ON A SUNDAY EVENING IN SEPTEMBER OF 1909, a fifty-three-year-old neurologist from Vienna, accompanied by two of his close intellectual companions, stepped off the train in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was the last leg of a long journey that left him temporarily exhausted. The overnight train he had taken from Munich to Bremen after leaving his holiday residence in the Alps meant that he only had a day to explore the old city, and then there had been a tedious transatlantic journey on the German-American liner the George Washington. The weather had been unkind—cold, wet, and foggy—and the seas rough, “not friendly,” as our weary traveler confided in his diary, and accordingly “the uplift in mood through the sea air did not occur as I had surmised.” The presence among his fellow passengers of a fierce rival and critic, Professor William Stern of Breslau, did nothing to improve his mood. Stern, he wrote to his wife, is “a repulsive person” and “he will not find us hospitable.”1 Ignoring Stern for the most part, Sigmund Freud and his companions, Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, passed much of the time analyzing one another’s dreams.
On August 29, Freud’s party docked at Hoboken, New Jersey. A few days of sightseeing in New York, the high point of which was a visit to the Metropolitan Museum to view Greek antiquities, had been marred by gastric upsets and an embarrassing episode when he publicly wet himself. It was a measure of Freud’s deep-seated dislike of the United States that he would ever afterward blame his years of digestive problems on his encounter with American cooking. There was a lengthy trip north, first by an overnight boat trip as far as New Haven, and then by train via Boston—an exhausting itinerary made worse by Freud’s growing prostate problems. The weary travelers welcomed a few hours of rest at the Standish Hotel before they repaired to their host’s house for dinner.
Waiting to greet them was the president of Clark University, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall. He was, Jung wrote to his wife, “a refined, distinguished old gentleman close on seventy who received us with the kindest hospitality. He has a plump, jolly, good-natured, and extremely ugly wife, who, however, serves wonderful food. She promptly took over Freud and me as her ‘boys’ and plied us with delicious nourishment and noble wine, so we began visibly to recover.”2 On Monday morning, Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi moved in to stay with the Halls for the balance of the week.
Over the next few days, Freud delivered five lectures on psychoanalysis in his native German. In return, besides a fee of $750, he received an honorary doctorate. It was Freud’s first and last academic honor of this sort, and his first and last visit to the country where, in the middle years of the twentieth century, his intellectual brainchild would achieve its greatest influence, albeit in a bowdlerized and simplified form. Yet the famous occasion nearly failed to materialize. Freud was undoubtedly eager for some public acknowledgment of his genius, but he had little regard for America or Americans even before setting foot in the United States, and his first instinct had been to refuse the invitation. Clark’s first president, Hall had sought to make his university a center of graduate training, modeled to some extent on Johns Hopkins University, the first American institution to embrace the German principle of a research university. The year 1909 marked the twentieth anniversary of Clark’s opening, and he conceived the plan of inviting a host of eminent scientists and scholars for a week of lectures to celebrate the occasion. Many were far better known than Freud, and the plan had originally been for the distinguished group to assemble in early July.
For Freud, the dates simply wouldn’t do. He wrote back, “I am a practicing physician and because of the summer habits of my countrymen, I am obliged to discontinue work from July 15 to the end of September. If I were to lecture in America in the first week of July, I should have to suspend my medical work three weeks earlier than usual, which would mean a significant and irretrievable loss for me. This consideration makes it impossible for me to accept your proposal.”3 Privately, he complained to Ferenczi, “America should bring in money, not cost money.”4
Learning of Freud’s decision, Carl Jung promptly wrote to his mentor, urging him “to speak in America if only because of the echo it would arouse in Europe.” Far more attuned to the indirect rewards the trip might bring in its wake, he returned to the subject at the end of his letter: “About America I would like to remark that [Pierre] Janet’s travel expenses were amply compensated by his subsequent American clientele. Recently Kraepelin gave one [consultation] in California for the tidy sum of 50,000 marks. I think this side of things should also be taken into account.”5
As Jung well knew, the mention of Emil Kraepelin was bound to attract Freud’s attention. In successive editions of Kraepelin’s highly influential textbook, the German psychiatrist had developed a new diagnostic system that distinguished two major classes of psychosis, what he termed “dementia praecox” (relabeled as “schizophrenia” in 1910 by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who saw it as not necessarily involving dementia or restricted to the young), and manic-depressive psychosis, each characterized by particular clusters of symptoms and a differing prognosis. Derived inductively from some of the thousands of cases that filled Germany’s barracks-asylums, Kraepelin’s nosology made him the most famous German psychiatrist of his generation. He was Freud’s bête noire, and Freud referred to him sarcastically as “the Great Pope of Psychiatry.”
