A Dangerous Method E-Book

John Kerr

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Now a Major Motion Picture by legendary director David Cronenberg starring Viggo Mortensen, Kiera Knightley and Michael Fassbender. In 1907, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung began what promised to be both a momentous collaboration and the deepest friendship of each man's life. Six years later they were bitter antagonists, locked in a savage struggle. In between them stood a young woman named Sabina Spielrein: a patient and lover to Jung, a colleague and confidante to Freud, and one of the greatest minds in modern psychiatry. This mesmerizing book reconstructs the fatal triangle of Freud, Jung and Spielrein. It encompasses clinical methods and politics, hysteria and anti-Semitism, sexual duplicity and intellectual brilliance wielded as blackmail. Learned, humane and impossible to put down, A Dangerous Method is intellectual history with the narrative power and emotional impact of great tragedy.

Leseprobe

A Dangerous Method

John Kerr was trained as a clinical psychologist at New York University. He is an editor at The Analytic Press, a scholarly press specialising in works on psychoanalysis, and was co-editor and a contributor to Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis. He divides his time between Boston and New York City.

A Dangerous Method

John Kerr

First published in the United States of America in 1993 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York.

First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Limited.

Copyright © John Kerr, 1993

The moral right of John Kerr to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, for permission to print an excerpt from a March 12, 1913, unpublished letter from James Jackson Putnam to Fanny Bowditch, Fanny Bowditch Katz Archive; and an excerpt from an interview of Carl Meier with G. Nameche, conducted September 11, 1970, Jung Oral History Archive, 59.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

American Medical Association: Excerpts from letters of October 10, 1910, March 11, 1911, and November 3, 1911, from Bleuler to Freud, from “Freud-Bleuler Correspondence” by Alexander and Selesnick (Archives of General Psychiatry, 12, pp. 1-9), copyright © 1965 by American Medical Association. Reprinted by permission.

Andover Newton Theological School: Excerpt from “Jung and Freud” by Billinsky (Andover Newton Quarterly, 10), copyright © 1969 by Andover Newton Theological School. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Ayer Company Publishers Inc.: Excerpts from Sigmund Freud: His Personality, His Teaching and His School by Fritz Wittels (reprint of 1924 edition, George Allen & Unwin, London). Reprinted by permission of Ayer Company Publishers Inc., P.O. Box 958, Salem, NH 03079.

Owing to limitations of space, all remaining acknowledgements of permission to reprint published material will be found following the index.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 178 5

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Some people are lucky enough to have three parents.This book is dedicated to

my mother

my father

and Mabel Groom

I hope that Freud and his pupils will push their ideas to their utmost limits, so that we may learn what they are. They can’t fail to throw light on human nature, but I confess that he made on me personally the impression of 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.

—William James, letter of 28 September 1909 to Théodore Flournoy

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE A CASE OF HYSTERIA

1. Her Father’s Hand

2. A Psychiatric Monastery

3. Jung’s Test Case

4. The Organic Untruthfulness of Woman

PART TWO

THE NEW DOCTRINE OF NERVOUS HEALTH

5. The Rise of the Zurich School

6. Jung and Freud

7. The Science of Fairy Tales

8. Sexual and Psychological Researches

PART THREE THE MOVEMENT

9. America and the Core Complex

10. The House with Two Skulls

11. The International Psychoanalytic Association

12. The Spiritual Trend in Psychoanalysis

13. The Dying and Resurgent God

PART FOUR INTIMATE MATTERS

14. On Transformation

15. The Death of a Friendship

16. The Rest Is Silence

PART FIVE THE AFTERMATH

17. The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement

18. In Search of a Great Destiny

Afterword

Notes

Bibliographical Essay

Index

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK owes its existence to a small number of people whose interest, patience, and generosity outlasted my ability to exhaust the available supply of all three traits. First, I must thank Paul Schrader, who introduced me to the topic and facilitated the translation of Spielrein’s early papers. An inadvertent mentor, Schrader not only intuited that an important story lay inside the tangle of available documents but pursued that story with a rare intellectual honesty.

Peter Swales, a friend as well as a colleague, deserves far more credit than space allows. Had I not early tumbled to Swales’s researches, most of them then unpublished, which he made available with a generosity bordering on recklessness, I would have undoubtedly gotten off on the wrong track. Swales has done more independent archival research and has dug up more new information about Freud than almost any other living person. He has also gathered what is surely one of the finest private libraries in the world regarding Freud and the early history of psychoanalysis. He put all of it at my disposal. One has to be personally acquainted with Swales to grasp what a treasure-trove of information he is—and how willingly he will make time for discussion of elusive and difficult points, even at one in the morning if need be.

Schrader and Swales got me started, but the topic would still have lain there had not Robert Holt taken an interest and offered to sponsor an earlier version of this story as my doctoral dissertation. Holt’s scholarly diligence is legendary within the field of psychology; I took advantage of it with multiple drafts. My indebtedness here to Professor Holt compounds multiple earlier debts for his patient instruction in the logic of scientific verification and the intricacies of Freudian theory.

What Swales and Holt have meant to me in terms of Freud, Sonu Shamdasani has meant in terms of Jung. Not only has Shamdasani made himself continuously available for discussion over the years, he has shared with me his own archival researches and his preparations for his forthcoming intellectual biography of Jung. In particular, I would like to thank him for discovering Jung’s early association with Binet, for charting Jung’s evolving intellectual debt to Myers and Flournoy, and, most especially, for identifying Spielrein’s word association protocol. Eugene Taylor, Anthony Stadlen, and Ernst Falzeder have likewise been very generous with their time and erudition.

Over the course of the past decade, Anthony Econom, student of history and book-lover, has given me advice, instruction, offprints, and an occasional scolding. The original 1916 English version of Jung’s “Transformations and Symbols” was once relatively hard to find; Econom found two copies, one for me and one so he could read along and keep an eye on where the argument was going. This book could not have been written without his support and guidance. Three other book-lovers, Jack Molloy, David Little, and Heather Waters, have also earned my gratitude for their constant support—and for listening to more about Freud, Jung, and Spielrein over the years than any person should have to endure.

