In Psychiatry and the related sciences there has lately broken out a struggle for and against the Freudian theories. I count myself fortunate to be able, by means of such beautiful, inviting material as fairy tales, to bear a weapon in this conflict.
—Franz Riklin, Wishfulfillment and Symbolism in Fairy-Tales, 1907
FRANZ RIKLIN’S Wishfulfillment and Symbolism in Fairy-Tales appeared as the second number of Freud’s Papers on Applied Psychology in early 1908. Riklin, who had his own correspondence going with Freud, was well known as Jung’s collaborator and as director of the Rheinau asylum. Publishing Riklin’s book represented a small but significant step forward for Freud. That said, Riklin’s volume was quite slim, dubiously argued, and frankly apologetic about its shortcomings. The difficulty was that no matter how diligently Riklin applied himself to the scholarly literature on folktales—he was in personal communication with Otto Stoll, the Zurich folklorist—he ultimately had no interpretive rationale other than that “the human psyche … is always still a fairy poetess.” Taking his cue from Freud’s book on dreams, Riklin concentrated on ferreting out sexual symbols, but his justification for identifying them as such was the bald assertion, twice repeated, that their meaning was clear to “the initiated.” The methodological problems inherent in applying psychoanalytic formulations to literature, problems which Freud had so skillfully evaded in Gradiva, had begun to show.
Riklin did have some instructive points to make. The star of the book was the familiar figure of the Frog Prince. Riklin interpreted him as a symbol of the ambivalence of the virgin toward male sexuality. That is to say, the animal side of sexuality, which invites loathing and disgust, was transformed in stories of this kind into an idealized love for a prince. Both repression and splitting into positive and negative images were involved. Moving outward from this theme, Riklin went on to discuss various disguises for the motifs of insemination and birth, and also various portrayals of infantile egoism, typically manifest in the form of antagonism toward the father. He also proffered an interpretation of the familiar sleeping potions of fairy tales as symbolic of romantic introversion wherein love makes one oblivious to the outside world. All this in context appeared at least plausible, and in singling out the Frog Prince for attention Riklin had tumbled to something enduring.
But, gradually, Riklin lost his way and the discussion degenerated into a phantasmagoria of ever wilder stories culled from cultures around the globe coupled with ever more tentative interpretations. Thus, a princess had her legs chopped off by a giant, and Riklin asked in parentheses, “Abasia [hysterical dizziness] dream motive?” A wicked minister, who was actually the heroine’s father bent on incestuous designs, ended up confined to a chair with iron bands constricting his chest, and Riklin’s parentheses grew more uncertain: “Anxiety? Bad conscience?” When a magic golden pike tore three nets, twice over, Riklin asked about the nets, “Symbol for the hymen?” Meanwhile, though Riklin didn’t realize it, he undercut his use of Freudian dream theory by bringing in stories in which delightfully there was no disguise whatsoever regarding the incest motif. Freud’s argument in the dream book had allowed that certain dream symbols were truly universal, but by far the bulk of Freud’s interpretations had emphasized rather how symbols served the purposes of disguise and thus helped the dream-wish evade censorship. But what could possibly be disguised in a tale in which the princess married her father and both lived happily ever after?
Riklin’s topic was enormously important. Mythology and folklore occupied a place of importance in German culture quite unlike anything in English. When German men of letters first freed themselves from Christianity, they turned to philosophizing for their moral justification. But for their aesthetic justification they turned to the Greeks, whom they profoundly misunderstood. A nativist reaction then ensued and the indigenous products of the German folk soul soon became celebrated while men like Herder and the brothers Grimm were elevated to the heights of literary greatness. The native German folktales and myths were cherished both for their intrinsic value and as the carrier of nationalistic hopes for a people politically fragmented until as late as 1870. Thus a mythological motif might serve as the inspiration for individual fantasy, as an emblem for nationalistic hopes, as the window dressing for the latest racist theory of Aryan supremacy, or as the raw material for a scholarly enterprise in the emerging fields of philology, mythological studies proper, or what was then called Völkerpsychologie, the study of national character as it had evolved over the ages. The study of mythology was a field where the highest level of intellectuality might comfortably coexist with the most deeply felt sentiments. It was likewise an area in which a new scholarly contribution might have immediate and wide-ranging impact on the general educated public.
Riklin’s book touched off a stampede. Karl Abraham thought he saw a better way to proceed and managed to get his own Dreams and Myth into print the very next year as the fourth number of Freud’s monograph series. (Jung’s lecture to laymen about the new directions in psychiatry, The Content of the Psychoses, was the third number.) Rank weighed in immediately after with The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, number five in the series, and the race to be the first to offer the definitive psychoanalytic statement on mythology was on. Methodological caution was thrown to the winds—the topic was too important to wait.
SPIELREIN, OF COURSE, knew Riklin from her days as a patient doing work-therapy in the psychology laboratory, and it is possible, even likely, that she learned of his study while it was still in progress. But her own interest in mythology lay not in psychoanalytic reinterpretations of it. Rather, as with many young people of that time and milieu, she found in myths and folktales emblems for her own deeper strivings.
As we have seen in the previous two chapters, in January 1907 and again in July, Spielrein had been the occasion for Jung’s various ruminations about his own complexes and for his flights of fancy. Yet, properly speaking, we have thus far only heard Jung’s side of the story. In fact, neither Jung’s confessions to Binswanger in January, nor his giddy letter to Freud in July, at all capture the real flavor of Spielrein’s emotional state nor of what she was confiding to him during this period. Accordingly, here let us backtrack and take in Spielrein’s side of the story, so far as it can be known from her own retrospective accounts.
A decisive change occurred in Spielrein’s spirits following her sessions with Jung in October 1906 in which they reviewed her childhood memories of her brother and her father, and her sitting on her heel. Putting her beating complex temporarily behind her, Spielrein began to envision for herself a career as a psychiatrist, as someone who could do for others what she felt Jung had done for her. Jung had become her hero and her model. Her “ego complex” having been strengthened through the therapeutic rapport, Spielrein’s renewed self-confidence was paralleled by a change in her dreams. Siegfried appeared.
Siegfried is the greatest figure in Teutonic mythology, the child of the hero Siegmund by his sister Sieglinde, the slayer of the dragon Fafher, the rescuer of the fallen Valkyrie Brünnhilde—and the subject of so many widely varying folktales that a scholar might well ask which “Siegfried” Spielrein had in mind. Luckily, Spielrein subsequently made it clear, in a draft of a letter written in the late spring of 1909:
It was Wagner who planted the demon in my soul with such terrifying clarity. I shall omit the metaphors, since you might laugh at the extravagance of my emotion. The whole world became a melody for me: the earth sang, the trees sang, and every twig on every tree.
Spielrein had long been musically inclined, and Wagner’s operas had been among her favorites. In putting together his famous four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelungs, which had premiered in Munich in 1869, Wagner had adapted the Siegfried legend to his own artistic purposes. In his version of the story, there is first an incestuous union between the twin brother and sister, Siegmund and Sieglinde, who are children of Wotan. Subsequently, at the instigation of his wife, Fricka, and against his own wishes, Wotan allows Siegmund to be killed, but Sieglinde is aided by Brünnhilde and escapes long enough to give birth to the love-child Siegfried. As a punishment, Brünnhilde loses her immortality and is placed in a deep sleep surrounded by a ring of fire, destined to become the lover of the first man who penetrates the flames. Siegfried is raised by the evil smith Mime, and grows up without knowing what fear is. In time, Siegfried slays both the dragon Fafher and the treacherous Mime; thereafter, he rescues the Valkyrie Brünnhilde and they fall in love. In the final opera, however, he is bewitched by a potion to forget Brünnhilde, whom he delivers as a wife to Gunther, while he himself is murdered by the evil Hagen. All of this narrative is set against a rich cosmologica! and symbolic backdrop in which the three races of gods, dwarfs, and giants are equally ensnared in an accursed struggle for supremacy through possession of the Ring. The destinies of the various human heroes have from the beginning been enmeshed in this cosmological struggle. Thus, at the end, Siegfried’s death and Brünnhilde’s fury, which leads her ultimately to sacrifice herself so that she may be joined with Siegfried in death, set into motion the general destruction (Götterdämmerung) of the final opera, Twilight of the Gods, in which the corrupt old order finally perishes and a new age begins. Wagner’s is a rich, psychologically complex tapestry, with the themes of incest and betrayal made palatable by their juxtaposition with innocence and the heroic. Throughout the opera the antinomies of duty versus true passion and of love versus power are invoked in ever more complex embodiments.
