Few friendships or feuds are more famous than Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s. This natural confluence of kindred characters began as a fruitful intellectual partnership, but it quickly evolved into an intense father-son dynamic, affecting their professional and private lives.
After six years of confiding their dreams to each other and mutually airing their domestic woes, the founder of modern psychoanalysis and his prodigious heir apparent became bitter, uncommunicative foes. The cause of their dissociation appears to have been as much personal as pedagogical. However, Jung maintained, late into his long life, that the primary reason for their fallout was a dispute over the direction their newfound discipline should take.
Freud and Jung met in 1906. The young Swiss doctor journeyed with his wife to Vienna to visit and pay homage to the controversial professor. The pair allegedly conversed for twelve hours without stopping. Many of us experience the exciting commencement of a new friendship and for these two pioneers of a world-changing philosophy, the depth of their bond must have felt ordained by fate.
From the onset of their union, however, their spiritual and cerebral differences were easily discernible. Jung said in a television interview broadcast in 1959 that he and Freud intellectually emanated from drastically divergent interests. Whereas Jung was steeped in European history and continental philosophy, Freud’s medical education was elevated by his numerous esoteric but autodidactic inquiries. Kant, for example, whom Jung believed to be essential reading for an adequate understanding of the development of human thought, was wholly unread by the revered professor. As they both cultivated and formalised their complementary but contrasting schools of thought, the battle lines for an academic conflict that would rage for decades were drawn.
Freud focused on the influence our libidos exert over our general behaviours. He espoused the idea of an inelastic unconscious, an individual unconscious, formed by personal experiences and unique conditions. Jung laid less emphasis on the influence of the libido over our senses of self and worldviews. He proposed a static model of the unconscious and claimed that an inescapable collective unconscious exists, an idea from which he generated his pantheon of contested archetypes and symbols.
As Jung became increasingly confident in his own theories, Freud’s dogmatic dismissals of his prolific protege’s assertions began to grate and an emotional impasse was suddenly established. The strains and stresses of professional life often infect the purity of personal relations and given the reciprocated openness and vulnerability of these trailblazing psychologists, any disagreement had the propensity to escalate awfully.
In a final letter to Jung, written in 1913, Freud clearly no longer saw his young friend as “the Joshua to my Moses”, as he once had. Responding to Jung’s accusation that Freud treated his followers like patients, an abrasive Freud wrote: “it is a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel ashamed of his own neurosis. But one [Jung] who while behaving abnormally keeps shouting that he is normal gives ground for the suspicion that he lacks insight into his illness. Accordingly, I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely.”
Days later, to conclusively terminate their peculiar bromance, Jung suavely replied: “I accede to your wish that we abandon our personal relations, for I never thrust my friendship on anyone. You yourself are the best judge of what this moment means to you. “The rest is silence“.”
Biographers of Jung have argued that several egregious episodes involving older men from formative years instilled a profound aversion to close connections with male mentors. Freud also suffered from fears of being supplanted and eclipsed and once acknowledged as the primogeniture of a fresh theory of humanity, was more concerned with obedience than originality. Given their various foibles and extreme sensitivity, their friendship was doomed from the start. Neither expressed much regret over their parting, but both conceded how stimulating and inspiring they were to each other.