Special thanks go to the members of New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center’s History of Psychiatry Section, founded by Eric Carlson. The Section gave my ideas a patient hearing and provided an education in return. Among the members I would particularly like to thank are Larry Friedman, Jacques Quen, Leonard Groopman, Dan Burston, Marianne Eckhardt, Nate Kravis, George Makari, Anna Antonovsky, Doris Nagel, Norman Dain, Ralph Baker, Barbara Fass Leavy, Leon Hankoff, Herb Spiegel, and Cornelius Clark. It is extremely rare to find people who are both historically sophisticated and well versed in psychiatric and psychoanalytic theory. Rarer still are people who combine these qualities with such graceful collegiality.

As I possess only rudimentary French and, beyond a few technical terms, no German at all, I have been dependent on the good offices of others for translations. Here I would like to thank Ursula Ofman, Peter Gachot, Julia Swales, Marie-Louise Schoelly, Tanaquil Taubes, Michael Münchow, and Michael Norton for their tireless assistance. Libraries and, even more, librarians were also indispensable. In particular I would like to thank Mr. Richard Wolf of the Rare Books Department of the Countway Library, Harvard Medical School; Ms. Taylor of the A. A. Brill Library, New York Psychoanalytic Society; and especially Doris Albrecht and Peggy Brooks of the Kristine Mann Library of the C. G. Jung Institute of New York.

Without Amy Bianco’s intervention, this book might still be a manuscript. She found not only a publisher but also an editor: Peter Dimock, whose sensitivity to the narrative was matched by a seemingly endless supply of patient support. This book owes more to him than the reader can possibly guess. I would also like to acknowledge the diligent and inspired efforts of Melvin Rosenthal, Ellen Shapiro, and Carol Devine Carson in preparing this book for publication.

Research on this book was financed at times by borrowed money. Here I must thank those who lent it to me: Jack Molloy, David Little, Anthony Econom, Lester Berentsen, my parents, and my brothers Chris and Colin. I would also like to thank Jack Benson and Joseph and Michael Diliberto for extending credit—and their support—over the years. Similarly, I have to thank Sara Weber and Robert Langan, colleagues as well as friends, and Steven Cecere, for letting their upstairs tenant be late with the rent.

Ruth Ochroch, William Blackwell, Ted Coons, Paul Vitz, Richard Noll, Dennis Klein, and Carol Janeway all made valuable suggestions during the course of this project. Finally, I would also like to thank a number of people for their support and encouragement over the years: Gene Anderson and Judy Robinson (and Eleanor), Susan Coates, Vincent Russo, Paul Stepansky, Jackie Balzano, Frank Sulloway, Andrew Lubrano, Rosemarie Sand, John and Deanna Robins, Deborah and Daniel DeLosa, Mark Micale, Damien Dummigan, Richard Schimenti, Frank Kominsky, Eric Benson, James Van Meter, Phyllis Grosskurth, Peter Rudnytsky, Toby Gelfand, and Ralph Martin.

J.K.

A Dangerous Method

Introduction

SIGMUND FREUD and Carl Jung met for the first time on 3 March 1907. They talked for thirteen hours straight. The last time the two men were together in the same room was at the Fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress, held in Munich on 7–8 September 1913. On that occasion, so far as is known, they said not a single word to each other. So it was in silence that one of the most vexed partnerships in the history of ideas ended. Yet, working together for little more than six years, these two men decisively altered the course of twentieth-century thought.

This is the story of that partnership. I tell it not primarily to round out the biographical understanding of either man; still less to take sides. I tell it in order to raise critical issues about the nature of their joint accomplishment.

During the years of their collaboration, Freud and Jung brought into prominence a new method of psychotherapy—psychoanalysis— and won widespread acceptance for the interpretive views, some of them quite radical, that helped make that method distinctive. Without them, more specifically without their collaboration, psychoanalysis as we know it today would not exist. But if Freud and Jung brought into being something radically new—something whose transformative value continues to be felt today—they also shaped their creation in ways that were scarcely inevitable, ways that reflected their own special needs of the moment, and ways that ultimately produced distortions which are important to recognize and understand.

Clearly, the relationship between Freud and Jung is an important story to tell. But it is not an easy story to tell critically. These are men we would prefer to admire. We would rather keep them as heroes, as the attractive, humane, skeptical, ultimately wise figures that emerge in so many later anecdotes. Having opened a new perspective on the human mind, and most especially on human limitations, Freud and Jung were perforce the first thinkers to live with that peculiarly intense burden of self-reflection that distinguishes the psychology of modern man. They were, in that sense, the first citizens of the twentieth century. It both pleases and comforts us to think that they possessed the virtues that the new forms of self-awareness require to be humanly sustaining.

Neither man was ever so winning a personality as when he was in opposition. Later in their lives, if the logic of a situation called for them to be in opposition to their own theories, they could manage that gracefully, too. We are all familiar, I think, with Freud’s unamused protest: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But more pertinent perhaps is his remark to Abram Kardiner, who during a training analysis questioned the logic of a particular psychoanalytic theorem: “Oh, don’t take that too seriously. That’s something I dreamed up on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” The irreverence complemented the streak of indomitability in Freud’s character. When the Nazi authorities required him to sign a propaganda statement attesting to their good treatment of him before he would be allowed to emigrate, Freud responded with a heroic flourish. After signing his name, he thoughtfully added a postscript: “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anybody.”

Jung, too, could take a bemused distance from himself. During a panel discussion at the institute he founded, he confided quietly to a colleague: “Thank God I am not a Jungian.” Jung’s handling of patients could be equally straightforward. When one young woman tired of talking about her unrequited sexual transference and proposed that they lie down together on the couch, Jung replied on point: “Yes, we could—but then we would have to get up again.” And Jung could wear the mantle of his reputation no less lightly than his former Viennese friend. During a trip to London later in life, Jung took an afternoon by himself to go to the reading room of the British Museum to look up a rare book. But at the entrance he was challenged politely by the guard: Where was his entrance pass? Jung replied that he had no pass, that he was Carl Jung from Zurich and did not know he needed one. The guard, obviously startled, queried: “Carl Jung? You mean Freud, Adler, Jung?” To which Jung answered wistfully, “No . . . just Jung.” (He was allowed to enter.)