The impact of the saga for Spielrein seems to have resided in the fact that though Siegfried is a hero he is also essentially an orphan and an innocent, one who has needed the initial, self-sacrificial protection of a woman (Brünnhilde) whom he then subsequently rescues and loves, all this in the context of a general sense that the younger generation, who are capable of true love, have been sacrificed by the gods, who are hypocritically bound by duty. Apart from an occasional mention in a diary Spielrein kept during the fall of 1910, there are two main sources of information about Spielrein’s “Siegfried complex”: letters she wrote to Jung in the years 1917–1919 and drafts of letters she wrote to an interested third party in May and June 1909. (At this time, letters were routinely copied over before being sent.) The lattermost account, chronologically the closest in time to the actual events, is the most vivid, but is unfortunately fragmentary. The following passage is typical:
Thus Siegfried came into being; he was supposed to become the greatest genius, because Dr. Jung’s image as a descendant of the gods floated before me, and from childhood on I had had a premonition that I was not destined for a mundane life. I felt flooded with energy, all nature spoke directly to me, one song after another took shape in me, one fairy tale after another.
The feeling that a great destiny awaited her was tied up in Spielrein’s imagination with a sense that she must make an equally great “sacrifice.” She was twenty-one years old at the time.
It scarcely required the new methods of psychoanalysis to interpret the essence of the sudden transformation. It had well been understood right along in the medical literature that with the upsurge of sexuality in puberty, especially in hysterical women, there was likely to occur a triad of exalted self-consciousness, religious preoccupations, and a yearning for self-sacrifice. It was also well known that all that was usually needed to resolve these superficially mysterious “symptoms” was that they attach themselves to a suitable young man. There would be sacrifice enough in having his children, he would himself take the place of the gods, and the temporary overflow of self-consciousness would give way, with maturity, to the poised, self-aware charms of a lady who knew her worth.
Accordingly, we don’t really know how naïve Spielrein allowed herself to be when Wagner’s Siegfried theme first rose from the unconscious orchestra, but she seems to have been clear enough that Jung was at the center of the complex. At the time, Spielrein was ambiguously both Jung’s friend and his patient. Whichever, she did not fail to bring her new complex to his attention. Contrary to his published policy of ruthless disillusionment, he treated her gently:
When I confessed this complex to Dr. Jung for the first time, he treated me with tenderest friendship, like a father, if you will. He admitted to me that from time to time he, too, had to consider such matters in connection with me (i.e., his affinity with me and the possible consequences), that such wishes are not alien to him, but the world happens to be arranged in such a way, etc., etc. This talk calmed me completely, since my ambitia was not wounded and the thought of his great love made me want to keep him perfectly “pure.”
Though the onset of Spielrein’s “Siegfried complex” cannot be dated precisely, it is likely that the above scene took place at the end of 1906 or the very beginning of 1907. That is to say, it was probably this scene, in which Jung reassured the young woman by confessing that he occasionally entertained similar thoughts while cautioning her about “possible consequences,” that led to Jung’s subsequently feeling “threatened” at the time of Binswanger’s first experiment in January 1907. Upon reflection, Jung seems to have realized that he had said more than it was perhaps wise to say. In any case, his initial strategy seems to have been to encourage Spielrein to keep her love for her Siegfried perfectly pure; Jung was still acting on his stated principle that the therapeutic rapport should involve something more than mere sexual attraction.
There was, however, another important phenomenon entailed in Spielrein’s “Siegfried complex,” namely an ability to produce “prophetic dreams.” It was, of course, a common folk belief, which dated to antiquity, that dreams could tell the future. Freud would no doubt smile at such a claim—he specifically contested the prophetic powers of dreams in Gradiva—but in the twist Spielrein gave things, psychological sophistication was no protection against her personal brand of mysticism. For besides telling the future, she could also tell the hidden complexes of other people, most especially Jung. For example, among her “prophetic” dreams were some which foretold the unveiling of Jung’s own secret wish to have a son, wishes that he had so far kept from her but which he had indeed revealed to Binswanger.
To the modern reader, the evidence for Spielrein’s clairvoyance is quite equivocal, but she manifestly believed in it. Once during this period Jung became irritated with her claims and challenged her to crack his diary; she opened it right at the page where he described his cousin the medium coming to his room at night dressed in a long white robe. Thereafter Jung himself seems to have been inclined to give it some credence. Spielrein wrote in another of the 1909 letter-drafts, “I was able to read Dr. Jung’s thoughts both when he was nearby and à distance, and he could do the same with me.” Reading thoughts at a distance was one of the things that had interested Jung in the occult back in his college days. In short, in its original incarnation, Spielrein’s “Siegfried complex” seems to have been an innocent mixture of romanticism and idealization, tailored in such a way that it would capture Jung’s attention. It was not destined to stay that way.
IN THE AFTERMATH of his trip to Vienna in March of 1907, Jung began to investigate the sexual complexes of his patients with renewed seriousness. Jung’s handling of Spielrein’s “Siegfried complex” changed accordingly. Specifically, he began vigorously interpreting Siegfried as the child she wanted to give him; equally as vigorously, she resisted the imputation. As she much later put it:
Without your instruction I would have believed, like all laymen, that I was dreaming of Siegfried, since I am always dwelling on heroic fantasies, whether in conscious expressions or in the form of a “heroic psychic attitude.” I am, and most especially always was, somewhat mystical in my leanings; I violently resisted the interpretation of Siegfried as a real child, and on the basis of my mystical tendencies I would have simply thought that a great and heroic destiny awaited me, that I had to sacrifice myself for the creation of something great. How else could I interpret those dreams in which my father or grandfather blessed me and said, “A great destiny awaits you, my child”?
Discussions about the real meaning of Siegfried continued throughout the late spring of 1907, a time when Jung was passing around his copy of Gradiva—“the women understand you by far the best”—and secretly plotting his escape from the Burghölzli, so as better to taste the fruit from Freud’s “tree of paradise.” The two, Jung and Spielrein, made an increasingly mad pair, with her continuing to insist upon her mystical destiny while he basked in his new sexual understanding of what she really wanted. Jung’s inner reverie climaxed in the scene reported in his manic letter to Freud of 6 July 1907, wherein Spielrein’s secret identification with him, her wish to set someone free through psychoanalysis, and her wish to have his son all swirled around in his imagination with images of “birdies” and pornographic “love-gods.”
Spielrein’s contribution to that occasion is lost, but from other documents we know that she most often dreamed of “Siegfried” in the form of symbols, such as a candle that Jung gave her or as a “book that grew with colossal speed,” symbols which “only yielded ‘Siegfried’ as a real child upon being subjected to analysis.” Sometimes, too, she herself appeared as Siegfried in disguise—“in her dreams she is merged with me”—while at other times, Siegfried was replaced altogether by “Aoles,” a wandering “Aryan-Semitic minstrel.”
The overall irony of the situation, in early July of 1907, was that Jung was sexualizing a situation which by Spielrein’s lights was already well sublimated. Jung’s wife was not the only person who wanted to write a “psychotherapeutic handbook for gentlemen.”
AFTER THE publication of the Carotenuto documents in 1982, a second cache of Spielrein’s personal and professional papers was discovered in the family archive of Edouard Claparède in Geneva. Included in this batch was a folio some twenty pages in length written in German in Spielrein’s hand. It would appear to have been a journal of sorts except that, first, it regularly addresses itself to another person—Jung—and, second, it specifically identifies itself as a “letter” at one point and asks that Jung return it so that she may keep it for reference. It may be that we have here all or part of a “letter” alluded to in the following passage from the Carotenuto documents:
That he could say such a thing to me, who had always been so proud, who had defended myself in letters against every impertinence (one even ran to 40 pages), who had finally simply been forced as a patient to confess my love for him and had warned him countless times against too thorough an analysis, lest the monster get in, since my conscious desires are much too compelling and demand fulfillment.
The folio is divided into three parts. From internal evidence, the third part was not written until the spring of 1908, while the first two parts appear to have been written during her summer vacation in 1907. What we are dealing with in the first two parts, then, are Spielrein’s own contemporaneous reflections during the summer of 1907 while Jung was preparing for his Amsterdam address. It is an extremely important document.