KRAEPELIN’S STANDING as the leading psychiatrist of the age had led to his invitation to perform a highly lucrative examination of perhaps the wealthiest psychiatric patient in the United States. Stanley McCormick was the youngest son of Silas McCormick, a man who had parlayed his invention of a reaping machine into one of the great nineteenth-century fortunes. The family company, International Harvester, controlled 85 percent of the market for agricultural equipment from its headquarters in Chicago, and by the turn of the century the McCormicks’ wealth rivaled that of Carnegie, the Rockefellers, and the Vanderbilts. Stanley had married Katharine Dexter, the first woman to graduate with a science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in September 1904. After a nine-month honeymoon in Paris, partly spent in the company of Stanley’s domineering mother, Nettie, and Katharine’s mother, Josephine, the couple returned to the United States. Much to Katharine’s dismay, Stanley insisted at first that they live in Chicago. Nettie had bombarded Stanley with telegrams during their European sojourn, telling him what to eat and wear, where to visit, and what to avoid (with special concern for that “den of evil,” Monte Carlo). The prospect of living in a city where Nettie’s proximity would allow still more attempts to control her son, whose behavior was notably unstable, scarcely boded well for the marriage.
Within weeks, Katharine relocated to Boston, where she had designs on attending medical school. Stanley, nominally occupying an executive position in the family firm, stayed behind in Chicago and moved back in with his mother. His behavior grew more erratic, and after some weeks his brothers, in the face of Nettie’s vociferous opposition, persuaded him that he ought to join his wife in Boston. Katharine sought to keep a low profile, to minimize the stress that social situations evidently caused her husband, but Stanley’s mental state was fragile. The marriage, it subsequently materialized, had never been consummated, and as the months passed, Stanley began to hallucinate and behave increasingly erratically and violently. In June 1906, his decline forced his resignation from International Harvester. By October, as his irrational outbursts worsened, scandal threatened to erupt, and at Katharine’s behest he was confined in the McLean Asylum—to this day the institution favored by the New England plutocracy. Pugnacious and delusional by turns, given to shouting obscenities and to unpredictable violence, Stanley seemed particularly prone to paroxysms in the presence of women, including his wife, and soon all female attendants were removed. Ice-cold baths were used to calm him whenever he refused to behave, and in therapy Stanley confessed his impotence.
Months of confinement produced no improvement in his condition. Adolf Meyer, brought from New York to examine him, pronounced him to be suffering from “psychasthenia” overlain with psychotic and manic-depressive features. Meyer’s report, filled with his usual prevarications and obscure prose, suggested that, while Stanley might improve over time, the prospects of a full recovery were fading. In a subsequent letter to Stanley’s mother, he indicated that the case was “one of the saddest” he had encountered, since earlier opportunities to head off his now-serious problems had been missed.6 Months passed, with many behind-the-scenes squabbles between Katharine and the McCormicks over who would control Stanley’s treatment. The deeply religious Nettie prayed for his recovery, and other family members enlisted a pliant Meyer in their campaign to persuade Katharine to accept a lucrative divorce—a course of action she summarily rejected.