But these anecdotes come from late in the lives of the two men. The story of their partnership belongs to an earlier, much darker period. And though many of their more admirable qualities were also in evidence then, both men were more ambitious, more dogmatic, more intolerant—more possessed—than they would show themselves later on. Success improves most characters, but ambition usually does not. At the time of their collaboration, both Freud and Jung were being cruelly tantalized by the prospects of their own future greatness.

One has to keep in mind the context. At the beginning of this century, in both Europe and America, there was an explosion of interest in the psychology of what were then called “nervous” disorders. There was also a corresponding surge in experimentation with psychotherapy. This dual trend—the effort to understand better the nature of nervous complaints and to provide amelioration through purely “psychical” means—was the result of multiple factors which obtained generally throughout the Western world. To begin with, it was a period of general economic prosperity. Then, as now, when people have money to spend, one of the things they spend it on is themselves. Often enough, this entails seeking relief from troubles that in harder times one would pay less attention to. Then, too, it was a period when there was an extremely high incidence of “nervous” disorders generally. Few today remember an era when a proper Victorian household was equipped with decanters of smelling salts in all the downstairs rooms for the benefit of equally proper Victorian ladies who might be struck down by that common malady, the swoon. But not only women suffered. Men, too, commonly suffered from a variety of mental and physical symptoms to the point where it was generally conceded, even if the specific causes were disputed, that there was something about the pace of modern civilization that regularly resulted in a pathologically overtaxed nervous system.

Where it could, diagnosis followed gender. While hysteria was reserved largely, but not exclusively, for women, neurasthenia, compulsion neurosis, obsessional states, and other syndromes were generally the diagnostic prerogative of the male. Moreover, inside all these labels lay the more insidious secondary diagnosis of hereditary taint—that sneak thief of medical theory which satisfied the physician’s need to say something while robbing the patient of all confidence in his or her future prospects for sanity. It was an age when many sensitive citizens, and not a few more robust ones, found themselves in the uneasy position of pleading a clear conscience as a way of staying one step ahead of unvoiced doubts; of exhausting their energies in overwork and in equally taxing trips to the spa to ward off an ominous, brooding lassitude; of endorsing all sorts of philosophical, political, and social causes as a way of deflecting their attention from an inward unhappiness that seemed to have no name. The resources of character—willpower and rectitude—seemed to have been mysteriously undermined from within.

Against all this, late-nineteenth-century neurology had proved itself singularly impotent. Though a few fundamental insights had been won concerning the basic functioning of the nervous system, their relevance to nervous complaints was confined to the introduction of a physicalist language of “energy” and “discharge,” of “tension” and “fatigue,” which only served to constrict what the patient could say. The available physicalist treatments—electricity, bromides, surgery—had generated no discernible pattern of success, and the suspicion was widespread that what success had been had was due rather to the power of suggestion. The use of hypnotism outright had proven more consistently effective, but it raised both eyebrows and questions. If the mind could be affected for the better in a trance, then why not in the waking state? And what did this say about the nature of the complaint, and about the functioning of the nervous system generally?

Nervous complaints thus entailed any number of intensely interesting and hitherto unsolved scientific questions. In an age when an important scientific discovery could guarantee lasting fame, this factor alone was sufficient to ensure that talented men would begin tackling the problem in earnest. Of all the factors conspiring to make the study of nervous complaints fashionable, however, perhaps the most important was philosophical. For this was the age that first accepted scientific materialism as its dominant worldview. It was now commonly assumed that science had decisively triumphed over religion and metaphysics and that a complete materialistic account of the external world was nearly at hand. But how then was man to conceptualize that other pole of experience—the self? There seemed no place in the material world, with its endlessly antecedent causes, for the thinking, feeling, willing agency of the self. The paradox was apparent to all. There was as yet no agreed upon way of resolving it.

The questions inherent in nervous complaints—the relation of the nervous system to the conscious and unconscious mind—occupied a crucial philosophical backwater. A satisfactory scheme which could relate the felt phenomena of human psychology with the findings of anatomy and physiology necessarily would have important philosophical ramifications. It ought not surprise us, therefore, to learn that medical men who occupied themselves with nervous patients also regularly tried their hand at philosophy. Nor that the phenomenology of nervous disorders was closely linked in the popular mind with all that seemed exceptional and marvelous, with séances, genius, telepathy, and the like—with all the places where there still seemed to be cracks in the materialist world order.

The net result of all these factors was that any number of discerning medical men elected to go in the only direction that was open, pursuing psychological investigations and experimenting with psychological treatments. The trend was quite general throughout the Western world. Its diversity notwithstanding, one can properly speak of a “psychotherapy movement.” In only a few decades’ time, however, this general movement virtually disappeared, consumed from within by just one of the many strands of which it was originally composed.

The rapid growth of psychoanalysis to a position of preeminence is astonishing in retrospect. As of 1900, the theories of Sigmund Freud about hysteria and other common nervous syndromes were known to most medical men, but they occupied no more prominence than the varied theories of numerous contemporaries. The specific method Freud used in arriving at these theories—his beloved “psychoanalysis”—was considered more a curiosity than a model. One could often hear the ostensibly reasonable view that in Freud’s own hands psychoanalysis had indeed generated some interesting findings, but that it was neither teachable nor learnable and that in the hands of a less talented physician would generate nothing worthwhile.