The folio begins dramatically. In an almost epigrammatic introduction entitled “Two Speakers,” Spielrein puts the reader on notice, in prose more polished than anything that will follow, that the journal constitutes an inner psychological dialogue that represents a continuation internally of her recent talks with Jung. Part One proper begins with the impressive title “The Theory of Transformation and its Corollaries.” It contains Spielrein’s answer to the point of view Jung had lately been pushing in her therapy. All mental life, in her Herbartian view, is governed by two fundamental tendencies: the power of persistence of the complexes and the instinct of transformation. The latter, which subsumes the sexual instinct but is not identical with it, seeks to transform the complex by attracting to it new meanings. In what are the journal’s most difficult passages, Spielrein attempts to interrelate the instinct for transformation to “the instinct for species preservation.” She is a mixture of Janet, Bleuler, and received medical wisdom. Every complex strives to realize itself, in her view, strives to become autonomous. One naturally seeks to discover similar complexes in other people since this leads to a feeling of having objectified the complex and thus of having gained mastery over it. However, sharing complexes also leads to a feeling of sympathy between the two people and this, in turn, since it entails an implicit feeling of similarity, can generate sexual attraction. Explicitly, she states that this sort of unintended attraction can occur between a doctor and patient.
About sexuality itself, however, Spielrein has a further observation, one worthy of Schopenhauer: since it operates at the level of the species and depends only on a racial similarity or identification, sexuality, unlike love, is ultimately antagonistic to the differentiated individual. For this reason it is felt to be something “demonic” and “destructive.” Accordingly, sexuality is typically accompanied by its own resistances as the individual seeks to preserve what he has achieved by way of differentiation. The resistances can be seen even in children who do not yet know to what the sexual feeling will lead. Still, one can distinguish this sense of the demonic or destructive from the wish to make a great “sacrifice” for the sake of a cause so often seen in young people—here Spielrein is taking issue with received medical wisdom—for the latter entails the instinct for transformation as well. Even in the act of copulation, moreover, part of the sexual instinct is still necessarily repressed, held at bay by those fragments of the complexes transformed in the intimate relationship; otherwise, she asserts, the sexual act would degenerate into murder and martyrdom. Here, to be sure, we have a revival of a personal theme—beating fantasies and masochistic excitement—but Spielrein’s prose gives little hint of it.
Part Two continues the discussion, and Spielrein’s vigorous German only grows stonger. The dissolution of a complex through empathic sharing (with attendant sexual attraction) is but one of the avenues open to the instinct for transformation. Others are “art” and “science,” both ways of objectifying complexes; art in particular allows complexes “to express themselves to the utmost.” Spielrein insists, however, that the common denominator between art and intimacy is the instinct for transformation, for refashioning the complexes, and not sexuality per se. Thus, for example, she says that she no longer loves Jung “in the ideal way” and that “this state is worse than death.” She despairs about getting him to understand her: “I have to take an extreme position in regard to you, because you don’t admit the possibility of a non-sexual transformation in your enthusiasm for your new theories.”
The following passage forms the conclusion to the second part and clearly addresses itself to the struggle that had lately been going on in their sessions:
Understand me well; when undertaking to treat hysteria, it’s necessary to consider two different things:
No. I: Do it in such a way that the psychosexual component … of the Ego transforms itself (this could be by means of art or through simple [ab]reaction—as you wish); the component would find itself weakened thereby like a phonographic record running down. Furthermore, the feeling having been fulfilled, the psyche doesn’t exhaust itself in resistances.
No. 2: More often than it seems, wouldn’t it be necessary to hinder the stimulation of the psychosexual component as much as possible.… It is dangerous to pay too much attention to the [sexual] complex, to feed it with new representations; an artist can live only in that way—yet even for him there are limits which are beyond his powers.…
What concerns me is that with the interruption of my studies my family has put me fully back in the complex again. My desolation is again without limits. Will I get out of it safe and sound?
By this time, her parents were advising Spielrein to take some time off from school. She herself, showing the same insight as Janet and Charcot had before her, knew that she had to get back out of the family if she was to again recover.
JUNG’S UNSTEADINESS at the Amsterdam Congress takes on new meaning in light of Spielrein’s “Transformation Journal.” The featured patient was, at the time, in open rebellion against the treatment. More, she was bringing to bear a very sophisticated psychological rationale drawn from the best contemporary theory had to offer. Indeed, her position resembled nothing so much as the theory Jung himself had held scarcely a year earlier. Yet, ultimately Spielrein did return to Zurich for the fall semester and she also resumed seeing him. And for his part, Jung continued his correspondence with Freud, while mulling over various organizational ideas of his own.
In historical retrospect, the most one can claim for Spielrein at this particular time is that she was the occasion, and scarcely the only one, for Jung’s new style of interpretation. She was not the cause of it. Where Spielrein differed from the other female outpatients was in her intuitive capacity to grasp what was going on in Jung and in her intellectual ability to frame her “resistances” in terms of theory. In this respect, she was tailor-made for Jung as he continued to explore the range of the new interpretive style. But that Jung viewed her case in an altered way, and seemed to enjoy himself while doing it, depended as much on his new friendship with Freud and its relation to his own continuing self-exploration as it did on the unique qualities of the young woman. Indeed, it was in his letters to Vienna that Jung’s psychoanalytically transformed second self chiefly put in its appearances.
In his second post-Amsterdam letter, of 11 September 1907, Jung expressed “a long cherished and constantly repressed wish”—to have a photograph of Freud. In his next letter, of 25 September 1907, he expressed his ambivalence toward Eitingon, who had since parlayed his unfortunate visit nine months earlier into a summer excursion with Freud in Florence and Rome; Jung declared Eitingon an “impotent gasbag,” but on reflection had to admit that he envied the expatriate Russian his “uninhibited abreaction of the polygamous instinct.” In the same letter, Jung also mentioned Otto Gross, assistant at Kraepelin’s clinic and son of the criminologist Hanns Gross, and perhaps the only pro-Freudian at the Amsterdam Congress who had acquitted himself well. Gross’s views were distinctive. Like Spielrein, he seemed to think that, once made conscious, sexual desires tended to demand expression; unlike Spielrein, he didn’t think this such a bad thing. Jung disagreed:
Dr. Gross tells me that he puts a quick stop to the transference by turning people into sexual immoralists. He says the transference to the analyst and its persistent fixation are mere monogamy symbols and as such symptomatic of repression. The truly healthy state for the neurotic is sexual immorality. Hence he associates you with Nietzsche. It seems to me, however, that sexual repression is a very important and indispensable civilizing factor, even if pathogenic for many inferior people.… I feel Gross is going along too far with the vogue for the sexual short-circuit, which is neither intelligent, nor in good taste, but merely convenient, and therefore anything but a civilizing factor.
Jung’s letters also reported on the meetings of a newly founded “Freudian Society of Physicians” in Zurich. Ernest Jones, a young British neurologist who had trailed Jung back to the Burghölzli from Amsterdam, sat in on the second meeting, which Bleuler kicked off with some “priceless doggerel” aimed at Freud’s critics, leading Constantin von Monakow, professor of neurology at the University of Zurich, to shrivel in his seat. Afterward, Jones teased von Monakow: “If only his respectable colleagues knew about it [his attendance] they would say he might as well climb the Brocken to attend a Witches’ Sabbath.”
Jung also continued to report to Freud on patients. His letter of 10 October 1907 asked for supervision about one of them:
I would like to ask your sage advice about something else. A lady, cured of obsessional neurosis, is making me the object of her sexual fantasies, which she admits are excessive and a torment to her. She realizes that the role I play in her fantasies is morbid, and therefore wants to cut loose from me and repress them. What’s to be done? Should I continue the treatment, which on her own admission gives her voluptuous pleasure, or should I discharge her? All this must be sickeningly familiar to you; what do you do in such cases?
Freud’s reply, unhappily, does not survive. The case might or might not be Spielrein. Spielrein had resumed her medical studies, but about the only thing we can infer for certain about her relationship to Jung in the fall of 1907 is that she was still talking to him—with no fee charged. That said, the following anecdote from one of her later letter-drafts, with its telltale mention of Freud’s visage, may well date from this time:
For a long time our souls were profoundly akin: for instance, we never discussed Wagner, and then one day I come to him and say that what distinguishes Wagner from previous composers is that his music is profoundly psychological: the moment a certain emotive note occurs, its matching melody appears, and just as the emotive note at first rumbles dimly in the depths when the appropriate situation is evoked, so, too, in Wagner the melody first appears almost unrecognizably among the others, then emerges in full clarity, only to blend and merge with the others later on, etc. Wagner’s music is “plastic music.” I liked Das Rheingold best, I say. Dr. Jung’s eyes fill with tears. “I will show you, I am just writing the very same thing.” Now he tells me how Freud sometimes moved him to tears when they thought along the same lines this way. He found … [Freud’s] face enormously likeable, particularly around the ears, etc.… He [Jung], too, always liked Rheingold best.