Fortified by the promise of a substantial fee for his trouble, Meyer subsequently renewed his attempt to secure Katharine’s agreement to a divorce, arguing that it would be therapeutic for her husband. Again, he was rebuffed. Ever afterward, Katharine would view his involvement in the case with suspicion, seeing him as the ally of her enemies, Stanley’s mother and siblings. Not that Meyer was in the least deterred by her hostility, clinging for nearly two decades to the stream of fees that Stanley’s relations continued to send his way.7
At length, with the utmost precautions against his escape, Stanley was moved by private train across the continent to Santa Barbara. Here he was locked up in a family mansion, Riven Rock, with a full-time medical attendant and staff. (In his saner days, Stanley had helped design and build his new place of imprisonment as somewhere to confine his mad older sister, Mary Elizabeth—though she had been relocated to an Arkansas sanatorium by this point.) Insistent on securing the services of the most eminent psychiatrist in the world, with money no object, Nettie summoned Kraepelin to her son’s bedside, offering him so princely a sum that he could not refuse the weeks of travel the consultation would necessitate.
Kraepelin examined Stanley and pronounced him a case of catatonic dementia praecox, endorsing Meyer’s previous diagnosis. His report made no mention of the fact that Stanley was kept in virtually complete physical restraints most of the time. Like most of the other eminent psychiatrists who had preceded and would follow him to Riven Rock, Kraepelin tried hard to find some sliver of optimism to proffer the family in return for their largesse. “These conditions,” he reported, “have always to be regarded as very grave disorders. In a very large proportion of the cases the disease progresses to a more or less pronounced degree of mental enfeeblement. There are, however, patients in whom marked improvement takes place; indeed, in isolated instances, a complete recovery has been observed.… [W]e would conclude that at present we are still dealing with an acute illness in which a more or less favourable turn may still occur, although this can by no means be predicted with any certainty.”8
This was all rather disingenuous. In reality, Stanley would remain psychotic till his death in 1947, the arrangements for his care complicated by a long-running power struggle between his mother and siblings on the one hand and his equally strong-willed spouse on the other. Between them, the two sides would engage a veritable galaxy of eminent psychiatrists (and their not-so-eminent assistants) to examine and treat a patient who was mostly violent and incoherent.
Stanley McCormick’s unfathomable wealth made him a one-man psychiatric gravy train. One psychiatrist, a Dr. Edward Kemp who had once briefly met Freud, would be paid $10,000 a month—almost $2 million a year in today’s dollars—to live with Stanley and “treat” him psychoanalytically between 1927 and 1930, when Katharine finally obtained a court order to terminate his services: all this two years after Kraepelin had found it “impossible to have any continued conversation” with someone scarcely able “to carry out movements or utter words.”9
WHEN JUNG URGED FREUD to consider the rewards an American visit might bring, he could draw on more than just the gossip about the fabulous fee Kraepelin had secured for his services. For Jung himself had already begun treating two other members of the McCormick clan at the Burghölzli, the famous mental hospital in Zürich. The first was Stanley’s cousin Medill McCormick, who sought help supposedly for his alcoholism.10 Jung’s treatment would extend intermittently over almost two decades before the then Senator McCormick committed suicide in a Washington hotel in 1925.11 In March 1909, Jung would be consulted by Stanley’s brother Harold and his wife, Edith Rockefeller McCormick.12 Surely there were other rich, nervous Americans whose patronage the nascent science of psychoanalysis might secure?
