Still jung and freudened?
William Sargant The Freud-Jung Letters Edited by William McGuire (Routledge and Kegan Paul, in association with Hogarth Press £7.95) The reviewer was fortunate to know both a patient and a psychiatrist who had been treated by Freud. And he also spent a very exciting afternoon personally driving around Oxfordshire with Jung in 1938. They were the most contrasting characters, with very strongly held views. Freud gave his interpretations to his patients in no uncertain manner. But what rubbish they sound these days as a means of curing an illness, and how completely obsessed he was with sex. Writing to Jung in 1907 about a boy he is sending to him with screaming fits, Freud says "He stands outside a door and screams, roars, raves and spits. . . he is running two fingers of his right hand up and down in a groove in the door panel, in other words he imitates a coitus. When I mentioned this to him after his attack, he denied it . . . At the same time he counts: two, three, four with long pauses, which indeed makes sense in connection with coitus, and his spitting is obviously an imitation of ejaculation."
No wonder Freud's views caused uproar in Vienna and one wonders how Jung tem porarily got to believe this sort of interpretation, till he finally broke with Freud gradually after a period in 1907 to 1910. Freud, believing he was going to die young of a heart attack looked upon Jung as his 'Crown Prince' who was going to succeed to the fame that would be Freud's if he only lived longer. And Freud did live to be very famous, not dying till over eighty, in London in 1939. By 1912 relations between the two had become cold and formal. But Jung never attacked Freud personally in public and his behaviour was reasonable to the last (he did not really want the letters between them to be published) in contrast to those in the Freudian camp, who accused Jung after the war of Nazi collaboration from his home in Switzerland and the like.
The whole correspondence makes fascinating reading. One realises again how far in treatment psychiatry has recently progressed by totally ignoring Freud and Jung, and concentrating on a more physical treatment approach. One reads about the cases Jung tried to help in his asylum in Zurich and they are absolutely heart-rending in their unrelieved suffering. Jung did most of his interpretive treatment on schizophrenics, while Freud, in private practice in Vienna, was mostly working on the neuroses. Later in life Jung himself had a schizophrenic illness with hallucinations, which he was quite prepared to describe at Oxford to me in 1938; Ernest Jones, in Freud's biography, shows how Freud had periods of severe depression with attacks of phobic panic in closed spaces, travelling and so on, which gave him fears of sudden death and made him analyse himself to discover their cause. Each of the two was in fact working on their own predisposition to different nervous illnesses at the time the letters were written. Freud had a firm belief that his views would triumph, and both he and Jung were very hard on their psychiatric colleagues who did not agree with them. Psychiatry is still as split, and the proponents of various schools are still at each others' throats, then as now. This is, of course, bound to continue till we know more of how the brain works in health and disease.
These letters confirm that the split probably started when Freud and Jung went together by boat with Sandor Ferenczi to Clark University to lecture in 1909. They analysed each other's dreams on the boat. Freud refused certain information to Jung which he said he could not do "without losing my authority" as head of the movement. Jung, who had a great sense of humour, which Freud had not, told a friend that when they arrived in New York, Freud walked the streets vainly searching for a lavatory (there are none in New York — only hotel restrooms) and finally wet himself. Jung jokingly told Freud that if he had revealed the information, it would not have happened. One can only speculate what it was that he could not reveal to Jung. The remark was not appreciated by Freud, and Jung refers to the remark on authority three years later in one of his letters when relationships had become so strained.
Those of us used to working under the National Health Service are surprised at the keenness for making money shown by both Freud and Jung in these letters. Their private practices were always uppermost in their mind and Freudian psychoanalysis developed as a private practice technique, so suitable for America but not for this country. One of the present Freudian tenets is that the patient must be made to pay quite a lot of money as part of the therapeutic process. But Freud was really interested in more than money. When he arrived in England, he was begged to treat a patient who later became my own. (The patient, a very severe depressive with obsessive fears, has now had a very successful business career for over ten years following a modified leucotomy after years and years of terrible mental torment). At first Freud said the patient was too ill to be helped by his method, finally he agreed to try, after a month he told the patient he was going to reduce his fees. He apologised for having been charging so much on the advice of his followers in England; now he saw it had been a wrong thing to do. He was still treating this patient till his death and analysing out the effect his death would have on the patient.
One ends this book with great admiration for both Freud and Jung. Both were trying to help patients in truly desperate times, in psychiatry when no other treatments were available and being a good cricketer was the best qualification of an asylum medical officer. They fought for their beliefs against indifference and active opposition. It was inevitable that they would quarrel, as Freud quarrelled with anybody who questioned his authority and doubted his sexual theories of the subconscious. Following Freud became the same as following a revealed faith and anybody who doubted the sort of interpretation given at the beginning of this review was simply showing his 'resistance' and needed such resistances analysed out of him by couch treatment.
Throughout the letters there is a tremendous lot about the ill health of both. They were very often exhausted and felt unable to think. Colds were frequent. They worked hard but were ill constantly. As already mentioned, Jung had his attack of schizophrenia and Freud was constantly having mental fatigue, depressions, fears of dying,faintingattacks and the like. Freud's neurotic illness would now have responded in a matter of weeks to one of the new groups of anti-depressant drugs, the monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and Jung's hallucinations would now be relieved by intramuscular moditen. If the modern physical treatments of psychiatry were in existence then, should we have ever had this correspondence of each person in search of his own cure and so should we ever have had the metaphysical theories of Freud and Jung?
Dr William Sargant was formerly physician in charge of the Dept of Psychological Medicine at St Thomas's Hospital. His most recent book is The Mind Possessed.
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