Jung confusions
Anthony W. Clare C. G. Jung Letters selected and edited by Gerhard Adler in two volumes, Vol. 1: 1906-1950 (Routledge and Kegan Paul £7.50) C. G. Jung, Collected Works edited by Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler, Vol. 2: Experimental Researches (Routledge and Kegan Paul £7.95)
The publication of Jung's letters has long been awaited not merely because he was a Prolific and talented writer who used the medium to clarify as well as communicate his Ideas but because of what such correspondence might have to say concerning the relationship between himself and Freud. The bones of the relationship are reasonably well known. Freud had turned to the imaginative, warm-hearted and energetic Swiss doctor after searching and failing to find a loyal disciple first in Flournoy and later in Janet. That Jung performed the task initially with considerable willingness is borne out in his early letters which are marked by intense irritation With Freud's attackers and a respect for his master bordering on servility. Having confessed in a letter to Ferenczi that he cannot make head nor tail of Freud's paper on obsessional neurosis he reassures the author that the fault lies in his (Jung's) lack of understanding; his difficulties regarding Freud's theory of libido" are obviously due to the fact that I have not yet adjusted my attitude sufficiently to yours "!
Such adjustments which were made were not destined to last. The correspondence suggests that the rift began, albeit in a gentle way, over the nature of the incest taboo — Jung questioned the wisdom of explaining the Incest barrier by having recourse to speculating on the existence of a fear of real incest — but within a year, in a letter written to Maeder in 1913, Jung admits to finding it "impossible to collaborate with Freud's attitude" Which shortly afterwards he terms " papal." If these were the specific issues over which the rupture developed, the more general dis
agreements appear in a variety of letters to several contemporary figures including his friend and compatriot Schmid, Jung objected to the materialism of Freudianism, its all-embracing interpretations and " pseudo-truths " and its pretensions to explain that which • Jung valued as mysterious and impenetrable. "The immediate reason for my dissension," he wrote in a letter to the American neurologist, Jelliffe, in 1936 "was that Freud in a i publication identified the (analytical) method with his theory" whereas Jung believed that "it was much too early for psychology to restrict itself to a one-sided reductive point of view."
So although it had been envisaged that whereas Freud was to be the Moses of the psychoanalytical movement gazing from afar at the promised land of psychiatry into which Jung's Joshua was to enter, Jung after a short yet intense relationship broke and joined a growing list of defectors which included Fliess, Adler and Stekel. The bitterness smouldered and was to burst into flame in the dispute concerning Jung's alleged racialism in the early nineteen thirties. At that time, the German Society for Psychotherapy had come under Nazi control and all its members were expected to study that profound analytical work by Hitler, Mein Kampf, which was to be the little red book of the purified movement. The German-born Kretschmer promptly resigned as President and was replaced by Jung. The orthodox interpretation of this event, given by Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, shows Jung to be a selfish schemer who for personal gain departed from "the neutrality of science" yet Jung's letters reveals this for the narrow, shabby and vindictive smear it is.
It is clear that Jung succeeded Kretschmer because he was the latter's Vice-President. He stayed because he believed that being Swiss he might be better able to protect the Society, and its Jewish members, than a German-born President. True his expectations now appear somewhat naïve; Professor Goring, a cousin of the Reichminister, and overall controller of psychiatry and psychotherapy, is described as "a very amiable and reasonable man " but it must be remembered that such a view was shared by Jones himself when the latter went to see Goring concerning the freedom of the psychoanalytic movement in July 1936.
Jung's earlier pronouncements concerning the nature of Jewishness significantly contributed to the suspicion with which his activities were viewed. He had been the first prominent, non-Jewish analyst and had seen part of his task in terms of widening the ideological base of the theory. As early as 1908, Freud was labelling minor criticism from Jung as evidence of an anti-semitic tendency, an ac cusation which rankled with Jung through the later turbulent years. Yet with an enthusiasm and a scant disregard for the dangers implicit in his theorising worthy of an Eysenck, Jung launched himself into a specu lative analysis of Jewishness and non-Jewishness at the very moment that the Nazis chose to embark on their political programme of persecution and extermination.
His timing in retrospect seems, to put it mildly, unfortunate although Jensen and Ey senck, from the vantage point of history, may be judged no less harshly concerning their speculation on negro deficiencies in the de cade that witnessed -Selma, Watts and Sharpeville. Within a year of his succeeding Kretschmer, he is assuring a colleague that "the Nazi outpourings of the German members" are due to political necessity rather than religious conviction.
While the aged Jung accepted that hisnevity had significantly contributed to the virulence of the attacks upon him, he never forgave the Freudians for their accusations of anti-semitism. "The Jew," he once wrote, " directly solicits anti-Semitism with his readiness to scent out anti-Semitism everywhere." He could scarcely conceal his contempt for what he saw as Freud's refusal to acknowledge the problem of his own Jewishness and the contempt is implicit in Jung's elaim that the Jews had failed to create a cultural form of their own.
"He had a confused mind" declared a former school-mate, of Jung's when asked what he remembered of the great man's early days. At the heart of Jung's philosophising one senses a profound confusion concerning the nature of his theoretical position. He himself recalls elsewhere that while writing supposedly under the dictation of the unconscious he asked himself" is this really science what I am doing?" and a woman's voice answered him: "It is art." Yet he is reluctant to lose the aura of science and in a variety of letters, mostly written to a cluster of clergymen (he appears from his correspondence to have had an insatiable appetite for somewhat .arid metaphysical speculation), he is at pains to stress that his approach to the problem of religious experience is essentially scientific.
But it is for the glimpses of the essential Jung behind the facade of astrologist, mystic and seer that the collection of letters merits sampling. There is the novelist Walpole comparing Jung to " a large genial English cricketer . .. he delighted me with his hatred of hysterics." There is Jung himself describing how he trembled with almost uncontrollable excitement at finding himself seated beside the ailing Churchill at a dinner in Switzerland just after the War ended. And there is the elitist Jung confessing that "everything to do with the masses is hateful to me. Anything popularised becomes common. Above all I would not disseminate Goethe, rather cook books."
By an ironic twist it is the works of Freud that have become the cook-books of contemporary social work theory while Jung's works retain an exclusiveness worthy of their author's sentiments.
Previous page