By the end of October, there were even more revelations in Jung’s letters to Vienna. Freud had complained about Jung’s tardiness in correspondence. Jung defended himself by citing his work load, but he also noted his “self-preservation complex”:
Actually—and I confess this to you with a struggle—I have a boundless admiration for you both as a man and a researcher, and I bear you no conscious grudge. So the self-preservation complex does not come from there; it is rather that my veneration for you has something of the character of a “religious” crush. Though it does not really bother me, I still feel it is disgusting and ridiculous because of its undeniable erotic undertone. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped.
For the record, the “assault” happened in Jung’s adolescence, when he was already of fairly imposing size; it was therefore more in the manner of a seduction. In his letter, Jung went on to say how the transferential reactions of his colleagues now struck him as “downright disgusting,” singling out Bleuler for special abuse. In his next letter, of 2 November 1907, he stated that he was suffering “all the agonies of a patient in analysis” and went on to speak of a dream he had had while in Vienna that Freud was a very frail old man. Jung proceeded to analyze the dream as a defense against “your +++ dangerousness!,” the crosses to ward off the Devil having been borrowed from an earlier letter of Freud’s, before going back to Jensen (the author of Gradiva) as a topic, invoking, again with emphasis, the “theme of brother-sister love.” Next he announced his election to the American Society for Psychical Research and confessed that he was again dabbling in “spookery”: “Here too your discoveries are brilliantly confirmed.”
In short, Jung was still alternately basking in and wrestling with the new sexual vision, and in Freud he had a confidant with whom he could be as unreserved as he could himself manage.
A. A. BRILL was lucky enough to gain the post of Burghölzli assistant left open by Karl Abraham’s departure in November of 1907. At his first Grand Rounds, Brill was astonished to see how rapidly the attending physicians disposed of an odd symptom in a post-menopausal woman, i.e., her staining her bedsheet with red wine, which was readily interpreted in terms of her wish that her period would return. Brill was impressed with both the psychological emphasis and the openness with which sexuality was talked about. He was also struck by the general milieu and subsequently wrote the most vivid account we possess of what life was then like at that institution:
In the hospital the spirit of Freud hovered over everything. Our conversation at meals was frequently punctuated with the word “complex,” the special meaning of which was created at that time. No one could make a slip of any kind without immediately being called on to evoke free associations to explain it. It did not matter that women were present—wives and female voluntary interns—who might have curbed the frankness usually produced by free associations. The women were just as keen to discover the concealed mechanisms as their husbands. There was also a Psychoanalytic Circle, which met every month. Some of those who attended were far from agreeing with our views; but despite Jung’s occasional impulsive intolerance, the meetings were very fruitful and successful in disseminating Freud’s theories.
Like everyone else, Brill was impressed with Jung’s “enthusiasm and brilliance.” Jung was a doctrinal lion:
Jung was at that time the most ardent Freudian.… Jung brooked no disagreement with Freud’s views; impulsive and bright, he refused to see the other side. Anyone who dared doubt what was certainly then new and revolutionary immediately aroused his anger.
The disconcerting paradox was that the more Jung beat the Burghölzli bushes for Freud, the less personal reassurance he got out of him. There is a distinct shift in the tone of the extant Freud-Jung correspondence in the last two months of 1907. In the next letter after con fessing his “religious crush” to Freud, Jung, on 8 November 1907, invited Freud to visit him over Christmas, this while reassuring Freud that he had regained his composure: “My old religiosity had secretly found in you a compensating factor which I had to come to terms with eventually, and I was able to do so only by telling you about it.” To which Freud replied on 15 November 1907: “What you say of your inner developments sounds reassuring; a transference on a religious basis would strike me as most disastrous; it could end only in apostasy.…” At this point Jung, as though trying to prove his worth, wrote that he was brokering the idea of holding a “Congress of Freudian followers” with Sándor Ferenczi, Leopold Stein, and the visiting Jones. It is not clear who first had the idea, but it clearly fell to Jung to organize it and he began to call for papers. Jung also entered into secret negotiations with Claparède and Morton Prince about founding a psychoanalytic journal, to be published either conjointly or amalgamated with Prince’s year-old Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Freud duly took note of Jung’s “magnificent plans,” but in the end he did not come to Zurich for Christmas and, worse still, his holiday greetings came along with the unhappy news that Karl Abraham had just visited him in Vienna. The chill did not last long. In his letter of 25 January 1908, Jung was back to open affection:
I have a sin to confess: I have had your photograph enlarged. It looks marvelous. A few of our circle have acquired copies. So, like it or not, you have stepped into many a quiet study!
If Jung meant to keep his personal relationship with Freud exclusive, he might as well have been commanding the historical tides. On 2 February, Freud had two more visitors to report, Sándor Ferenczi and Leopold Stein, the Hungarian contingent at the Burghölzli.
Jung was silent the first two weeks of February of 1908. His letter of 15 February apologized for it, pleading an attack of the flu, but Jung also wrote mysteriously that “a complex connected with my family played the very devil with me.” The rest of his letter was all business; among other things, the plans for the journal were not going well. Now Freud became solicitous. His letter of 17 February addressed Jung simply as “Dear friend.” In German, opening and closing salutations are governed by an elaborate etiquette and for that reason are essentially untranslatable. The change in the form of address from “Dear friend and colleague” to “Dear friend”—Freud remarked on it in the body of the letter as well—was an unmistakable overture for greater intimacy. But at the same time Freud sounded a very peculiar note. After discussing preparations for Jung’s coming Congress for Freudian Psychology, to be held at Salzburg, Freud relaxed into the following theoretical remarks:
At last I come to science. I have been in contact with a few paranoia cases in my practice and can tell you a secret.… I have regularly encountered a detachment of libido from a homosexual component which until then had been normally and moderately cathected.… My one-time friend Fliess developed a dreadful case of paranoia after throwing off his affection for me, which was undoubtedly considerable. I owe this idea to him, i.e., to his behaviour. One must try to learn something from every experience.… Altogether I have a good many budding and incomplete ideas to tell you about. Too bad that we shall not be exactly undisturbed in Salzburg!
Everything was wrong with this. First of all, though Jung could not predict how it was going to go, Freud was announcing that he intended to write up a theory about paranoia, thus crossing over into what had heretofore been Jung’s and Bleuler’s territory, the psychoses. Proposing a policy of “intellectual communism,” Freud had already shared some of his thoughts on the subject with Jung over a year earlier, but had then let the subject drop after Jung had diplomatically expressed his dissent by seeming to get everything muddled. Now Freud was resuming the initiative. Then there was the equation of paranoia with a split-off homosexual component; whether Freud meant to do so or not, this stepped rather heavily on the toes of Jung’s “religious crush.” That it came in the same letter which began with the “Dear friend” salutation was potentially bewildering for Jung, all the more so since there was in fact something like a paranoid streak in Jung himself. We should note, too, the mention of Fliess and the great peculiarity of a man theorizing about a former friend to a current one. What Freud had in mind here was Fliess’s conviction that Freud had wanted to kill him at the time of their next-to-last meeting at Achensee in 1900. To be sure, Freud’s dream book, which Fliess had read in manuscript many months before that meeting, had made explicit mention of a wish that Fliess should die (and thus leave Freud in sole possession of bisexuality theory). In the charged atmosphere of the meeting at Achensee, Fliess, who was physically quite a small man, had apparently found Freud’s invitation to go hiking on a dangerous mountain trail nothing less than sinister. It is not clear how much of the story Jung knew, but he certainly knew that he was trying to replace Fliess as Freud’s special friend.
Jung found a gracious way to reply to what had been a very mixed message:
I thank you with all my heart for this token of your confidence [i.e., the salutation]. The undeserved gift of your friendship is one of the high points in my life which I cannot celebrate with big words. The reference to Fliess—surely not accidental—and your relationship with him impels me to ask you to let me enjoy your friendship not as one between equals but as that of father and son. This distance appears to me fitting and natural. Moreover it alone, so it seems to me, strikes a note that would prevent misunderstandings and enable two hard-headed people to exist alongside one another in an easy and unstrained relationship.