By 1911, scarcely more than a decade later, this same marginally interesting method had become the focal point for a massive, extremely bitter controversy that was the chief preoccupation of the world of official neurology and psychiatry in Europe. By 1926, the year a secret governing “Committee” of its adherents disbanded, psychoanalysis had become the single most prominent school of psychology and psychotherapy in the world, one capable of attracting a steady stream of students and followers not only from the medical specialties but also from the arts and humanities. By 1939, the year of Freud’s death, it had become, in the words of Auden’s eulogy, “a whole climate of opinion.” Freud’s own stature had grown in proportion to the latent scientific and philosphical dimensions that had informed the topic of neurosis from the start. The niche had been there all along, and it was Freud whom the world called upon to fill it. Jung was left to find his own parallel niche, and he did so by leaving room in his system for some of the religious and mystical sentiments that Freud personally abhorred.

Such was the rapid rise of psychoanalysis to a position of predominance that it completely supplanted the discourse of an earlier age. Gone were the names and contributions of many other thinkers; gone, too, were the variety of original points of view that had made the earlier period so fertile a ground for theory. It was a situation ripe for the rewriting of history, and out of it there inexorably arose several sets of myths and half-truths, many of them initiated by Freud himself. One set of myths and half-truths involved a false portrayal of the era. It was said that originally Freud alone tackled the issues of human sexuality honestly, and likewise that Freud alone took the idea of the unconscious seriously. It was also maintained that for doing so he was roundly ignored or else unfairly attacked, forced by his contemporaries to live the life of a scientific nomad until the world caught up to him. All of this is demonstrably untrue, but it has only been in the last twenty-five years or so that historians have had the confidence to set the record straight.

A second set of myths and half-truths related to the origins of Freud’s theories. It was said that his ideas first emerged in the course of his clinical work—indeed, that his conclusions were more or less forced on him by his patients—and that he then extended these findings by performing a heroic self-analysis upon himself. Here, too, there is more distortion than truth. It is now quite clear where Freud actually got his ideas—from his library principally—and it is equally clear that his novel application of these ideas to the testimony of his patients was often as likely to be tendentiously wide of the mark as on it. The ancillary myth of the self-analysis has only recently come under critical scrutiny, and while it is still too early to tell what the final judgment will be, it is already clear that some of the alleged theoretical “fruits” of this episode were available to Freud from other sources.

This book is principally concerned with a third set of myths and half-truths, those having to do with the early years of this century when psychoanalysis first came to controversial prominence. Because Freud’s were the founding insights, it has seemed more or less natural to most commentators to tell the story of the psychoanalytic movement from the perspective of Vienna. Told in this way, it readily becomes the story of how Freud gradually refined his theories while simultaneously attracting a number of followers, some of whom were nonetheless ambivalent about all or part of psychoanalysis and later left to found their own schools. The view seems reasonable enough on the surface, and it makes the noisy schisms of the era less disturbing by robbing them of much of their significance. Paradoxically, the view is equally attractive to the adherents of the dissident figures, since it allows them to suppose that their champions held distinctive views of their own right from the start.

The essential problem with this view is that it reads Freud’s later stature back into the earlier period, to the neglect of the prevailing realities within the European medical community. At the time, the people who mattered were Jung and his Zurich mentor, Eugen Bleuler, not Freud. Jung and Bleuler already possessed international reputations as pioneering psychiatrists. Moreover, they had the prestige of the Zurich medical school behind them and they commanded the Zurich Psychiatric Clinic with its attached psychological laboratory, where interested physicians could receive training. In short, it was Jung and Bleuler who possessed the institutional resources needed to turn psychoanalysis into a scientific movement. The rise of psychoanalysis directly reflected these institutional realities. It was when Jung and Bleuler first began reporting that they could confirm some of Freud’s theories with their own patients that the controversies began in earnest. It was Zurich where almost all of Freud’s most important early followers first received training in the new methods. And it was Zurich that ultimately provided psychoanalysis with its first official institutions: the first congress, the first journal, the International Association when it was founded—all these initially were run out of Zurich, not Vienna. It was Jung and Bleuler who put Freud on the scientific map, not the other way around.

The story of the psychoanalytic movement has to be understood in terms of the axis between Zurich and Vienna. This perspective forces us to recognize the fundamental change that psychoanalysis underwent shortly after Jung and Bleuler came upon the scene. Insofar as psychoanalysis was a science, its findings, in principle, had to be replicatable by others. Recognizing this, and seeking to capitalize on it, Freud in effect presented himself to Jung and Bleuler as a scientific asset to be acquired. They responded on their side by setting up the necessary practical institutions. Initially, the arrangement seemed straightforward. Freud’s priority was unquestioned, and beyond priority science knows no property rights in its discoveries. There was no logical reason why Zurich should not be the international center for psychoanalysis, and at first Freud was very eager to see it become so.

But Freud’s ambitions were not only scientific; his attentions were little diverted by such things as experimental validation, outcome studies, and the other accoutrements of collegial research. No sooner did psychoanalysis acquire the much-needed trappings of day-to-day science than it began branching off into other areas. By degrees, it ceased to be primarily a clinical method and became increasingly a literary, artistic, and cultural movement with general aspirations as a totalizing worldview. Jung, for his own reasons, was happy to hasten the transformation. Bleuler was not, and began to withdraw. As the essential character of the movement changed, so, too, did the reasonableness of the institutional arrangement. For in a literary, artistic, and cultural movement there are indeed such things as property rights. When Freud became distrustful of Jung, he decided he had to take back command of psychoanalysis.

The resulting confrontation was scientifically destructive and personally savage. It does not do Freud credit that in order to reassert his property rights, he turned all too readily to the means that lay closest at hand. Making out of his new therapeutic tool a weapon, Freud attempted to use what he knew about Jung’s personal life to exert a measure of essentially ideological control that the younger man found intolerable. It does not do Jung credit that in trying to counteract this pressure while yet remaining the official president of the movement, he began to toy with the idea of introducing a Christianized version of psychoanalysis. This only accelerated the pace of Freud’s insinuations, until finally Jung threatened to retaliate in kind by revealing what he knew about Freud’s personal life. The actual outcome, in which each man found the liberty to go his own way, was predictable only in retrospect. For a time, it was all the two men could do to keep the more ruinous possibilities of their situation from running riot and wrecking everything they had worked so hard to build up. Their final act of collaboration was to accept the fact that they were stalemated.

