud had to meet all attacks “entirely alone,” and a second period, “heralded by the appearance of Jung and the ‘Zürichers.’ ” Where this left men like Adler and Stekel, who had been on hand for the last eight years, was anybody’s guess. Then, on the basis that “guerrilla warfare” was no longer practical, and that their lack of organization to date was a handicap, Ferenczi went on to imagine what a psychoanalytic organization should look like. As analysts, they were of course all aware that every group reproduced the dynamics of the family, that every president was a father, that the other officials were the older children, and that the rank and file were the younger children seeking to oust the older ones. But, as analysts, they should also know that they could not hope to escape these dynamics in themselves altogether. Therefore, their association should make use of the “family organization” self-consciously:

It would be a family in which the father enjoyed no dogmatic authority, but only that to which he was entitled by reason of his abilities and labours. His pronouncements would not be followed blindly, as if they were divine revelations, but, like everything else, would be subject to thoroughgoing criticism, which he would accept, not with the absurd superiority of the paterfamilias, but with the attention that it deserved.

Moreover, the older and younger children united in this association would accept being told the truth to their face, however bitter and sobering it might be, without childish sensitivity and vindictiveness.

Next came Ferenczi’s concrete proposals, handsomely printed out that very morning. From the accounts of other participants, we know that orally Ferenczi made the following additional elaborations: Jung was to be president for life, with full authority over “external matters” (including all publications outside the Jahrbuch) and the right to disbar any member who violated the rules. In effect, not only was Jung being handed the whole organization, but he was also being given the right to curtail any member as he saw fit and, if he chose, to tell the Viennese what he thought of them “…  to their face, however bitter and sobering it might be.” Fritz Wittels has described the scene that followed:

It can readily be imagined that the unsuspecting Viennese (“We had no anticipation of such an onslaught”) were utterly dismayed by these proposals. I doubt if powers so absolute have ever been entrusted to any one except the heads of certain Roman Catholic orders.…

Freud behaved like the Old Man of the primitive horde—was simultaneously ruthless and simple-minded. When he perceived that his Viennese pupils were up in arms, and that they were determined to resist Ferenczi’s proposal with all their might (this determination was especially conspicuous in the cases of Adler and Stekel, whose interests were more closely touched than those of the others), he postponed the vote until the next sitting. The three years’ struggle within the psychoanalytic camp had begun, the unedifying struggle that was to end in three great secessions.…

On the afternoon of this memorable day, the Viennese analysts had a private meeting in the Grand Hotel at Nuremberg to discuss the outrageous situation. Of a sudden, Freud, who had not been invited to attend, put in an appearance. Never before had I seen him so greatly excited. He said: “Most of you are Jews, and therefore incompetent to win friends for the new teaching. Jews must be content with the modest role of preparing the ground. It is absolutely essential that I should form ties in the world of general science. I am getting on in years, and am weary of being perpetually attacked. We are all in danger.” Seizing his coat by the lapels, he said: “They won’t even leave me a coat to my back. The Swiss will save us—will save me, and all of you as well.”

It was an impossible situation. The Viennese would not budge, but they could do nothing on their own without Freud. Their whole claim to outrank the Swiss depended—Stekel’s passionate address to the floor had stressed this—on their claim to have been the first at Freud’s side. A compromise was worked out. Jung was given the presidency, but only for two years. Riklin was made secretary. The official seat of the association was to be the city where the president resided. Thus, Zurich was to be the seat of the association for now, but not necessarily permanently. There was to be no censorship.

The fight was just beginning. Adler and Stekel caucused between themselves after Freud left and decided to test the “no censorship” clause immediately. At the next day’s session, Stekel sprang the announcement that the two were starting their own journal, the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse. Apparently, they also took whatever opportunities presented themselves to be rude to Jung personally.

Freud spent the day after the congress with Jung. In search of a diversion, they visited the nearby town of Rothenburg, home to the world’s largest collection of medieval torture devices. Years earlier Freud had been unable to interest Fliess in witches and their confessions, and in that connection he doubtless was moved to reminisce about the various turns a man’s fortunes can take. On Jung’s side, it was probably here that he mentioned to Freud that he should really have a look at Daniel Paul Schreber’s book, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. A jurist, Schreber had risen to the high court of Saxony, only to be felled by insanity. In his book, Schreber described his experiences as though they contained important religious revelations, thus ensuring that his work would become a psychiatric classic. No hard information survives concerning this outing, but Freud and Jung seem to have parted each other’s company with a renewed sense of their shared destiny.