It was Freud’s turn to feel confused. As far as he knew, Jung had had a rotten relationship with his own father. In explicating his associations for Binswanger’s experiment, Jung had talked only about his father’s death, not about any great filial bond between the two of them. (In point of fact, there was none.) Be that as it may, the damage was now done. Henceforth, confessions of affection, filial or otherwise, did not recur in the letters between the two men for the next six months.
What they did instead was to begin swapping “paranoia formulas” as they jockeyed for position vis-à-vis what had once been the Zurich school’s special domain. To be sure, the jockeying had its Alphonse and Gaston aspect as each man pressed for his own viewpoint only while seeming to agree with and echo what the other man said. Jung began right away. In the very same letter, after saying that he had been able to “confirm” Freud’s views “many times over,” he went on to propose a distinctive psychological rationale for distinguishing paranoia from hysteria in which “libido” was only a secondary factor. Yet, if Jung had reason to feel pleased with both sides of his reply to the “Dear friend” letter, he also had reason to feel a little lonelier than before. Thus, after posting his letter, he went off to Jena to visit young Binswanger and his important uncle Otto. Just to remind Freud of his connections, he found the time to mail a postcard from Jena signed by himself and Binswanger junior as “Jung and Jünger” [“Young and Younger”; alternatively, “Jung and Disciple”].
Freud was both gracious and wary in reply: “You really are the only one capable of making an original contribution; except perhaps for O[tto] Gross, but unfortunately his health is poor.” Freud also knew, however, that Karl Abraham had decided to speak at the Salzburg Congress, now two months away, on the psychosexual differences between hysteria and dementia praecox. Abraham, the third and highest degree of “follower,” already accepted Freud’s contention that dementia praecox could be interpreted in terms of “auto-eroticism.” Freud saved the news of Abraham’s planned talk for his next letter. Jung took cognizance of it on 11 March 1908; “Of course the devil had to put a spoke in my wheel with that lecture of colleague Abraham’s; I can hear you chuckling.” There were as well other matters connected with the congress to discuss. Jung wanted Freud to lecture about one of his cases and to make the hotel arrangements. Freud wanted Jung to get Bleuler to chair the meeting—Jung never even asked him—and also to see both Jung’s Amsterdam lecture and a recent joint paper with Bleuler on the aetiology of dementia praecox, before they all met. Freud got his wish in regard to the papers, but was disappointed with both articles and let Jung know. Jung finally was becoming desperate. On 18 April 1908, but one week before the congress, he wrote:
Your last letter upset me. I have read a lot between the lines. I don’t doubt that if only I could talk with you we could come to a basic understanding. Writing is a poor substitute for speech.
Jung had been gradually discovering that a friendship at a distance was not necessarily all that friendly. Insofar as Jung had wanted to enjoy an exclusive relationship with Freud, his hopes were doomed from the start. It was inevitable that other physicians, including other Burghölzli physicians, would eventually make their own pilgrimages to Vienna, and equally inevitable that at least some of these pilgrims would also become Freud’s friends. Ferenczi, for example, had initially found Freud’s ideas to be nothing short of disgusting and had only gradually seen some profit in them. Nonetheless when he met Freud in person in February 1908, he found him to be an arresting figure and rapidly developed his own equivalent of a religious crush; a lifelong friendship thus began. All this Jung simply had to accept. But Jung was gradually discovering something else as well, something not a little disconcerting, namely that one’s stock with Freud potentially rose and fell by degrees depending on the extent of one’s theoretical agreement. Jung had been able to manage the pressure fairly comfortably so long as it was contained within a private dialogue. Now, however, that dialogue was being triangulated by other dialogues.
Most uncomfortably for Jung, psychoanalysis had begun to acquire a political dimension. The coming Congress for Freudian Psychology, scheduled for Salzburg on 27 April, represented Jung’s chance to once more get back out in front of the field.
IF JUNG’S relationship with Freud was becoming strained, his relationship with Spielrein was totally disintegrating. Jung had continued to see her for weekly sessions in which he behaved with an almost sadistic therapeutic correctness, probing the meanings of her “Siegfried” dreams while steadfastly refusing to discuss any of his own feelings. Her humiliation had grown accordingly. The intolerable situation now came to its logical crisis point: between them they decided to call off any further attempts at “psychoanalysis.” Yet her feelings were scarcely spent. In search of a private abreaction she returned to her “Transformation Journal” for the first time since the previous summer, to write the third and final portion of this document. This third section, composed in the early spring of 1908, explodes with furious recriminations, coupled with confessions of passion. It begins:
Don’t act on the first impulse—my principle is sound. I am certainly tired at this hour but calm, I believe. Yesterday’s conversation seems to me like a bad dream that does not cease to oppress me. Yes! This is the moment to react! Must I act on my pride? Play the woman, righteous and offended? That would seem to be lying to myself and to you. Ah! If only all my being were of one mind! And in spite of everything it is dreadful to me to hear you speak to me so. At the same time, you must take into account that my “unconscious” wants nothing that your unconscious refuses. The way things are, I can (or rather must) be frank and you can’t. And the fact that I abuse this frankness is a source of constant reproach to me, but how can I do otherwise? The complexity of the situation makes me adopt the unnatural role of the man and you the feminine role. I am far from taking what has been said as final; I understand that you must resist, but I also understand that your resistances excite me. I am also quite aware that if everything depended on me, then I would resist desperately.… Oh you! If you knew how dear you are to me without the least thought of the child. Isn’t the wish to have a little boy by you merely the wish to possess you at least in a little form.… Yes, if there were an affectionate link that united you to me! But you seek to smother every strong feeling in regard to me. The consequence is that you are only tact and lies.
Spielrein goes on in her recriminations to say that as a consequence of his posture Jung’s own unconscious has had to make use of detours. By giving her Binswanger’s paper to read—probably meant as an antidote to the recently published Amsterdam lecture—he has in effect admitted his own desires, most especially his wish to have a son with her. And in the conversation they had yesterday he was able to break the silence only by bringing up his cousin the medium, as though that story should be a moral lesson to her. Does he expect her to believe what he tries to make others believe? He dares to speak of how refined “S.W.” ’s unconscious was; the truth of the matter is that it is his unconscious he’s speaking of—the girl represents him, not herself. She mocks him, again bringing up the confessions in the Binswanger experiment: is this how he would cross the flames to rescue his Brünnhilde?
She frankly misses their old relationship:
Before you could converse with me about the most abstract subjects, you would show me different things in the laboratory, would have me at your place and show me paintings or ancient books; now everything which doesn’t have a close connection with the sexual complex, you call “making speeches” …
She agrees with him that further therapy is out of the question:
I don’t feel very much at ease talking to you like this and yet, what to do? It’s impossible for me to let you defend yourself before me while humiliating me. For me this is infinitely more dreadful than if it were necessary for me to die for you to have peace. What must I do? I agree with you completely that we should never talk together about the unconscious.
From here Spielrein goes on to speak of her own bad conscience, and yet scarcely has she done so than she complains that Jung’s wife borrows Jung from her as much as the other way around. The journal closes with thoughts of the child:
… we either decide not to touch on such subjects or if we do decide to touch on them I will have to react as required by your remarks. My wishes cannot naturally change following a conversation because conscious reflection for too long necessarily has its effects. But my wish has never been formulated as: “I want to have a little boy by you.” Because that would mean above all: “I agree to renounce you forever.” And that seems possible only in the isolated moments when I feel profoundly offended by you; it’s then that the desire to have your child dominates completely. But otherwise I cannot do it and that is why I myself put up so great a resistance to the complex. I am usually taken with fear that our relationship would not be as nice as if it were a totally disinterested friendship. But at the same time there are moments when the fact I’ll never have a child by you seems abominable. When the time comes when I must definitely take leave of you … then I don’t know …
From the letter-drafts of June 1909, we know that Spielrein’s spirits had lifted considerably by the end of April 1908. For whatever reason, she was once again in the exaltation of the “Siegfried complex” and was understandably delighted by her ability to foretell not only the dates of her exams but also what they would cover.
By that time, Jung was at Salzburg for the long-awaited Congress for Freudian Psychology. Afterward Jung went to Munich to see the architect who was building his new house at Küsnacht, a ferryboat ride from Zurich. The money for this handsome dwelling was provided by his wife’s dowry, though in accordance with the very same laws that Forel had railed against, the money was largely at Jung’s disposal.