The story is both complex and disturbing. Of all its manifold dimensions, perhaps the most important has also been the hardest to conceptualize: the relation between the personal factor and the theoretical struggle that arose out of it and ultimately supplanted it.

To be sure, Freud’s imputations as to Jung’s motives have been a matter of record since the publication of their correspondence in 1974. But heretofore there has been no way of appraising those charges objectively and thus of arriving at a final verdict about the whole episode. The ultimate break was so painful for Jung—he teetered close to insanity for several years—that afterward he put as much distance as he reasonably could between himself and this period of his life. Having arrived at last at his own distinctively “Jungian” views, he elected to obscure the essential continuity between his later endeavors and his earlier one. Even more to the point, he deliberately concealed the biographical keys that were needed to make that continuity meaningful. Yet the story of the psychoanalytic movement cannot be adequately told without Jung. Indeed, such was his pivotal role in it that were one to put it in the form of a drama, one would perforce make Jung the protagonist: dramatically speaking, he is the motor of the story, the engine that makes things happen.

Even with the red flag of Freud’s imputations, it has not proved easy for commentators to keep the requisite attention focused on Jung’s motives. The understandable wish of history to know those motives better has seemed to fare badly before the bar of a formidable but essentially right-headed contemporary philosophy of science which rules categorically that the animus of a discoverer ordinarily has no bearing whatsoever on the ultimate validity of the discovery. Not knowing what Jung’s motives were, psychoanalytic historians have had no way of fashioning the rejoinder that needed to be made. In point of fact, Jung’s incipient revisions of psychoanalytic theory, the very thing that first aroused Freud’s distrust and instigated the runaway collapse of their partnership, stemmed directly from Jung’s own reflections about his motives and about where they had led him psychologically. Accordingly, though it is, only part of the story, an adequate historical account of the psychoanalytic movement must rescue Jung’s various decisions during his career as a psychoanalyst from the deliberate mystification with which Jung subsequently surrounded them. I believe this will do Jung somewhat more justice than he was able to do to himself.

The possibility of reappraising both Jung’s early career and his partnership with Freud depends to no small degree on a recent archival discovery that is as astonishing as it is improbable. In 1977 a carton of personal papers was discovered in the basement of the Palais Wilson in Geneva. Upon inspection these turned out to have been the property of one Sabina Spielrein, who had last been in Geneva in 1923. Spielrein had held a post as lecturer on psychoanalysis at the Rousseau Institute, an international pedagogical center, during the time when it was housed at the Palais Wilson. Then she had emigrated back to her native Russia. No one knows how or why this collection of personal papers was left behind, to molder or to be discovered as chance dictated.

One has to understand just how obscure a figure Spielrein was to appreciate the discovery. She was known to have been one of the first women psychoanalysts. Her bibliography comprised some thirty professional papers, a few of which had been cited in works by Jung and Freud. (One paper in particular had drawn an occasional mention in the secondary literature, for it was said to have anticipated Freud’s later theory of a “death instinct.”) At one time or another, she had been officially listed on the rosters of the Vienna, Berlin, Geneva, and Moscow psychoanalytic societies. But, beyond that, and beyond a few biographical facts that could be adduced from reading her professional papers, prior to 1974 virtually nothing more was known about this woman.

The first glimpse that Spielrein might be far more than a minor figure had come only with the publication of the Freud-Jung correspondence in 1974. There one could learn that before becoming an analyst, Spielrein had been Jung’s patient. One could also learn that there had arisen a potentially disastrous scandal, barely covered up, implicating the two of them in an illicit romance. The Freud-Jung letters additionally made clear that when Spielrein later moved to Vienna she became personally acquainted with Freud. The documentary record expanded a bit further in 1975 with the publication of the third volume of the minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. There one could read of Spielrein’s participation in the weekly Wednesday Night Meetings of the Vienna group during the academic year 1911–1912. But the two documentary sources seemed out of joint. There was no easy way to combine them or use them together with her published papers to arrive at a coherent picture of who Spielrein was. Nonetheless, working largely on clinical intuition, a Jungian analyst based in Rome, Aldo Carotenuto, speculated in a book published in 1976 that Spielrein might have been far more important to Jung’s development than had hitherto been appreciated.

Then came the discovery of the carton in the Palais Wilson. Included in the cache were portions of a diary Spielrein kept, letters and drafts of letters that she had written to Freud and Jung, and, no less important, hitherto unknown letters written back to her by both men. For being the first to speculate about her in print, Carotenuto found himself the beneficiary of this improbable find. After further research proved unavailing, Carotenuto published what he had in 1982 together with a somewhat anachronistic though thoroughly sympathetic commentary written from a Jungian perspective. In the wake of his book, a second carton was then discovered. This one was lodged at the family archive of the descendants of Edouard Claparède, a prominent Genevan psychologist who had known Spielrein personally. Still another cache has since been discovered in the personal archives of George de Morsier, once an important Swiss analyst.

Taken together, the different documentary sources allow one to sketch out large portions of what proves to have been an astonishing career. In a feminist age, I think, no one will object to the notion that the story of Spielrein’s career within the psychoanalytic movement is worth telling for its own sake. Unfortunately, however, even with the new materials, it is not possible to tell that story with anything like the fullness of detail one would wish. About Spielrein’s husband, for example, we know scarcely more than that he was a Jewish physician. Similarly, there are several long stretches in her life for which we have only the meagerest of ideas concerning with whom she associated or what she did. But perhaps we should be grateful that we know anything at all. As it turns out, she was a woman with a predilection for insisting on her point of view at exactly those moments when history began moving in opposing directions. In retrospect, it becomes clear why it was not accidental that her name has not come up before now.