When Freud returned to Vienna, he discovered the mood was still hot. The locals accused him of being the author of Ferenczi’s proposal, and he did not deny it. There were hurt feelings; Freud had to explain his favoring Zurich. Nonetheless, despite the heat, Freud was in rare form. Having officially moved the center of the movement out of Vienna, at least for the time being, he was willing to make further concessions on paper to the locals. In short order, Adler became president of the Vienna society, Stekel vice-president. Freud also moved that the group take cognizance of its new status by finding an appropriate meeting place. It need no longer meet in his waiting room but could and should reserve a proper hall. Freud even offered to withdraw altogether from any official position, at which point sentiment shifted and he was made “Scientific Chairman.” Freud wrote to Jung that he was satisfied with “the outcome of my statesmanship,” as well he might have been because in the ensuing scramble of titles, he managed to end up as “Director” of the new Zentralblatt, and thus titularly above the editors, Stekel and Adler, an arrangement which belied their actual bargain. (Freud managed to persuade the two that his name on the masthead was being insisted on by a potential publisher. Over coffee, the three agreed to a de facto equality: each of them would have veto power over all contributions.)

Wittels’s pithy observation that the “three years’ struggle within the psychoanalytic camp had begun” needs to be qualified; the struggle initially had a good deal of foolishness about it. The immediate consequence of the Nuremberg decisions was that the Vienna group became transformed into something of a debating society with everyone self-importantly pushing his or her own “discoveries” forward. The competition had perhaps always been there, but the formalities of being an officially constituted body brought it strongly to the surface. For his part, Freud liked to imagine that he detected an increase in industriousness and sober thinking, but he balanced his pleasure with a seeming disdain for the organizational pretensions of the locals. This created the misleading impression that nothing serious was in the offing. Hanns Sachs later remembered Freud opening the annual business meeting of the Vienna group in the years that followed with the comment, “Today we must play high school fraternity.” But, in point of fact, Freud took the new high school politics very seriously. He was just biding his time.

But this covers only the local problems of the Viennese. In the larger world the new association was a dramatic bust. Simply put, people would not join the International Psychoanalytic Association. In Berlin, Marcinowski, who had lectured at Nuremberg, “energetically protested against belonging.” Frau Dr. Sophie Erismann, a Zurich regular—on paper, the first woman psychoanalyst—disappeared without explanation after attending the congress. Ludwig Frank, a fence-sitter with nominal ties to the Zurich group, now ostentatiously withdrew his affiliation, complaining that Freud had slighted him personally at Nuremberg. (Freud had. When Frank had introduced himself, Freud had replied, simply, that he knew all about him.) Eitingon, no fence-sitter but a man of independent means, saw no reason to join. Muthmann, an early champion whose “courage” had already been vouched for by Freud, also would not join. Wilhelm Strohmayer, Privatdozent for psychiatry and neurology at Jena, refused to let himself be listed on the masthead of the Zentralblatt, though he subsequently did allow himself two years’ official membership in the Berlin group. Löwenfeld, Freud’s personal friend and critic, had been willing to lecture at Nuremberg on hypnotherapy. Perhaps Freud had not expected otherwise, but Löwenfeld did not join the association. Wittels himself dropped out of the Vienna group during the summer of 1910 after a confrontation with Freud over whether he could publish his novel in which the central character was based on Karl Kraus, the prominent journalist with whom Wittels was connected through a love triangle. Hans Maier, Jung’s successor as second-in-command at the Burghölzli and a friend of Binswanger’s since childhood, would not join. Binswanger did join, but no one else associated with his illustrious family would, and he himself continued to entertain reservations about what in private he called Freud’s “empire.” As Jung put it, speaking of the association, “It seems to give people the horrors.”

Most important, Eugen Bleuler would not join. The barring of Isserlin, an unusual step, had had important ramifications. Jung and Freud had no hope of courting favor with Kraepelin, and they had rather enjoyed this slap at one of his assistants, but they had indulged themselves without considering the position that this put Bleuler in. And, as Bleuler went, so went the Burghölzli. With the exception of Jan Nelken, the assistants there, now led by Maier, all refused to join, though they continued to sit in at local meetings. Jung, with Freud’s blessing, tried to put a stop to this quasi-revolt by insisting on official membership, but this was voted down.