By the end of April something else was certain. Emma Jung was pregnant again—with Franz Jung, the first boy who would be born to this family.
HISTORY HAS subsequently called it the First International Congress for Psychoanalysis. It was held in Salzburg on 27 April 1908 at the Hotel Bristol. Forty-two people went. Jung, Bleuler, Riklin, and Eitingon attended from Zurich. Edouard Claparède of Geneva was the lone participant from French Switzerland. A. A. Brill upheld America’s honor as its sole representative. From England, Ernest Jones brought along his friend, the prominent surgeon Wilfred Trotter. Karl Abraham was the only participant from Berlin. Vienna came in force with twenty-one participants. Stein and Ferenczi represented Hungary. Löwenfeld came from Munich, as did Otto Gross. There were two women in attendance, Frau Dr. Sophie Erismann of Zurich, a physician herself and married to a noted internist, and Otto Gross’s wife, Frieda, who was there to keep an eye on her husband.
It was not a sterling occasion for Carl Jung. First of all, for his talk in the afternoon session, he took the opportunity to present his rather mad version of the toxin theory of dementia praecox. The idea that some form of endogenous toxin, presumably the result of faulty metabolism, was the cause of this illness was widely held, and Kraepelin even supposed that the as-yet-unidentified toxin might be related to sexual processes. Jung’s divergence from the prevailing psychiatric consensus was based on his own research into complexes. Specifically, he proposed that the putative toxin was produced by the activity of a particularly severe complex. This amounted to saying that certain thoughts, or at least certain feelings, were metabolically dangerous. In fairness to Jung, it should be pointed out that any psychosomatic theory of psychosis must sooner or later jump the great divide between mental and physical processes. At Salzburg, however, the audience was not willing to take this particular leap.
Karl Abraham, meanwhile, in his talk, “The Psychosexual Differences Between Hysteria and Dementia Praecox,” proposed just the theory that Freud had been trying to plant with both men right along, the theory of auto-eroticism. Jung and Bleuler had already demonstrated in a general way what Brill had lately learned at the Burghölzli Grand Rounds regarding the woman who spilled wine on her bed-sheets, namely that sexual complexes could determine specific symptoms. Where the theory of auto-eroticism went much further was in supposing that a specific functional alteration of the libido, a turning in upon itself, was the necessary and sufficient cause of dementia praecox and of all the striking alterations of consciousness and ultimate intellectual deterioration that came with it. A bold claim, indeed, and yet no empirical way of testing it was advanced. In effect, here as with mythology, the appeal was to the essential reasonableness of the idea.
In one sense, what was going on here was a situation not unknown in the history of science, namely that a set of hypotheses that appear to be conceptually fruitful in one area are rapidly applied to other areas to see what they will yield. Yet, in another sense, matters were subtly shifting in the direction of what would prove to be a problematic enterprise. Both logically and scientifically, Freud’s endeavor ultimately held together on the basis that it was possible to demonstrate that the recovery of sexual traumas, or of repressed sexual wishes, led to the elimination of symptoms, and ultimately of the neurosis itself. But, at Salzburg, no one supposed that a similar demonstration would soon be forthcoming with regard to dementia praecox (i.e., our “schizophrenia”). The intractable, treatment-refractory facts were known; Abraham’s speculative reinterpretation of their significance in terms of libido theory was just that—an interpretation. Its comparative superiority to Jung’s equally speculative toxic-complex theory lay solely in its terminological and conceptual consonance with Freud’s theory of the neuroses. Theory was becoming subtly divorced from empirical test; almost imperceptibly, psychoanalysis was becoming a Weltanschauung.
To make matters worse, Abraham had originally heard of the theory of auto-eroticism from Jung during his days at the Burghölzli. Having thus stockpiled fuel enough for a good quarrel between Zurich and Vienna, Abraham also supplied the match: his address neglected to cite the work of either Bleuler or Jung in the whole area.
Not enough has been said about Abraham’s tactics in this regard. According to Jones, Abraham was already complaining in private conversation about the “unscientific and mystical” tendencies of the Swiss, while suggesting that they would not long stay the course with an explicitly materialistic theory like Freud’s. Intellectually, Abraham did have at least half a point to make here, but he consistently seasoned his remarks with his accumulated personal resentments. Well aware of Riklin’s monograph in progress on fairy tales, he had begun his own study, Dreams and Myth, and had managed to mail it off to Freud, along with his opinion that Riklin’s study was inferior, before the Salzburg congress, Freud’s first chance to meet Riklin. (At the congress Riklin, a last-minute replacement for Morton Prince, spoke on the topic “Some Problems of Myth Interpretation.”) In private conversation with Jones at Salzburg, Abraham whispered, “Do you think Jung can escape the anti-Semitism of a certain type of German?” (Jones, to his credit, replied with Edmund Burke’s dictum: “I do not know the method of indicting the whole nation.”) As for Bleuler, Abraham had raised him as a psychological problem during his first meeting with Freud. No Züricher was safe.
Freud was not unaware of what was going on. For example, Abraham was told in mid-February of 1908 to look out for the publication in March of the paper “Character and Anal Eroticism.” This gave Abraham the chance to convey the news, in his letter to Freud of 4 April 1908, that the theory therein “fits a case of hysteria analysed by Jung with which you will be acquainted from his description.” Abraham, who would have known Spielrein from her hospital days, and who would have well known that hers was the case in the published version of the Amsterdam address, thus told Freud what he wanted to know and what he did not want to have to ask Jung.
Twice in the months immediately after the Salzburg congress Freud would be obliged to put Abraham in his place vis-à-vis Jung just for the sake of keeping the peace. Peace did not keep him from then encouraging Abraham to work on the “Soma” myth and to see in it the solution to the “toxin” question: the magical drink of the ancient Persians and the dreaded toxin of dementia praecox were both to be viewed as varieties of a hypothesized sexual chemical in the brain. In the great scheme of things, the Burghölzli-trained and Berlin-based Abraham was strategically positioned to cut off the lines of conceptual retreat for the Zurich school. Abraham relished the job; Salzburg was his coming-out party.
At Salzburg, Jung didn’t get to see as much of Freud as he would have liked because, out of the clear blue sky, Freud’s half-brother Emmanuel, seventy-four years old, showed up unexpectedly at the banquet following the meeting, thus tieing up Freud for the rest of the evening and the next morning. That gave Jung rather more time to meet the rest of the Viennese, who, according to Jones, were even at this early date saying privately that Jung would not stay with psychoanalysis long. All in all, it was a less than edifying occasion. Wilfred Trotter, exposed for the first time to the level of discourse among the Viennese, consoled himself in a grumpy aside to Jones that he was the only person there who knew how to cut off a leg.
Of course, Jung did get to hear Freud lecture—for four and a half hours. Before the congress, Freud had intimated to Jung that he might speak on “Transformations in the (Conception and) Technique of Psychoanalysis,” but Jung had persuaded him instead to present case material. To be sure, if one examines Freud’s comments to his own little Wednesday Night group during the course of the previous year, what he had to say about “technique” was not likely to gladden the hearts of the Zurich school. First, Freud was of the opinion that the association experiment was vastly inferior to psychoanalysis and was only useful as a teaching device. Second, in his view there was no room for mixing the experiment with psychoanalysis proper as Jung, and lately Stekel, had done. Third, psychoanalysis did not primarily seek to discover complexes; its proper business was to remove resistances. Fourth, psychoanalysis was not possible with dementia praecox patients; all that could be done was to use what had been learned from neurotic patients as a guideline to the symptoms and then confront the psychotic patient directly. The upshot of all these qualifications, if they had been pooled into a single trenchant presentation, would have been that whatever Jung had so far been writing about, it wasn’t psychoanalysis.
But Freud had a real problem here quite apart from the politics of holding together his various disparate supporters. As he himself had admitted in the Wednesday Night discussion of 27 November 1907, “Associations as well as free thoughts yield much chaff.” How then did the analyst decide which associations, or free thoughts, were important? Did not analytic “technique” depend on what the analyst chose to respond to? In the absence of any rule for distinguishing analytic wheat from chaff, did not the analyst’s selectivity lead to the situation that Aschaffenburg complained of, and lately the influential Moll as well, namely that the analyst was shaping the material in support of the very theories that the analysis was meant to demonstrate? It was precisely here that the work of the Zurich investigators was potentially crucial, for they could claim to have identified specific empirical indicators as to when an association, or a free thought, was disturbed.
