Mark Anspach

Did a woman come between Freud and Jung? That was the promotional pitch for David Cronenberg’s
film A Dangerous Method. While the movie itself was much more nuanced, it still gave Carl Jung’s
romance with a female patient center stage. Yet she wasn’t the reason the two men divorced.

So what really caused the rift between Sigmund Freud and his star disciple? Before Jung became a
Jungian, he was second only to Freud as a champion of Freudianism. But being second was not a role
Jung relished.

In the end, what drove the two apart was the same thing that had drawn them together: Jung’s
worshipful emulation of the master, which concealed a fateful urge to take the other man’s place. That
is the conclusion that emerges from a careful reading of A Most Dangerous Method, the book by John
Kerr behind the Cronenberg movie.

An early episode recorded by Kerr already foretells the way the relationship would end. Before he met
Freud, Jung conducted word association tests that produced key experimental evidence for the
existence of repressed sexual complexes.

The tests were administered stopwatch in hand. A complex would betray itself through delayed
reaction to a stimulus word, as though the subject hesitated to tread on perilous ground. The
association could not be haphazard. The same word would elicit the same response when the test was
repeated

Yet, if asked to go through the list again and recall the responses previously given, the subject would
draw a blank when faced with the complex-related word, thus confirming the existence of repression.
In a majority of cases, the repressed complex had to do with sexuality.

The test results had Freud’s name written all over them. But when they were published in successive
issues of a prestigious psychology journal, Freud’s name was almost nowhere to be found. Many years
later, Jung blamed the devil for his reluctance to give Freud proper credit:

“Once, while I was in my laboratory and reflecting again upon these questions, the devil whispered to
me that I would be justified in publishing the results of my experiments and my conclusions without
mentioning Freud. After all, I had worked out my experiments long before I understood his work.”

Despite repeating the word “my” like a mantra – my experiments, my conclusions – Jung does not
claim to have reached his conclusions independently. He only says he didn’t understand Freud’s work
at the time he designed the experiments, when the real point is that he used it to interpret the results.

By Jung’s account, his better angel convinced him to ignore the devil’s blandishments:

“’If you do a thing like that, as if you had no knowledge of Freud, it would be a piece of trickery. You
cannot build your life upon a lie.’ With that, the question was settled. From then on I became an open
partisan of Freud’s and fought for him.”

Jung did enlist under Freud’s banner, but not until after the 1904 publication of the word association
experiments. The text “ran to nearly two hundred pages and four installments before Freud’s priority
on the idea of repression was belatedly acknowledged in a footnote,” Kerr remarks. “The devil was
doing more than whispering in Jung’s ear; he was guiding his pen.”

Who is this devil that beguiled Jung into taking Freud’s ideas as his own? French critic René Girard
can help us make sense of Jung's behavior without invoking supernatural forces. Behind talk about the
devil, Girard finds something real.

For Girard, the diabolical tempter of folklore and Scripture represents what he calls mimetic
desire. People copy their desires from an admired model, but the model soon appears to be a rival and
obstacle to the fulfillment of that same desire.

Girard’s definition fits the relationship of Jung to Freud. It wasn’t just Freud’s ideas that Jung copied,
but the desire to be their author. Jung would dearly have liked to be the father of psychoanalysis
himself. Freud had thwarted him by getting there first. The devil whispering in Jung’s ear was the voice
of mimetic desire enticing him to usurp the position occupied by his model.

Did Jung feel guilty about giving in to the devil? The next year he published a magazine article on the
topic of unconscious plagiarism. Consciously or not, he had been repressing the source of his ideas on
repression. His reluctance to cite Freud’s name was the symptom of an underlying condition that
would soon explode into view. The diagnosis was clear: Jung had a Freud complex.

When he finally made the pilgrimage to Vienna in 1907, Freud swept him off his feet. Jung found the
master “extremely intelligent, shrewd, and altogether remarkable.” Of all the men he knew, “no one
else could compare.” Not even in looks: years later, Jung still raved about how “handsome” Freud was.

Six months after their first meeting, Jung screwed up his courage and wrote Freud to express “a long
cherished and constantly repressed wish”: could he have a photo of the great man? To his delight,
Freud obliged. Jung saw only one flaw in the portrait: it was too small. “I have a sin to confess,” he
wrote Freud a few months later. “I have had your photograph enlarged.”