Of all the important people who later wished Spielrein forgotten, none had so desperately pressing reasons as did Jung. Spielrein had been closest to him during that personal transformation that first made Jung into a Freudian. Likewise, she had been at the center of the sudden squall of distrust that led to the break with Freud. Ultimately, she alone was in a position to provide the missing biographical keys linking Jung’s earlier endeavors with his later ones. But beyond shedding new light on Jung’s early career and on his partnership with Freud, the Spielrein story, such as it can be known, has another significance. As the reader will discover, she had a crucial contribution of her own to make, one that was potentially central to the overall structure of psychoanalytic theory. Yet that contribution, like her earlier protests as a patient and as a lover, was ignored and then deliberately obscured. In this respect, Spielrein is an exemplar of the larger tale being told in this book. The silence that for so long attended her story is emblematic of a more insidious silence that gradually overtook psychoanalysis during this time. By listening in a new way, psychoanalysis gave nervous patients a voice they had not had before. But as psychoanalytic theory became increasingly restricted to suit the personal and political needs of the two men who ran it, the range of its listening narrowed. In the absence of anyone to hear, there began to be many things that patients were not permitted to say.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has defined history as a story about the past told to the present for present purposes. The present to which this story is addressed is the contemporary state of psychoanalysis. There are four salient features of the psychoanalytic scene today. First, it is in a period of institutional decline. Candidacies are down, patients are harder to come by, other therapeutic disciplines are clamoring for recognition. Having originally oversold itself to psychiatry, psychoanalysis now finds itself unwelcome in many of the major medical centers that used to be its bailiwick. Second, psychoanalysis is in the midst of a sustained period of remarkable theoretical fertility. A host of new theoreticians have lately taken center stage, and while some of them still claim fealty to Freud, others equally brilliant claim otherwise. Third, taken from a scientific perspective, psychoanalysis is badly in need of retrenchment. The distinguished psychologist Robert Holt has summed up the situation with regard to the current scientific status of the body of psychoanalytic doctrine: “. . . [t]he situation is not hopeless, but it is grave. Psychoanalysts have been living in a fool’s paradise . . .” Fourth, psychoanalysis continues to exhibit an unconscionable disregard for its own history. No other contemporary intellectual endeavor, from conventional biomedical research to literary criticism, currently suffers from so profound a lack of a critical historical sense concerning its origins.

This book will argue that the seeds of the current situation were sown during the partnership between Freud and Jung. For it was during this period that historical accuracy first came to be less important than ideological correctness. Unchecked by a historical framework of accountability, the skew of ideology in turn created a context in which scientific claims could continue to be made without the needed critical tests being deemed necessary. The artificial restriction of the range of permissible interpretation, against which contemporary theorists are finally freeing themselves, also began at this time. Combined, these developments virtually guaranteed that psychoanalysis would eventually come to its present, problematic institutional status, once the remarkable momentum that Freud and Jung had won for it was finally spent.

In providing an account of the founding period of the psychoanalytic movement, this study joins a small number of similar studies which have sought to restore critical historical understanding to psychoanalysis. While such efforts cannot substitute for the efforts of practicing analysts to open fresh theoretical perspectives, nor for the much-needed efforts of scientific researchers to examine psychoanalytic hypotheses through empirical studies, they can serve as an important complement to both those endeavors. By surveying more carefully the ground upon which psychoanalysis was built, critical history can provide a map for those who wish to renovate it or build extensions. This book is written in the hope that it will significantly improve the prospects for psychoanalysis, now murkily hopeful at best.

Let me close this introduction with one final comment by way of a warning. The story that follows is not a nice one. It is not a love story. Nor is it one of those edifying stories about how a few intrepid men and women made a scientific breakthrough. If I could characterize it in a single phrase I would say that it is an unusually gruesome ghost story, where the ghost who finally devours all the people in the end is not a being but a theory—and a way of listening. When men first decided they had the power to understand one another in an entirely new way, it should not surprise us that the results could be tragic.

Part One

A Case of Hysteria

If . . . our much-plagued soul can lose its equilibrium for all time as a result of long-forgotten unpleasant sexual experiences, that would be the beginning of the end for the human race; nature would have played a gruesome trick on us!

—Emil Kraepelin, 1899

CHAPTER I

Her Father’s Hand

It is in the milder cases of hysteria that such delirious states occur. . . . Emotional disturbances seem to favor its outbreak. It is prone to relapse. . . . Most frequently we find delusions of persecution, with often very violent reactive fear . . . then religious and erotic delusions. Hallucinations of all the senses are not uncommon. . . . The visual hallucinations are mostly visions of animals, funerals, fantastic processions swarming with corpses, devils, ghosts, and what not. . . . The auditory delusions are simply noises in the ear (shrieks, crashes, bangs), or actual hallucinations, often with sexual content.

—Krafft-Ebing, Textbook of Insanity, as cited by Jung, 1902

ON 17 AUGUST 1904, a young Russian girl named Sabina Spielrein, not yet nineteen years old, was brought over a thousand miles from her home city of Rostov-on-Don to be admitted to the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich, Switzerland. Owing to that hospital’s formidable, if admirable, policy on the issue of patient privacy, Spielrein’s hospital record is not available. Virtually everything we know about her condition at the time of her admission, and about the course of her illness up to that time, stems from a lecture delivered three years later by Carl Jung, the physician in charge of her case. That lecture has been the source of considerable misunderstanding, because of the seeming gravity of the symptoms:

Puberty started when she was thirteen. From then on fantasies developed of a thoroughly perverse nature which pursued her obsessively. These fantasies had a compulsive character: she could never sit at a table without thinking of defecation while she was eating, nor could she watch anyone else eating without thinking of the same thing, and especially not her father. In particular, she could not see her father’s hands without feeling sexual excitement; for the same reason she could no longer bear to touch his right hand. . . . If she was reproached or even corrected in any way, she answered by sticking out her tongue, or even with convulsive laughter, cries of disgust, and gestures of horror, because each time she had before her the vivid image of her father’s chastising hand, coupled with sexual excitement, which immediately passed over into ill-concealed masturbation.

The seemingly grave course was matched by a vivid depiction of her state upon admission:

. . . her condition had got so bad that she really did nothing else than alternate between deep depressions and fits of laughing, crying, and screaming. She could no longer look anyone in the face, kept her head bowed, and when anybody touched her stuck her tongue out with every sign of loathing.