Perhaps Jung’s invocation of these future possibilities carried weight. In any event, when Hall renewed his invitation with more accommodating dates, Freud’s response was very different. The major celebration had been moved to early September. Perhaps just as significantly, Hall had raised the honorarium from $400 to $750 and dangled the prospect of an honorary doctor of laws degree. Freud accepted with alacrity, thanking his host for “a very happy surprise.”13
Freud was only one of a long roster of distinguished speakers during a busy week at Clark. Given the prominent place the visit has come to occupy in the annals of psychoanalytic history, it is important to bear in mind that, despite Hall’s own academic interests in psychology, the lectures given that week spanned a wide spectrum of subjects: mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology, as well as anthropology, pedagogy, psychology, and psychiatry.14 The speakers included two Nobel Prize winners (the physicists Albert Michelson and Ernest Rutherford) and such eminent figures as Franz Boas of Columbia.15 Within the field of psychiatry and psychology, Freud and Jung were far from having the platform to themselves. Some speakers were actively hostile to psychoanalysis, most especially Professor William Stern, who had traveled on the same ship as Freud and was harshly critical of his work, and Edward Bradford Titchener, the British-born experimental psychologist who wanted nothing to do with psychotherapy and loathed what he termed the perversion of psychological science in the service of “saving souls.” Still others, like Adolf Meyer, displayed a nominal openness to Freud’s ideas that would soon dissolve into hostility.16
Meyer’s ambivalence, and subsequent rejection, helped ensure that, whatever following psychoanalysis developed in some intellectual circles and among wealthy patients over the next three decades, it would attract very few American psychiatrists. Yet his stance was far from the only reason Freudian psychoanalysis remained a distinctly minority taste in those years. Freud’s focus on neurotic, fee-paying patients who were treated in his private consulting room had little relevance for psychiatrists whose experience was almost wholly confined to seriously disturbed patients involuntarily confined in institutions. Sensitive to their marginal status, they clung tightly to the vestiges of their medical identity, insisting on madness’s biological roots and repeatedly opting for somatic treatments for their patients’ troubles. Freud’s embrace of the “talking cure” would have had little appeal to them, had they been aware of his work. Still, as psychiatry began to broaden its remit, particularly after the Great War, and as an office-based practice became possible, Meyer’s open hostility to psychoanalysis added to the obstacles it faced, for by then his dominance of American psychiatry was entrenched.
Throughout his career, even when he rose to defend the most extreme physical interventions for mental disorders, Meyer continued to invoke the role of social and psychological factors in the genesis and persistence of mental illness. Yet if that prompted him to voice some initial sympathy for Freud’s views, it was one that would not—indeed, could not—last. Just as he had initially expressed a loyalty to Kraepelin’s doctrines, only to subsequently spurn them, Meyer was not content to operate for long in anyone’s shadow. Besides, the pragmatism and eclecticism of his psychobiology, where interpretation was loose and unstructured, put him firmly at odds with the highly deterministic intellectual system Freud had constructed. Psychoanalysis was, in that sense, psychobiology’s polar opposite. Until Meyer’s advancing age and the transformative effects of the Second World War weakened the hold of his teachings on America’s psychiatry, Freud’s ideas would gain only limited traction.
Twenty-eight of the twenty-nine participants delivering lectures at Clark later received honorary doctorates of law. (Titchener was awarded the somewhat more prestigious DLitt.) For Freud, the ceremony had to be a gratifying occasion, given the lack of recognition he had received so far in Europe. It was, as he commented when the degree was awarded, “the first official recognition of our labors.” Whatever pleasure the occasion may have provided was diluted by his underlying contempt for those offering him their applause. “America,” he would later remark, “is gigantic—a gigantic mistake.”17 The informality of Americans rankled him, and he was convinced that their hypocritical prudery would preclude their acceptance of his theories. Before he had even visited, he confided to Jung, “I … think that once they discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us.”18 Nothing changed once he had seen the country. It was, he informed Arnold Zweig, an “anti-Paradise” populated by “savages” and swindlers, and it ought to be renamed “Dollaria.”19 “What is the use of Americans,” he belligerently asked Ernest Jones in 1924, “if they bring no money? They are not good for anything else.”20
SADLY FOR FREUD, Americans never seemed to offer him enough of that particular commodity. An invitation in 1920 to spend six months in New York in return for a payment of $10,000 was scornfully rejected: “In other times,” he wrote to his daughter Anna, “no American would have dared to make me such a proposition. But they’re counting on our poverty [in the aftermath of the First World War] to buy us cheap.”21 Freud’s ambivalence or outright hostility thus compounds the irony that it was only in the United States that psychoanalysis would enjoy an unbridled period of success.