Bleuler’s absence left the Zurich group essentially and inexorably leaderless. Pfister was the obvious second choice to be president of the Zurich society—Jung and Riklin were barred by virtue of their central posts—but Binswanger, who had to worry about the flow of referrals to his private asylum in Kreuzungen, opposed Pfister on the grounds that he was not a medical man. Alphonse Maeder of Geneva was a good compromise choice, if and when he ever left his assistant’s post at Kreuzungen and settled permanently in Zurich. In the meantime Binswanger, whom Jung was beginning to distrust and whom Freud had accused of intellectual slumming some months earlier, was more or less in command. It was not quite chaos, but it was close. Adding to the complications was the fact that tensions between the Swiss and the Viennese were at new heights. The Viennese distrusted Jung more than ever, while on the Swiss side, Jung, Maeder, and Binswanger all flatly refused to publish anything in Adler’s and Stekel’s Zentralblatt. Bleuler’s feeling about Stekel was so strong that he listed him as a separate reason for refusing to join the association. As he put it to Jung, “[O]ne didn’t want to sit down with everybody.”

Jung had no knack whatsoever for conciliation, nor for shepherding the faithful. Central direction was utterly lacking. The Conespondenzblatt, the official organ of communication between the presidency and the local societies, stumbled along for six haphazard issues before dying a young death. Business details Jung passed along to Riklin. But Riklin was even less organized; he didn’t even answer letters. At one point the Viennese, who needed a copy of the international charter in order to register with the local Austrian authorities, so despaired of getting an answer out of Zurich that they entertained the possibility of going off on their own, at least on paper. And the propaganda value of having such an international organization was entirely lost. The truth was that without Bleuler’s name on the rolls, an omission that was certain to draw unwanted attention, the association was reluctant to publish its own membership list.

For all this, neither intellectual respect nor an improvement in professional etiquette was gained. It was correctly perceived by outsiders that this was something more than an ordinary scientific society, and the phrase “the psychoanalytic movement” came into currency with a quite different ring to it than Freud would have hoped for. The wrong note had already been struck by Fritz Wittels the year before with his polemical The Sexual Need, which was nothing less than a call for widespread sexual reform based on Freud’s teachings. And it was soon to be struck again by Jung in an alarmingly fanatical review of Wittels’s book slated to appear in the Jahrbuch in August. But the first person to use the exact phrase derogatorily was Willy Hellpach of Berlin, whom Freud had courted for years. Writing in Der Tag in June, Hellpach predicted “the inevitable collapse of the Freudian movement.” The month before, however, Alfred Hoche, professor of psychiatry at Freiburg, speaking before the Congress for South-West German Psychiatrists in Baden-Baden, had already found a better phrase. Hoche entitled his talk “A Psychic Epidemic Among Physicians.” The phrase echoed essentially similar phrases that had been used some years before to decry the propagation of hypnotism. Adjusting himself to the vagaries of the present situation, Hoche defined a “psychic epidemic” as “the transmission of specific representations of a compelling power in a great number of heads, resulting in the loss of judgment and lucidity.” To great applause, he scolded the Freudians for their superior attitudes, their jargon, their intolerance, their proselytizing, their credulity, and their fantastic overvaluation of their own contribution. Hoche went on to list as the causes of this epidemic a lack of historical sense and philosophical education as well as the thanklessness of treating nervous patients.

Perhaps the worst moment in a long summer came at the first congress of Forel’s new International Society for Medical Psychology and Psychotherapy in early August. The young Freudians in attendance (the peripatetic Ernest Jones prominent among them) seemed ready to attack anybody who did not mention the name of Freud, to the point where Forel finally got up to protest, and Oskar Vogt, Forel’s friend and coeditor of the Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie, was moved to the following denunciation:

I object that a man like myself who has collected his own dreams since the age of sixteen and has investigated the problems under discussion here since 1894, that is, almost as long as Freud has done and longer than any of his disciples, should be refused the right to discuss these questions by any Freudian.

On 10 August, Freud wrote Jung from Holland:

Maybe I am to blame, but it is easy to find explanations after the event, and the outcome could not have been foreseen. All the same, when I look at the situation objectively, I believe I went ahead too fast. I overestimated the public’s understanding of the significance of ΨA [psychoanalysis], I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry about founding the I.A. My impatience to see you in the right place and my chafing under the pressure of my own responsibility also had something to do with it. To tell the truth, we should have done nothing at all. As it is, the first months of your reign, my dear son and successor, have not turned out brilliantly.

Freud’s disappointment, however, fazed Jung not at all:

I heartily agree that we went ahead too fast. Even among the “favourably disposed” there are far too many who haven’t the faintest idea of what ΨA is really about and especially of its historical significance. My ear is now cocked at our adversaries: they are saying some remarkable things which ought to open our eyes in several ways. All these mutterings about sectarianism, mysticism, arcane jargon, initiation, etc. mean something. Even the deep-rooted outrage, the moral indignation can only be aimed at something gripping, that has all the trappings of a religion.

