"Jung's struggle with Freud"

Of course their relationship was very famous, it’s also very poorly understood. You'll hear this expression sometimes: “Jung was Freud’s disciple, Jung was Freud’s student.” Analyst and historian John Kerr - who wrote the book A Most Dangerous Method, which was of course turned into a somewhat unfortunate movie – John Kerr remarks that at the beginning of their relationship Freud needed Jung more than Jung needed Freud. In the course of looking at the material it became fairly clear I identified several aspects of the two systems that were very important in terms of why and how they were at loggerheads with one another eventually. They didn’t really realize it at the beginning that many of the issues that eventually lead to the break between them were actually there from the beginning. Both of them, each for their own reason, put an awful lot of effort into not recognizing the differences between them.

The main ones that I identified at the time and I subsequently wanted to add a fourth primary distinction. One was the basis of Freud’s system, Freud’s theory, relied very heavily on the idea of repression. And repression was probably one of the greatest stumbling blocks for Freud in getting his theories accepted – there were many, many stumbling blocks but this was an important one that he really couldn’t provide evidence for the kind of repression that he wanted to talk about. You have to understand that the basis of Freud system, one of the critical elements of Freud’s system, is that any material that is in the unconscious was originally in consciousness and gets pushed into the unconscious by repression. Jung at the time was doing work on the word association test, and in fact his work on the word association test was extraordinarily important. The word association test had been around for 50 or 60 years as an important psychological tool but he really transformed it’s significance by adding a whole array of measures to what was actually happening with a person in an anomaly with their association

It had started in England with some research that was done before becoming a major element in German experimental science with Wilhelm Wundt and others but what they were primarily looking at was the role in which an association was made, in other words, what kinds of words were associated with one another. Jung added and actually designed the equipment for the galvanic skin response, cardio-pulmonary response, and ways of measuring these things. He had basically turned the word association test into the first lie detector, and in fact used it in a couple of court cases. So the word association test had been around for a long time and Bleuler, who was the head of the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic, where Jung was doing what we would call a residency, amongst other things had Jung and some of the other doctors there diligently working on this. The other thing that Bleuler did was he had his students, his residents, reading all of the current literature in psychology and psychiatry. Jung was an extraordinarily voracious reader and he went through everything, and one of the things he was assigned to read by Bleuler right off – must have been literally the day he arrived at the Burghölzli – was Freud’s very recently published Interpretation of Dreams. So, the Zurich psychiatrists at the Burghölzli knew about Freud and were following his early writings because they were basically following everything.

Jung, as he worked on the word association test, came to the conclusion that he in fact had empirical data that pointed toward something that looked like Freud’s notion of repression. A big part of the original connection between Freud and Jung was because Jung was measuring these lapses in associations; you give a person an association word, like “house,” and they pause for ten seconds before they give you a response. And not only do they pause but their galvanic skin response goes all over the place, their heart rate goes all over the place, things begin to happen and what Jung realizes is that there’s a strong emotional or a strong affective dimension to these lapses in association. They involve the entire organism, the whole body. Then what he does is he sits down with these people – say they had a big lapse; you say “home” and they either come up with a very odd response or these other measure of the affective response are off-kilter – so he sits down with them and says “Tell me about your home life.” He begins to do a kind of simple analysis of why the lapse took place and begins to find out, well “my father was an alcoholic,” he had a very unfortunate home life, and he begins to see that there are real psychological causes for these lapses. He writes to Freud in 1906 and sends him a collection of his papers on the word association test and basically says “I think you’ll find these interesting” and the implication there is “I’ve solved your problem.” You’re telling people about repression but they’re saying “We have no evidence for that. It seems like something that you, Professor Freud, just cooked up to explain phenomena.” Now Jung comes along and basically says “I’ve got empirical data, I’ve got experimental data that looks like Freud’s idea of repression.” So that’s kind of how they get started.

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Jung comes into the relationship with the idea that they are going to be progressing in what we might call a more normal scientific way where you have a group of colleagues who work together to shape a theory as it unfolds. At virtually the same time up in Copenhagen you have Niels Bohr and the quantum physicists and they’re all sort of bouncing off of each other and revising their ideas and writing papers and having arguments and that leads to what we can call a more scientific evolution of the understanding of quantum mechanics. What’s happening between Freud and Jung is that Freud is far less, if he is at all, willing to proceed with this kind of collaborative scientific investigation that leads to variations in the theory. He’s quite tolerant for a while – they’re both trying to make this work – but Jung begins to realize at some point along the way that Freud is not operating that way. Freud has his principles, his ideas about the way psyche works, and it’s very difficult to come in with another point of view on things and have Freud make any serious revisions to his theory on the basis of those kinds of interactions. Now Freud revises his theory many times along the way but every time Freud does make a change in this theory it’s because he’s run into something himself that he can’t reconcile anymore so he has to do something with it. There’s some very famous stories about Freud’s difficulty with evolutionary theory for example, and so on. At a quite early stage they began to have conflicts on some of these things.

- Speaking of Jung: George Hogenson (Ep. 14)  (Author of Jung's Struggle with Freud)