That success came some decades later, and it is easy to exaggerate the importance of the visit to Worcester, set against what was to come. And yet the occasion was an important one. To be sure, by no means was all his audience converted. Experimental psychologists like Edward Titchener greeted Freud’s talk of the unconscious with scorn. William James, already suffering from the heart disease that would soon end his life, might have been expected to be more receptive to Freud’s theories, but he attended only the lecture on the interpretation of dreams, and found the Viennese physician pretentious, “a man obsessed with fixed ideas. I can make nothing in my own case with his dream theories, and obviously ‘symbolism’ is a most dangerous method.”22
But Freud also made a handful of enthusiastic converts. Stanley Hall became his champion, though that was in some ways a mixed blessing, given Hall’s controversial career and propensity for all sorts of intellectual enthusiasms. More important, given his intellectual and social standing among the New England aristocracy, was James Jackson Putnam, the impeccably connected professor of neurology at Harvard, whose benediction did much to lend legitimacy to psychoanalysis in its early years. Along with transplanted European disciples like Ernest Jones, who had fled to Toronto in the face of a looming sexual scandal, these men gave Freudian psychoanalysis an important early bridgehead in North America, one that would be amplified and extended when a flood of analysts arrived in the 1930s to escape persecution at the hands of the Nazis.
Then there were the lectures themselves, a fluent and engaging outline of Freud’s ideas as they were then constituted, beginning with the patient Anna O. and her famous (and mythical) cure. Bertha Pappenheim, the real Anna O., had been treated not by Freud but by his colleague Josef Breuer, for symptoms that included a chronic cough; paralysis of the extremities on the right side of her body; and disturbances of vision, hearing, and speech.23 As recorded in the monograph the two men published in 1895, Studies on Hysteria, her “cure” came about as she recalled repressed events and emotions. For Freud and his followers, she thus became the patient who launched psychoanalysis. Her treatment, Freud emphasized, was but one example of the force and power of recovering memories via the talking cure.
At the very time Freud was delivering these lectures, Pappenheim was visiting North America to give a series of lectures of her own on white slavery and prostitution. She had become one of the foremost feminist activists of her generation. Many decades later, we learned that, far from being cured by Breuer’s ministrations, on leaving his care she was immediately hospitalized in the Belleview Sanitorium in Kreuzlingen, where her symptoms continued unabated. Her subsequent recovery owed nothing to psychoanalytic therapy, of which she was fiercely critical.24
The Worcester lectures were delivered in German and apparently extemporaneously, though in reality Freud had carefully rehearsed what he would say while walking with Ferenczi just before delivering each lecture. German was then the language of science and particularly of medicine, so for the scholars in the audience Freud’s decision to speak in his own idiom posed no great difficulty, but it is striking that the Massachusetts newspapers managed to provide extensive and largely accurate summaries of Freud’s arguments. To be sure, they glossed over most of the Saturday lecture, devoted as it was to the sexual aspects of Freud’s theories, for such subjects were hardly suitable for family newspapers. But the essential elements of what purported to be a radically new approach to the understanding and treatment of mental disorder were laid out in a brief and appealing compass.25
Freud began with a becoming modesty—one he would regret when his audience took his self-effacement at face value—granting to his early collaborator, Josef Breuer, the primary credit for the invention of psychoanalysis. He announced that he intended, over five days, “to give you in a very brief compass a historical survey of the origin and further development of this new method of investigation and treatment.”26 He proceeded to do so in a clever fashion, one that recapitulated for his audience the slow, halting, and uneven process by which he had moved from Breuer’s initial emphasis on recovering repressed traumatic memories via hypnotism to his own completely different approach. He sought to make plausible the notion of “a purely psychological theory … in which we assign the affective processes the chief place.” Breuer’s faltering first attempt, it turned out, “was able to give only a very incomplete and unsatisfying explanation of the observed phenomena.” Psychoanalysis had advanced markedly in the succeeding decade and a half, but it took much time and patient effort, Freud emphasized, to construct “a well-rounded theory without any gaps,” one that was not “a child of speculation” but rather “the product of an unprejudiced and objective investigation.”