No doubt Freud balked at the thought of hooking up an electro-galvanic machine alongside the couch or of holding a stopwatch in his cigar hand. No doubt, too, he was right in supposing that treatment had to adopt a more free and easygoing approach than the demands of immediate experimental validation would permit. But the fact remains that the experiments going on in Zurich had enormous bearing on the scientific status of psychoanalysis as a method of investigation.
In any case, seated at the head of a long table in the conference hotel room at Salzburg, Freud opened the conference not with schematic remarks about technique, but with an extended case presentation—the case of the “Rat Man.” This patient’s symptom was worthy of Dostoyevsky. He feared that an exotic torture, by which rats were forced to eat their way into the anus of the victim, would be applied both to the lady he was courting and to his late father unless he returned a small sum of money to a fellow officer who had paid it out for him at a village post office while they had been on maneuvers. When it developed that, in fact, the officer had not advanced any money on his behalf, thus making the compulsion impossible to fulfill, the fear became overwhelming and ostensibly irremediable.
The “Rat Man” was blessed, so to speak, with an illness whose time was ripe. Interest in this syndrome, which was characterized by compulsive thoughts, doubts, absurd rituals, and the like, was currently quite high. Under a variety of labels—compulsion neurosis, psychasthenia, folie du doute, obsessional neurosis—it had already attracted the theoretical attentions of Löwenfeld, Janet, and others. It would indeed be a coup for psychoanalysis if it could shed new light on this condition, so far removed in its phenomenology from hysteria and the usual run of anxiety states. Luckily, the “Rat Man” was also blessed with an unusual ability to make use of the psychoanalytic method for the purpose of disassembling his obsessional formula. Henri Ellenberger has written that great psychotherapists require great patients. Breuer’s “Anna O.,” the featured case in Studies on Hysteria, had been such a patient. So, too, in her own way, was Spielrein. In the person of the “Rat Man,” Freud had yet one more such great patient. The wordplay of free associations seemed just the ticket for this man; he took to it as to the manner born, and between his intelligence and his dawning conviction that something could indeed be done for him, he proved to be an enormously productive patient. His productivity in turn enabled Freud, always at his best when considering the secret language of symptoms, to dissect the obsessional formula and show how it had been built up, piece by piece, almost phrase by phrase, from the ground of the patient’s unresolved childhood ambivalence toward a loved but entirely too punitive father. (In the published version, and perhaps also at Salzburg, Freud improved somewhat on the actual case record so that his interventions could stand in sterling, nonsuggestive juxtaposition with the patient’s spontaneous self-revelation.) All in all, it was a stunning demonstration of the method and a matchless psychological study in its own right, well worth the four and a half hours’ time spent on it. Nothing like it existed anywhere in the vast literature on obsessional neurosis.
With case material like this Freud could afford to be generous, even magnanimous, and he seems to have used the occasion to make one overture after another to the Swiss. For a close reading of the published case shows Freud using the language of the Zurich school to a degree that was never again to be repeated. He spoke of a “splitting of the personality,” of “repressed complexes,” of “diversion of … attention,” and even of “complex sensitiveness.” He also talked about unconscious “symbolism” and about the “perfect analogy” between a transference fantasy and an earlier event. At one point, he even had some fun with this game of making the crew from Zurich comfortable; Freud described the scene in which his patient first heard of using rats to torture people thus:
It was almost as though Fate, when the captain told him his story, had been putting him through an association-test; she had called out a “complex stimulus-word,” and he had reacted to it with his obsessional idea.
Freud’s diplomacy was not idle. Following the afternoon session, he closeted himself with the various members of the Zurich school; Abraham, Ferenczi, Brill, and Jones were present, as were the Swiss, but from his own party, Freud brought along only young Otto Rank. The twenty-odd remaining members of the Viennese contingent were left to mill about the lobby and wonder what was afoot. When the meeting broke, there was an important announcement. It had been decided to start a periodical, a biannual yearbook, for psychoanalysis and related researches. Jung was to be the editor; Freud and Bleuler would be co-directors.
Beneath all the social awkwardness and petty sniping of the conference, the important thing had happened. Freud had persuaded the Swiss that psychoanalysis was an open science, that it was still producing new and sturdy findings, and that between the assembled they had enough qualified contributors to make their own journal. They did not have to wait for Morton Prince or anyone else to come aboard. By meeting with members of the Zurich school privately, moreover, Freud made it clear that he personally was ready to rise above any lingering Viennese parochialism. Bleuler’s willingness to lend his name to the new venture, meanwhile, was in keeping with his role of patriarch of the Zurich school. As for Jung, he was more than just the logical first choice as editor—his participation was plainly indispensable to the viability of the new enterprise. Jung did not get the personal chat with Freud he sought at Salzburg, but he did get this recognition of his preeminence and it was enough for him to take on the post of editor.
And the excluded Viennese? For them there was nothing, save the hope that Jung might deem their own submissions worthy for inclusion in the new yearbook. Stunned, they spent the banquet that followed swapping remarks about the Zurich “Siegfried,” as they took to calling Jung with an uncanny contempt.
THE CENTRAL theme of Freud’s case presentation, ambivalence toward the father, had had special relevance to at least one member of the audience—Otto Gross. For at this time Gross was in no little conflict with his own father, Hanns Gross, professor at Graz and a force in European sociology. Alarmed at his son’s behavior, which was passing beyond eccentricity into his own special area of competency, outright criminality, Gross senior had been trying for months, for everyone’s protection, to get his son committed to a hospital. To that end he had written to both Jung and Freud, who, in turn, had been discussing the problem between themselves in their letters immediately prior to the congress. The original plan had called for Jung to escort Gross junior from Salzburg back to the Burghölzli, but Jung had ducked that unhappy assignment.
Jung did not evade Gross for long. Less than a week after his return to Zurich, Jung received from Freud the certificate officially committing Otto Gross to the Burghölzli. Graciously, Freud promised to take Gross off Jung’s hands in October—five full months hence. Meanwhile, Freud had two new visitors to attend to, Ernest Jones and A. A. Brill, yet two more men trained in Zurich, who were in Vienna for their first visit with the inventor of psychoanalysis.
Ernest Jones had met Otto Gross at the Amsterdam Congress and then again during a stay in Munich. Jones later described him as “the nearest approach to the romantic idea of a genius I have ever met.… Such penetrating powers of divining the inner thoughts of others I was never to see again.” An extremely brilliant man, Gross never lacked for influential followers throughout his short life. His novel psychiatric and psychological theories were debated by the best intellects of his day. He had a special appeal to writers and appeared as a character in a half-dozen different novels. In Munich, he split his time between Kraepelin’s clinic, where he had one of the prized assistantships, and the cafés of the Schwabing district, Munich’s answer to Greenwich Village, where he conducted impromptu psychoanalyses into the night.
Central to Gross’s adherence to Freudian principles was his belief that here lay a practical method for cultural revolution. Gross wanted a world where monogamy did not exist, where all patriarchal authority had been overthrown, and where communal living and self-exploration would guide each individual to his own artistic heights. At Salzburg, Gross had wanted to talk about the “cultural perspectives” of psychoanalysis, earning this reproach from Freud: “We are doctors, and doctors we remain.”
But it was not his views that got Gross into trouble; it was his insistence on living out his fairy tale. To begin with, he was a charter member of The Great Unwashed. Then, in 1906, there had been a disturbing incident where he had given a patient, who was perhaps his lover as well, the poison that was the means of her suicide. In 1907, his wife, Frieda, had given birth to his son; so did Else Jaffe, who was married to someone else. More recently, there had been a local controversy in Munich concerning his treatment of a young woman whose family had subsequently hospitalized her to get her away from him. Then, too, there was Gross’s plan to sue his chief, Kraepelin, for malpractice on the basis that he did not offer psychoanalysis at the clinic, a plan from which Ernest Jones dissuaded him. And all along there had been marathon group discussions in which clothes were stripped off along with defenses. By the time of his forcible admission to the Burghölzli during the second week of May 1908, moreover, Gross was addicted to both cocaine and morphine. To be sure, the erosion of Gross’s personality had only just begun and his intellect and his charm were still intact. It could have been said about him as it was once said of Lord Byron: he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
Gross and Jung hit it off famously right from the start. Jung had been starved for intellectual companionship, and under the circumstances Gross could not have hoped for a more attentive and responsive physician. Beyond hailing from very similar professional backgrounds, the two men were temperamentally and intellectually compatible, enough so that Jung did not hesitate to think of Gross as his psychic “twin brother.” Thus, while his correspondence with Freud following the conference Was taken up with various business matters pertaining to the planned journal, also with a discussion of colleague Abraham’s behavior, Jung’s primary emotional energies went into his plan to analyze, and cure, this most important new inpatient.
