17 Jan 08 – Freud/Jung – Agreement in the Midst of Disagreement

17 January 2008

On this day in 1909, Sigmund Freud wrote to Carl Jung predicting that once Americans “discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us. Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great.” Two days later, Jung replied, “I have noticed this prudishness, which used to be worse than it is now; now I can stomach it; I don’t water down the sexuality any more.”Given their many disputes, it is interesting that they found agreement in this.

Jung, a generation younger than Freud, was energetic and imposing. He was trained as a psychiatrist and already working at the internationally known Burgholzi institution in Zurich (directed by Eugene Bleuler) when he met Freud. Despite the fact that Alfred Adler was senior to Jung, Freud saw Jung as his heir-apparent and saw to it that Jung was appointed as the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Still, behind their close association, there were always different agendas.

All of Jung’s work involved a distinctive mixture of both medical and spiritual undertones, the latter of which Freud had difficulty with. This difficulty was especially enhanced by Freud’s continued to desire to find professional acceptability that was so difficult for him to come by. At a time when the theories underlying the physical sciences were changing (e.g., with the development of relativity and, especially, quantum physics), Jung was developing a psychological theory that melded more readily to the new Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics than the classical model of Newtonian physics (in fact, Jung and Wolfgang Pauli were close associates and were involved in a series of dialogues captured in the book entitled, Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters). Freud, alternatively, though he was inclined to see the psyche as less deterministic than the classical model of physics would dictate, was reluctant to present a model that possessed such borderline metaphysical concepts such as non-local effects that underlain Jungian concepts such as synchronicity. Instead, to garner the approval he desired from the medical community at large and more specifically from associates such as Fleiss and Breuer and his professor Brucke, Freud maintained some essentially deterministic components as “add-ons” to his theory.

Ultimately, however, Freud and Jung’s relationship deteriorated and formally broke due to a difference regarding their perspectives on the unconscious. Jung felt that Freud’s concept was incomplete and unnecessarily negative. He preferred a view that encompassed both a collective and personal view on the unconscious, wherein the archetypal symbols of the collective human race were housed in the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious housed those forgotten memories of the present life. In this way, Jung was very much a dialectical thinker, preferring to see everything through the lens of his principle of opposites wherein for every tendency in one direction there is an implicit tendency in another direction. Furthermore, Jung believed that people were driven by ultimate goals through what he called the hermetic energy. Alternatively, Freud conceived of his unconscious (sometimes) in more demonstrative terms, with psychic energies developed over the present lifetime only, with dysfunction the result of fixated energy during specific developmental stages (this, of course, was the “add on” portion related to the concept of the Libidinal energy).

Still, it is curious that both Jung (who saw people as a product of hermetic energy which conflicted with the sexually charged driving force of Freud’s Libidinal energy) and Freud perceived that their theories would ultimately find demise in the United States due to the prudishness that was the mindset of the culture. Is it possible that this perspective is true and that the reason for the lack of widespread acceptability of these theories is due to exactly what Freud recognized and not so much to the reasons currently given (i.e., scientific respectability, falsifiability, etc.)? Certainly such concepts are met with resistance in our culture. Otherwise, we would probably not have such injunctions as to avoid discussion of the three topics of “Politics, Religion, and Sex.” In fact, neither Freud nor Jung were reluctant to talk about any of these topics…instead, each was fairly central in both individual’s theories.

Fuel for thought, I guess… head to my website GivingPsychologyAway.net for more fuel for thought regarding psychology.