Struggling with this great task, and with the simultaneous creation of effective therapeutic techniques, Freud gradually revealed how, moving from a stress on repressed traumatic memories and resistances to acknowledging them, he had developed the notion that the libido, or unconscious sexual drive, was the central psychological underpinning for all human beings. All sorts of discomforts and disturbances flowed from that fundamental reality, and from civilization’s demands that these forces be channeled in “acceptable” directions—a fraught process, and one that remained incomplete and unsatisfactory. The nuclear family was the scene of frightful and dangerous psychodramas that populated the unconscious, fomented its repressions, and created its psychopathologies. As the infant struggled to grow up, and the child to mature, the perils of Oedipal conflicts awaited—the unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable desire for an erotic relationship with the parent of the opposite sex—only to be suppressed in ways that wreaked havoc on the adult personality.
Forced to deny their fantasies, or drive them underground, children were riven with psychical conflict. Cravings and suppressions, a search for substitute satisfactions, false forgetting, the constraints of “civilized” morality—in all these respects and more, the conflict between Eros and Psyche created a minefield from which few emerged unscathed. Madness was not a condition unique to the degraded and degenerate, Freud argued, but something that lurked to some degree within all of us. Here, Freud emphasized, was what differentiated his theory from that of biological reductionists like the French psychotherapist Pierre Janet, who had spoken at Harvard some years previously. Sublimated in some with greater success, the same forces that led one to mental invalidism allowed another to produce accomplishments of surpassing cultural importance. Civilization and its discontents were thus locked in an indissoluble embrace. Where resistance to the repressed was strong, that which had been pushed into the unconscious surfaced in disguised form as symptoms. Rendering the unconscious conscious was necessarily a complex and drawn-out process. Here, dreams could play a vital role in uncovering what we hid from ourselves, giving Freud the opening for an extended treatment of his ideas on this subject, in his fourth lecture, attended by William James.
In Studies on Hysteria, the urtext of psychoanalysis, Freud acknowledged that the case studies he had contributed, a series of psychologically charged vignettes, read “like short stories.” As such, he lamented, they lacked “the serious stamp of science.” This was a thought that rankled, and he immediately sought to blunt the charge with the assertion that “the nature of the subject is responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own.”27 It was an insightful remark, however painful he found it. By the time of his American visit, Freud could offer a new theory of mind, one that presented human psychology as deterministic and just as rulebound as the functioning of the human organism.
It was a project that rested unabashedly on transforming the neurotic symptoms of his patients and seemingly chaotic landscape of our dreams into the raw materials of psychoanalytic science. Rendering the meaningless meaningful was Freud’s great accomplishment. If (and it was and remains a very large if) one bought into Freud’s increasingly elaborate set of assumptions about how human minds are constructed, then one possessed the key to unlock all sorts of puzzles about our psychic functioning. So it was that Freud’s intellectual edifice came to embrace the stranger-than-fiction case history as its intellectual foundation—Sherlock Holmes–like narratives that are the source of so much of psychoanalysis’s enduring popular appeal.
Who can resist the charms of a story-driven science that purports to unveil our innermost secrets, ones we keep resolutely hidden even from ourselves? Certainly, many of those in attendance and in the larger audience who learned of his ideas via the press found Freud’s ideas seductive. Delivered with wit and élan, here was a presentation that was straightforward without seeming overly simple, constructed in a narrative form that invited the audience to feel they were part of the process of discovery. Perhaps as a concession to the American culture he professed to abhor, Freud’s performance gave the impression that therapeutic success, if not easy, was assured.