This picture has led any number of contemporary commentators astray. Aldo Carotenuto, who published the first cache of Spielrein’s rediscovered personal papers, has supposed that she suffered from a brief “psychotic episode” indicative of “schizophrenia.” Bruno Bettelheim, whose trenchant comments on Carotenuto’s book have since been added as a foreword to it, alternates between “either a schizophrenic disturbance or severe hysteria with schizoid features.”

Thus does one age misjudge the illnesses of another. The fact is that there is absolutely no warrant in all the numerous personal documents left behind by Spielrein, nor in any other known document pertaining to her, for going beyond the diagnosis actually given by her physician in his lecture—“psychotic hysteria.” Moreover, as will become clear in a later chapter, the whole point of that lecture, delivered under historic circumstances, was to illustrate a new approach to the specific syndrome of hysteria. The psychiatrist Anthony Storr, virtually alone among reviewers of Carotenuto’s book, has seconded the diagnosis of “hysteria” while adding that because of

. . . changed social circumstances, we rarely see the dramatic cases of conversion hysteria upon which the early theories of psychoanalysis were based. My guess is that Sabina Spielrein was one of those cases and that Jung’s diagnosis underlines the fact that hysteria could indeed be so serious that it mimicked a psychotic break with reality.

Storr puts his finger on the problem: though such dramatic cases of hysteria are extremely rare nowadays, they were common enough at the turn of the century and had been well described, under a variety of labels, in the psychiatric literature. Krafft-Ebing, professor of psychiatry at the prestigious University of Vienna, had provided a comprehensive description of the phenomenology of such states in his Textbook of Insanity, for twenty years the premier psychiatric text in German-speaking Europe. Krafft-Ebing, anticipating his own subsequent researches into sexual pathology but confirming an ancient prejudice, rather stressed the role of erotic themes in the hallucinations of such patients. Jean-Martin Charcot, the legendary Parisian neurologist, had by contrast emphasized the theme of trauma. Charcot’s view was that such delirious states regularly marked the third stage in a fullblown hysterical attack, itself understood as a manifestation of an underlying neurological condition, and that the scenes which the delirious patient enacted might often refer to the specific incident that had triggered the onset of the condition. Theodor Meynert, professor of neurology at Vienna and a renowned brain anatomist, had thought enough of such confusional states to lend his own name to them (“Meynert’s Amentia”), a move that led a disgruntled former student of his, Sigmund Freud, to rename them yet again (“acute hallucinatory confusion”) in his own catalogue of nervous conditions. Meynert had stressed the wish-fulfillment aspect of such states and associated them accordingly with the mentation of childhood. Freud kept the wish-fulfillment hypothesis, but sought the context in a present erotic situation.

The truth is that physicians of that era knew both a lot more and a lot less about psychotic hysteria than today’s clinicians. They knew more because they had far more direct experience. Nowadays, an incipient hysterical symptom, whether a strange pain, or a cramp, or a dizzy spell, is likely to lead to a trip to an internist or family physician. There the patient will be prescribed Valium—one of the most widely prescribed medicines in the United States today—or the like, and sent on his or her way. Those who are persistent enough to return a second and third time, and to insist in the face of a negative diagnostic workup that their symptoms are getting worse, will eventually be sent off to a psychiatrist with the thought that obviously they are under a lot of stress. This unsympathetic regime, coupled with a widespread cultural dissemination of certain basic psychological principles, is sufficient to keep most cases from progressing very far along the hysterical path. It is rare nowadays for hysteric patients to reach the stage of delirium, and when they do, and are admitted to a psychiatric facility, interns and residents are rounded up from all around to see the syndrome in full flower. This on the basis that they may never be so lucky as to see such a case again.

At the turn of the century, however, matters were quite otherwise. The incipient symptom might lead straightaway to a trip to the local nerve specialist. There the patient would be interviewed with great curiosity and, depending on the doctor’s specialty, a regime of treatment would be instituted that might consist of cold showers (properly dignified as “hydrotherapy”), electro-galvanic massage (with the current strong enough to leave welts), or a trip to a local spa (one the physician usually was personally connected with). If the condition worsened, more severe remedies might be tried, including, ultimately, ovariectomies and clitoridectomies. In the meantime, it was up to the family to provide for the patient as best they could. But what were parents or spouse and children to do when the condition had already been sanctioned by a nerve specialist? In such a climate, hysteria flourished. So, too, did scientific knowledge of it.

The basic syndrome had, of course, been known to the ancients. Classical Greek theory had it that the seat of the disease was the uterus (hystera in Greek), hence the name “hysteria,” and the presumed cause was thought to be some sort of sexual or procreative frustration, for which the equally classical remedy of sexual intercourse might be prescribed. The Greeks knew, further, that a purely psychological cause might be sufficient, such as a secret passion that the patient would not reveal. The latter insight was subsequently amplified by the great medieval physician Avicenna for a related condition then prevalent in the Islamic world, “love sickness.” As part of the examination, Avicenna would take the patient’s pulse while inquiring if there were not perhaps a certain person that the patient had taken a fancy to. If the pulse quickened, the inquiry grew progressively more precise: did this person live in a certain city, a certain quarter, a certain street? And so on, until the identity of the secret love was revealed. At that point, to be sure, it was up to the families to see what could be arranged; only if marriage was out of the question did Avicenna institute other forms of treatment designed to strengthen the will.

The suspicion of concealed or frustrated eroticism continued to cling to hysteria—“the disease of nuns, virgins, and old maids”—almost down to the modern era, though each historical period speculated differently as to how best to conceptualize the physical mechanisms involved. In the mid-nineteenth century the work of two men, the ophthalmologist Richard Carter of London, and the French physician Paul Briquet, brought a sudden new clarity to the topic. Carter provided an entirely modern psychological portrait of the illness, a feature of which was his contention that the psychological motivations involved changed as the illness progressed. Briquet, meanwhile, put to rest the suspicions about sexual frustration by demonstrating that hysteria was far more common among Parisian prostitutes than among working girls in other professions. As to its causes, Briquet identified the “passions,” and he was especially compelling as to the role of psychic trauma in fomenting the disease.