At first things went swimmingly. Gross voluntarily reduced his drug intake while Jung devoted every free hour and then some to the care of this intriguing man. At one point they stayed up analyzing continuously for twelve hours; at the end, as Jung later confided to Jones, both of them sat stuporously “like nodding automata.” But it was not only the analysis of Gross that kept them up. With charm, insight, and professional courtesy to play on, Gross was able to turn the tables so that what transpired was equally an analysis of Jung. In a letter in late May, Jung described the novel procedure to Freud:
I have let everything drop and have spent all my available time, day and night, on Gross, pushing on with his analysis.… Whenever I got stuck, he analyzed me. In this way my own psychic health has benefited.… He is an extraordinarily decent fellow with whom you can hit it off at once provided you can get your own complexes out of the way. Today is my first day of rest; I finished the analysis yesterday.… The analysis has yielded all sorts of scientifically valuable results which we shall try to formulate soon.
In his various replies to Jung’s reports over the next two weeks, Freud allowed that it would be a fine thing if a collaboration grew up between the two men. However, as the man who had essentially introduced cocaine to Europe, and as someone with extensive personal experience with the drug, Freud knew well the gravity of Gross’s situation. As regards the treatment, he tried gently to caution Jung on a number of points—the analysis was too brief, the concurrent use of drugs was masking the resistance—but in the face of Jung’s insistently sanguine view, he finally acceded to the idea that perhaps things had indeed gone as well as Jung claimed: “Still, I have never had a patient like Gross; with him one ought to be able to see straight to the heart of the matter.” Three weeks later, however, Jung had a different version to report: all the therapeutic insights had been lost, nothing permanent had been achieved, and in fact, left unguarded the day before in the yard, Gross had jumped over the hospital wall and disappeared. Jung attempted to cover up his embarrassing failure with the self-protective assessment that Gross was really suffering from dementia praecox, hence the failure of the treatment to stick. This allowed Freud once more to launch into theoretical remarks about his views on paranoia and dementia praecox, a development which Jung finally responded to by proposing that Freud visit him at the Burghölzli in September. Implicit in Jung’s invitation was the thought that they might thereby have the chance to examine some patients together—and compare observations. As for Gross, Freud wrote: “He is addicted and can only do great harm to our cause.”
Following Gross’s escape, Jung continued to get reports as to his fate. For a time Gross was quite paranoid, but then he managed to pull himself together and write a paper in the fall which Jung found not at all bad. And so it went with Gross, in and out of trouble, for another five years, until once again Gross senior managed to get him hospitalized, this time in Vienna.
As for Jung, matters went quite differently. Soon his embarrassment about the affair took second seat to Freud’s embarrassment about Stekel’s new book, which, owing to an interpolation by Freud, blurred the distinction between hysteria and anxiety neurosis and thus made it appear that all neuroses could be cured by sexual activity. Jung did not hesitate to pounce on this Viennese version of Gross’s philosophy, and Freud had to concede Jung’s points as their correspondence drifted into the summer doldrums. During his August vacation, Freud wrote that he was pondering a new direction for his theory: “One thing and another have turned my thoughts to mythology and I am beginning to suspect that myth and neurosis have a common core.” The “one thing and another” were Abraham’s study of myths and dreams, Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, and two papers by Freud himself on children’s sexual development, all of which were awaiting a final round of editing.
THERE WERE two immediate consequences of the Gross affair in Zurich. The first was theoretical. Regaining his composure, Jung began writing up “The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual” and finished it in time to include it in the very first volume of the new journal. In the paper, Jung discreetly credited “an analysis carried out conjointly with Dr. Otto Gross” as his inspiration. Beyond containing a distillation of some of Gross’s own ideas, it was, for any of the “initiated,” plainly an analysis of Gross’s character; that said, it also had application to Jung’s own psyche, though this was less apparent. The paper began with a preliminary nod to the Freudian theory of regression:
A man disillusioned in love falls back, as a substitute, upon some sentimental friendship, masturbation, or false religiosity; if he is a neurotic he regresses still further back to the childhood relationships he has never quite forsaken, and to which even the normal person is fettered by more than one chain—the relationship to father and mother.
Citing the recent 1907 paper of his student Emma Fürst, Jung argued that “reaction-types” on the association experiment tend to run in families and that this psychic legacy predetermines the subsequent neurotic regression. In other words, the neurotic fails at his life tasks, especially the erotic ones, because he approaches the conflict with the emotional attitudes acquired from his parents rather than relying on his own. Arguing on the basis of experimental data and from his own clinical experiences, Jung suggested tentatively that the father typically appeared to be decisive in shaping the reaction-type of his children. He then presented four lucid case histories demonstrating the point; in each, it was transparent that the individual never succeeded in going beyond the attachment to the father and thus forever addressed life with the attitudes formed by that relationship. In his discussion section, Jung argued that the attachment was essentially if secretly sexual:
The infantile attitude, it is evident, is nothing but infantile sexuality. If we now survey all the far-reaching possibilities of the infantile constellation, we are obliged to say that in essence our life’s fate is identical with the fate of our sexuality.
From here Jung moved into a Nietzschean digression on the history of religion, “the history of the fantasy systems of whole peoples and epochs,” where he detected an alternating cycle between periods dominated by versions of the father—“Jehova” was the model—and periods where prophets and reformers achieved a more perfect sublimation by identifying themselves with the divinity. Then he picked up the theme of “fate” again:
Like everything that has fallen into the unconscious, the infantile situation still sends up dim, premonitory feelings, feelings of being secretly guided by otherworldly feelings.
These are the roots of the first religious sublimations. In the place of the father with his constellating virtues and faults there appears on the one hand an altogether sublime deity, and on the other hand the devil, who in modern times has been largely whittled away by the realization of one’s own moral responsibility. Sublime love is attributed to the former, low sexuality to the latter.
The finished paper was brief, cogent, topical, and brilliant. As well, it announced a new approach to the problem that had been hovering about the Burghölzli ever since Riklin began his work on fairy tales: how to get into mythology from a psychoanalytic perspective. The secret was not to look at individual myths, but to look at a succession of them. For the succession ought to show the same pattern of progressive differentiation from parental authority that took place in the psychological differentiation of each generation.
Amazingly, it also worked the other way around. For the model also suggested what to do with the rare case, like Spielrein’s and also perhaps Jung’s, where there seemed to be a natural talent for accessing the deeper, mythologically informed strata of the unconscious. Once one was face-to-face with the archetypal father image, be he Jehova or Wotan, the task was to move forward to an independent mythic (and, implicitly, libidinal) heroism of one’s own—to Jesus or Siegfried or whomever. For Jung, this theoretical opening not only possessed an unassailable logic but also offered the opportunity to make sense of some unusual clinical data at his disposal. His central problem, all of a sudden, was not how to proceed, but with whom to proceed. For with the loss of Gross, Jung was, as he complained to Freud in early September, largely without a decent intellectual companion.
THERE WAS in Zurich one other immediate consequence of the Gross affair, more personal in nature. It was subsequently described by Spielrein in the letter-drafts written in the late spring of 1909:
I told him [Jung] how my exams had gone, but was deeply depressed that he displayed no pleasure at hearing I was capable of doing good work after all and was now an official candidate for the medical degree. I was ashamed of having believed in any prophecies and told myself: not only does he not love me, I am not even a good acquaintance, whose welfare matters to him. He wanted to show me we were complete strangers to each other, and it is humiliating if I now go to see him. But I decided to go the following Friday, but to act completely professional. The devil whispered other things to me, but I no longer believed them. I sat there waiting in deep depression. Now he arrives, beaming with pleasure, and tells me with strong emotion about Gross, about the great insight he has just received (i.e., about polygamy); he no longer wants to suppress his feeling for me, he admitted that I was his first, dearest friend, etc., etc. (his wife of course excepted), and that he wanted to tell me everything about himself. So once more this most curious coincidence that the devil so unexpectedly turned out to be right.