There was one more feature of Freud’s lectures that proved attractive to some of the medical men in his audience: his resolute rejection of the then-popular mania for religiously based mind cures. New England had witnessed the birth of many of the most notable of these, from the effusions of Mary Baker Eddy and the Church of Christ, Scientist, to the initially more “respectable” interventions of the Reverend Elmer Southard at the Church of Christ Emmanuel in Boston. (Southard’s effort to combine religious consolation and psychotherapy with a veneer of medical blessing initially attracted men like William James and James Jackson Putnam, until they recoiled from the Frankenstein they belatedly realized they may have helped create.)28 Freud’s fierce rejection of these affronts to “science and reason” was welcome indeed among the medics in his audience. It was a message he sought to convey to a wider audience in an interview with the Boston Evening Transcript. “The instrument of the soul,” he noted solemnly, “is not so easy to play, and my technique is very painstaking and tedious. Any amateur attempt may have the most evil consequence.”29
After the conference, Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi traveled west to see Niagara Falls, and then south to the Adirondacks, where they spent a week in James Jackson Putnam’s camp near Lake Placid. As it happened, their time there coincided with a visit from a nineteen-year-old Harvard student, Alan Gregg, who had come to join Putnam’s niece and nephew. Gregg participated in conversations and learned much about psychoanalysis. Just over two decades later, he became medical director of the Rockefeller Foundation, a vital position where his adolescent interest in psychoanalysis would resurface. He played a significant role in underwriting its growth.
Their week in the country behind them, Freud’s party headed for New York, where they boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. A stormy crossing ensued, and they passed a somewhat-uncomfortable eight days before docking in Bremen. Freud proclaimed the visit a success, and in a limited sense he was right. To be sure, he was delighted to have escaped a country that held little charm for him. As he wrote to his daughter Mathilde, “I am very glad I am away from it, and even more that I don’t have to live there.”30 Still, his ideas had received a respectful hearing, and he had won a handful of important converts. Psychoanalysis would remain a distinctly minority taste among physicians and the public at large, but a bridgehead had been secured upon which, some three decades later, it would anchor its dominance in American psychiatry.
THE HOPED-FOR FINANCIAL WINDFALL was slow to materialize, at least for Freud. A handful of American patients and would-be analysts came his way, but none with the fabled wealth of the McCormicks. For Jung, however, the trip had a far more pleasant aftermath. His earlier connections with the McCormick clan now bore fruit. Edith Rockefeller McCormick was, in Jung’s own words, a woman who “thought she could buy anything,” and Jung was someone she decided she would buy. Suffering from depression and what she claimed was severe agoraphobia, she sought help from a variety of quacks and society doctors, to no avail. As early as 1893, Edith Rockefeller had been sent to Weir Mitchell’s Hospital for Orthopedic and Nervous Diseases in Philadelphia, where she was “treated” to his famous rest cure: bed rest, lots of food (to build up “fat and blood”), and massage and electrical stimulation of the muscles. The treatment had continued until just weeks before her marriage to Harold McCormick in November 1895. With the assistance of her husband’s cousin Medill, a sometime patient, Jung took the occasion of another visit to New York in 1912 to examine her, diagnosing her as a “latent sch[izophrenic].” Edith imperiously demanded that he relocate to Chicago where she would buy him a large house near hers and set him up in practice, bearing the entire cost of relocating his family and reestablishing him professionally in America. Jung toyed with the idea, and Edith even arranged a meeting with her father, John D. senior, notwithstanding the old man’s disapproval of her extravagant and pleasure-seeking lifestyle. But in the end, that particular scheme came to nothing.
By now, Edith was determined to have her analysis with Jung, and if the man would not come to her, she would go to him. Pleading agoraphobia, she insisted that Jung come to New York and travel with her to Zürich. Accompanied by some of her children, a huge retinue of servants and retainers, and the plethora of personal effects she simply could not do without, the grand dame made her way to a city where she would live for the next eight years, undergoing her own treatment with Jung, encouraging her children and her increasingly estranged husband to follow suit, and eventually offering herself for training as a lay Jungian analyst—for by 1914 the man Freud had once called his “Crown Prince and successor” had broken with his onetime mentor and struck out on his own.31
Besides the money that flowed from the analytic sessions themselves, Jung soon had other reasons to bless his American benefactor. In 1916, Edith gave him $200,000 to found a Psychological Club to promulgate his ideas, going so far as to take out $80,000 in bank loans for the purpose when her cash balances were temporarily inadequate.32 It was a fabulous sum.33 A quarter century later, Jung would receive similar bounty from a woman wedded to another great American fortune, Mary Mellon, wife of the spectacularly wealthy Paul Mellon and daughter-in-law of the ruthless Andrew Mellon. The Mellons’ money would fund the Bollingen Foundation, whose first great aim was to translate and publish the complete works of Carl Jung.