At the time of Spielrein’s hospitalization, however, this clarity had been almost totally lost. The culprit, paradoxically, was an increase in scientific knowledge. For at the same time that Carter and Briquet were working out their psychological portraits of the illness, Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany were doing the far more important work of putting the final touches on the modern theory of disease. According to this new synthesis—we should pause to reflect on just how new it is—disease is caused by a disruption in the functioning of organs brought about by a specific pathogen, most often a bacterium or virus. Where the disease progressed to death, its impact upon the afflicted organs could be examined directly through postmortem anatomical examination. Otherwise, the physician could attempt to classify the disease according to the symptoms and clinical course, and then seek confirmation of his thesis by demonstrating through bacteriological study that a given pathogen was invariably present in such cases. The theory was both revolutionary and entirely sound. Moreover, since it provided a way of uniting all the relevant disciplines (clinical description, bacteriology, physiology, and postmortem anatomical examination), it almost instantly passed into universal acceptance. Koch and Pasteur ascended directly into the medical pantheon.

Unfortunately, applied to the great mass of psychiatric illnesses, the new synthesis was hopelessly premature. For in the vast majority of psychiatric ailments, excepting tertiary syphilis and a few dramatic neurological syndromes, postmortem examination could reveal no organic changes in the brain, the presumed seat of the illness. The search for pathogens was equally unavailing. To be sure, the study of the physiology of the nervous system began to make fitful if essential progress, as did knowledge of the localization of certain functions in the brain, but the only real consequence of these endeavors was that microscopic researches became part of a psychiatrist’s training.

Thus it happened that in the last decades of the nineteenth century, in a well-intentioned effort to be scientific, official psychiatry went off in a hundred directions at once. Clinical syndromes multiplied as physicians struggled to identify certain regular clusters of symptoms with little else to go on but direct observation. Psychiatric theorizing, meanwhile, entranced by the exciting discoveries being made concerning the nervous system, was increasingly preoccupied with extrapolating new explanations of mental disorder on the basis of a very rudimentary set of hypotheses about brain tracts, metabolic toxins, and the like— to the point where a few sharper minds realized that the whole field was degenerating into a kind of “brain mythology.”

Of the many theories put forth in this period, two concern our story directly: the theory of hereditary degeneration and the theory of “functional” changes in the nervous system. The theory of hereditary degeneration was a kind of speculative psychiatric attempt to align the discipline with the new concepts of Darwinian evolution. Specifically, it was contended that in certain families hereditary taint would manifest itself in progressively more severe conditions over successive generations. Thus, in the first generation, one might find only such mild disorders as nervousness and a general psychological eccentricity (perhaps manifest in unusual religious ideas or else in an artistic bent). In the next generation, more severe illnesses would emerge, such as epilepsy or severe hysteria. In the third generation, these in turn would be replaced by psychosis and overt criminality. And so on, until the line died out. The theory strikes the modern reader as quite odd, even if upon a moment’s reflection he or she will realize that it is based on a true-enough observation, namely that mental illness does indeed seem to run in families, with increasing pathology seen at least in some of them. Where we differ from the nineteenth-century view is in our predilection for attributing any progressive deterioration to psychological causes, and for seeing in bad parenting the causes of pathology in the next generation. At the turn of century, however, it seemed equally reasonable to assume that such psychological causes were supplemented by physical ones, that the familial protoplasm was deteriorating along with its mental health. And though sharper minds were beginning to object to this theory, too, its day was not yet done. Accordingly, one of the first duties of an admitting psychiatrist in a state psychiatric facility such as the Burghölzli was to take a family history.

The theory of hereditary degeneration also made its mark in fields other than psychiatry proper. For example, beginning with Krafft-Ebing’s pioneering work Psychopathia Sexualis, it was regularly invoked as an explanatory variable in the literature on sexual deviancy. Then, too, it enjoyed a very definite cultural vogue as social critics used it as a basis for attacking what they saw as degenerate trends in literature and the arts. Max Nordau’s enormously popular book Degeneration sought to portray any number of modern artists as variants on the criminal-genius type, with the notorious composer Richard Wagner as a prime example. But by far the most ominous development was the use of the degeneration idea to foster incipient theories of racial inferiority. This was a particularly sensitive matter for Jews, since it was then accepted as a simple medical fact by Jewish and Gentile physicians alike that rates of nervous illness were higher among Jews than among the other races of Europe.

The other prominent theory which concerns our story, and which would have been routinely applied to Spielrein’s case, was the doctrine of “functional” nervous disorders. This category of illness was a direct outgrowth of the recalcitrant peculiarity that the brains of nervous sufferers showed no anatomical changes at postmortem examination. Thus, by the early 1880s, it had became fashionable to theorize about “functional” changes in the nervous system, i.e., nonstructural changes, as the cause of “nervous illness,” or “neurosis” as it is now called. In trying to conceptualize how such functional change could arise, medical theories turned to the idea of a trauma: just as a magnet mysteriously loses its power of attraction if it is repeatedly struck by a hammer, so, too, it was thought that the nervous system might somehow alter its functioning in the face of trauma, whether external (such as being struck by a runaway carriage) or internal (in the form of an endogenous toxin such as might be produced by an overactive thyroid). It was readily understood that such a trauma might be sexual in nature, such as traumatic abuse in childhood, just as it was well understood that the physiological changes of puberty constituted a significant endogenous stressor that might evoke hysterical symptoms in the constitutionally predisposed. But such possible sexual causes were not especially privileged; the “functional” view, unlike that of earlier eras, understood that a wide range of precipitants might be sufficient to trigger hysteria. The real cause lay in the resulting alteration of the nervous system, itself only possible in the hereditarily predisposed.

Interestingly enough, roughly the same paradigm had also seemed to prove its worth, at least for a time, in the study of hypnotism. The juxtaposition of the two conditions, the hypnotic trance and hysterical “somnambulism,” was largely the work of Jean-Martin Charcot.