Jung knew that his Freud obsession bordered on the pathological. It threatened to submerge his own
identity. When Freud complained that Jung took too long to answer his letters, Jung invoked his
instinct for self-preservation. Admitting “with a struggle” that his admiration for Freud was
“boundless,” he stressed that he bore him “no conscious grudge”:

“So the self-preservation complex does not come from there; it is rather that my veneration for you has
something of the character of a ‘religious’ crush. Though it does not really bother me, I still feel it is
disgusting and ridiculous because of its undeniable erotic undertone.”

By painting his obsession as libidinal, Jung gamely tried to put a Freudian spin on it. That was just
another way of denying reality. There was nothing erotic about his “crush” on the man whose photo he
revered. He did not lust after Freud the way a teenage boy lusts after a pinup model; he worshipped
him just as the same teen might worship the guitar god pictured on a concert poster.

In short, Freud was the younger man’s idol. That is why Jung described his crush as “religious” in
nature. In a letter written a few months after their first meeting, he did not hesitate to equate Freud
with the God of Genesis: “Anyone who knows your science has veritably eaten of the tree of paradise
and become clairvoyant.”

Jung was not clairvoyant enough to foresee that he might one day be expelled from Eden. His devotion
was destined to end badly. He idolized Freud because he wanted to be him. This could only lead to
frustration and conflict.

Freud offered him all he could. He made Jung editor of the first journal of psychoanalysis, then
president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. One might say he did everything possible to
encourage his disciple’s Freud complex. As John Kerr astutely observes, Freud “sought to build his
movement on the strength of Jung’s endeavor to become one with himself.”

Freud was now playing the devil’s part, tempting Jung to copy him and become his clone. Yet as soon
as Jung threatened to become the new Freud, Freud’s own instinct for self-preservation would kick in,
prompting him to banish the usurper. René Girard describes just this pattern of behavior in Violence
and the Sacred:

“The model, even when he has openly encouraged imitation, is surprised to find himself engaged in
competition. He concludes that the disciple has betrayed his confidence by following in his footsteps.”

Of course, real differences emerged. While accepting the existence of sexual complexes, Jung had
always been skeptical about using them to explain everything. But when the final clash came, it turned
on Freud’s anxiety that Jung would try to supplant him.

After their first meeting in 1907, when they had talked feverishly until two in the morning, Jung went
to bed and had a dream that Freud interpreted the next day as revealing the younger man’s desire to
“dethrone him and take his place.” That had not stopped Freud from recognizing in Jung his scientific
“son and heir.

But late in 1912, Freud’s fear of being dethroned flared up irretrievably during a lunchtime
conversation about Egyptian kings. Amenhotep, founder of the first monotheistic cult, had erased from
monuments the name of his father. Jung argued that since the father had been regarded as divine,
suppressing the earlier god’s name was necessary to establish the new religion.
Freud said he was reminded of Jung’s Swiss colleagues – like his old lab partner in the word
association experiments – who were writing about psychoanalysis without mentioning his name. Jung
retorted that there was no need to cite Freud because he was so well known. Then, returning to ancient
Egypt, he said “the father already has a name, whereas the son must go out and make one for himself.”
Shortly after, as seen in Cronenberg’s film, Freud collapsed in a dead faint.

Their relationship had entered free fall. Within weeks, Jung petulantly accused Freud of wanting to
“remain on top as the father, sitting pretty.” Freud soon proposed they break off all personal contact.
By April 1914, Jung felt compelled to renounce the presidency of the International Psychoanalytic
Association. At the bottom of Freud’s copy of the resignation letter, Jung inscribed an arcane symbol:
“+ + +”.

Painting three crosses on the side of a farmhouse was an old custom meant to ward off the devil. But
what was the source of Jung’s use of this symbolism? He had copied it from an earlier letter written by
Freud himself.

Even as Jung tried desperately to exorcize him, the devil was still guiding his pen.

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Mark Anspach is an anthropologist and the editor of Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on
Rivalry and Desire by René Girard (Stanford, 2004). He is a contributor to Mimesis and
Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and
Religion edited by Scott R. Garrels (MSU, 2011).