Vain, hedonistic, and a spendthrift, Edith Rockefeller McCormick had exhibited all the qualities her stern Baptist father abhorred. In Zürich, she inhabited a palatial suite at the Hotel Baur au Lac. Periodically, in an effort to cure her travel phobia, she would board a train, remaining on it as long as she could bear. Her chauffeur drove ahead in the Rolls Royce, stopping at each station lest his employer found herself unable to continue and felt compelled to return to the safety of the car. For a while, Harold joined her in Switzerland, resigning his position as secretary of International Harvester to do so. But in 1918, he was summoned back to Chicago to serve as the corporation’s president. Even while nominally together, the McCormicks had followed Jung’s lead and engaged in a multitude of affairs. Edith’s were now becoming increasingly public, threatening scandal. She was also piling up debts, many from massive investments in a Ponzi scheme that purported to have discovered a novel technique for hardening wood.
At last, in August 1921, she pronounced herself sufficiently recovered to return to the United States, her latest lover in tow. Embroiled in an affair of his own, Harold was less than delighted to see her, and within a month had filed for divorce. He had been more discreet than she and, faced with testimony about her serial infidelities, she was forced to sign a settlement that not only left her without alimony, but obliged to pay Harold $2.7 million as compensation, in return for retaining title to their houses. Harold promptly married his mistress, a young Polish “opera singer,” Ganna Walska, who couldn’t sing but whose career he besottedly kept subsidizing. (Walska was successively married to a half-dozen wealthy men; Harold was her fourth husband and contrived to stay married to her for nine years, but he invited ridicule, in a pre-Viagra age, when he had monkey testicles implanted by Serge Voronov in a desperate effort to improve his potency.)
Meanwhile, in 1923, Edith had pronounced herself to be the reincarnated wife of Tutankhamen, whose tomb had just been discovered. She set herself up in Chicago as a Jungian analyst, and before long she attracted as many as a hundred socialites as her patients. Simultaneously, she was investing yet more vast sums of money in fraudulent real estate schemes set up by her lover, losing all in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash. Though her father continued reluctantly to rescue her from her financial foolishness, she never saw him, pleading her travel phobia whenever a meeting was proposed. Through it all, her devotion to Jung and Jungian analysis remained unshaken. Diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer in 1932 (she had been operated on for breast cancer two years earlier), she elected to treat it with psychotherapy. By late August she was dead.34
By any measure, Edith and Harold and the McCormick extended clan were a rum lot, if a great blessing to psychiatrists, Carl Gustav Jung foremost among them. Freud himself managed to attract no such American benefactor, though a handful of his disciples eventually began to tap into the wealth of the American superrich in the 1930s. He had to content himself with repeated subventions from Princess Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of Napoleon, who became his patient in September 1925 and supported him financially and emotionally ever after.35
Support from American heiresses notwithstanding, Jung’s analytic psychology developed no mass appeal in the United States, nor any sizable following among American psychiatrists. His talk of not just an individual unconscious but of a collective unconscious populated by archetypes, a universal and objective part of the psyche made up of everything that has been inherited from human evolution, with its mystical overtones, was off-putting to many, as was his dabbling in the occult and his embrace of the irrational. Freud’s psychoanalysis, by contrast, after a fitful start, would for a time become the dominant belief system embraced by American psychiatry, enjoying an extraordinarily wide influence in American popular culture, in Hollywood, in fiction, advertising, and even the socialization of American babies. For decades after Freud’s famous voyage to America, though, psychoanalysis remained a distinctly minority taste, and the talking cure was the butt of ridicule and hostility from most psychiatrists and the medical profession at large.