Jung’s secular religiosity then evolved into a charming apocalypse:

Moreover ΨA is too great a truth to be publicly acknowledged as yet. Generously adulterated extracts and thin dilutions of it should first be handed around. Also the necessary proof has not yet been furnished that it wasn’t you who discovered ΨA but Plato, Thomas Aquinas and Kant, with Kuno Fischer [prominent philosopher and literary critic] and Wundt thrown in. Then Hoche will be called to a chair of ΨA in Berlin and Aschaffenburg to one in Munich. Thereupon the Golden Age will dawn. After the first 1000 years ΨA will be discovered anew in Paris, whereupon England will take up the opposition for another 500 years and in the end will have understood nothing.

Freud was charmed. To Ferenczi he wrote on 14 August 1910, “Yesterday I got an epistle from Jung which showed him to be at the top of his form and in full possession of those qualities that justified his election.”

Freud had good reason for taking heart. For whatever else had gone wrong with the International Association, one very important thing had gone right: he had secured Jung as the official president of his movement. Here we must remark briefly on Freud’s continued attachment to Jung. Peter Homans, following John Gedo, has suggested that it bore all the hallmarks of what is now called a narcissistic transference, i.e., that Freud loved Jung as a means of completing his own sense of self. How this attachment looked at the time, or at least how it looked in Switzerland, can be partially gleaned from an account given fifty years later by Alphonse Maeder:

 … he [Freud] regarded the coming together with Jung as something redeeming. He made Jung his “dauphin” [crown prince], as we say. He did not want a Jew. He was glad that he [Jung] wasn’t a Jew.… In some ways he did not think highly of all his pupils, in character and also in creativity. He did notice that Jung was a genius-type, you see, he had strength and was healthy. I mean, if you looked at those Viennese, they all looked like decrepit, strange people. No one had anything fresh … and that [health in Jung] made Freud happy.

How things looked to the Viennese can be gauged from the following passage from Wittels’s account. We pick up Wittels as he discusses the relation between Freud, Ferenczi, and Jung:

The three travellers took vows of mutual fidelity, agreeing to join forces in the defence of the doctrine against all danger. One of these dangers was that with which every scientific doctrine is threatened as soon as it becomes popular—the danger of vulgarisation and misunderstanding. Another risk seemed especially imminent to Jung, who was afraid of the trend of some of Freud’s Viennese disciples … afraid of the Viennese far-fetched interpretations. Freud, though he must have known the whole-souled devotion of his Viennese disciples, was at this time markedly drawn to Jung. His face beamed whenever he spoke of Jung: “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”

In short, the principal virtue of the founding of the International Association was that for the present it seemed to have brought Freud and Jung closer together again. As Freud put it on 24 September 1910, “I send you kind regards and an expression of my certainty that nothing can befall our cause as long as the understanding between you and me remains unclouded.”

There was one other, perhaps intended, benefit arising from the founding of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Now, it became possible for young physicians to imagine joining this organization, to imagine receiving further training in this new specialty, to imagine, in other words, becoming psychoanalysts. And thus it happened, even as the “three years’ struggle” within psychoanalysis was beginning to get under way, a host of talented newcomers, almost all of them quite young and accordingly quite impressionable, slowly began to log themselves in as candidates for membership in the local societies. Between 1909 and 1911, a new generation—Hanns Sachs, Viktor Tausk, Theodore Reik, to name an outstanding few—made its debut.

A NEW ERA

IN ZURICH, at the end of August, Sabina Spielrein took an important step in joining the next generation of psychoanalysts. For the past year, Eugen Bleuler had been supervising her dissertation, a psychoanalytic investigation into a chronic dementia praecox patient. But Bleuler had not joined the new association, nor had he yet found time to read Spielrein’s first draft. So, during a summer lull, Spielrein decided to approach Jung:

Despair gave me courage. I ran to my friend, with whom I had not wanted to speak for a long time. For a good while I found no words, until I was finally able to tell him of my desperate situation and ask him to read my dissertation, if for no other reason than that he figures in it. He laughed at Prof. Bleuler as an analyst and said surely I had not come to make fun of a person whom I liked so much. We arranged that in September, I would ask for my dissertation back from Prof. Bleuler and send it to my friend.…

The most important outcome of our discussion was that we both loved each other fervently again. My friend said we would always have to be careful not to fall in love again; we would always be dangerous to each other. He admitted to me that so far he knew no female who could replace me. It was as if he had a necklace in which all his other admirers were—pearls, and I—the medallion. At the beginning he was annoyed that I had not sent my paper to him long before, that I did not trust him, etc. Then he became more and more intense. At the end he pressed my hands to his heart several times and said this should mark the beginning of a new era.