137 - Arthur I. Miller [10]
Freud clung to the late-nineteenth-century view that the mind, like everything else, could be reduced to matter and understood through physics and chemistry, subjects that he had studied in some detail as a medical student, in a daring departure from the traditional curriculum. This approach—known as “positivism”—had been founded by the philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach. Mach claimed that science could only study data obtainable in the laboratory and which could ultimately be experienced with the senses, such as direct touch.
Freud had begun his career as a medical researcher in neurology. This work further supported his view of the brain as a mechanism. But it was the teachings of the then-master-neurologist Jean Martin Charcot in Paris on the use of hypnosis to study hysteria—itself seen as a disease of the nervous system—as well as the analytic methods of the Austrian physician Josef Breuer that launched Freud on the route to his everlasting fame. Having found that hypnotizing patients with hysteria was often unsuccessful, he tried a “talking cure,” in which patients talked through their problems. Thus was psychoanalysis born. Most of the fundamentals had been worked out by Breuer, Charcot, and Pierre Janet, the famous French psychologist, among others. Freud’s genius was in putting them all together and then devising ways systematically to study the unconscious.
Although Jung initially considered a career in brain anatomy, his experiences at the Burgölzli led him to return to his original interest in regions of the unconscious that Freud, with his positivistic turn of mind, dared not enter—the world of the collective unconscious with its archetypes. Parapsychology, he was convinced, was a way to probe it. Jung often turned the tables on Freud by arguing that Freud’s views on sexuality were as unprovable as his own on parapsychology in any strictly scientific sense, especially the positivistic one.
Eight months after their first meeting he wrote to Freud, “I have been dabbling in spookery again.” He could not resist any opportunity to remind Freud of his interest in parapsychology.
Mach himself once remarked acerbically on Freud and his school of psychoanalysis, “These people try to use the vagina as if it were a telescope so that they can see the world through it. But that is not its natural function—it is too narrow for that.”*
The debate between Jung and Freud on parapsychology and sexuality continued for several years. Jung strongly believed that the human psyche was much too complex to be understood merely in terms of the libido. Conversely, when Jung visited Freud in the spring of 1909, Freud categorically rejected the entire field of parapsychology, which Jung so fervently believed in, as “nonsensical.” He offered supporting arguments, Jung recalled, in “terms of so shallow a positivism that I had difficulty in checking the sharp retort on the tip of my tongue. While Freud was going on in this way I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot—a glowing vault.”
As the two were arguing, there was a loud report in the bookcase next to them. They both jumped back, fearing it would fall on top of them. “I said to Freud,” continued Jung, “there, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon”—a physical effect brought about by a mental thought. “Sheer bosh,” replied Freud. He dismissed Jung’s explanation of what had happened as occult nonsense. They never again discussed the incident.
That very evening Freud named Jung as his successor in the psychoanalytic movement and adopted him as an eldest son. A month later he wrote Jung accusing him of taking away all the pleasure of the moment and divesting “him of any paternal dignity.”
Around this time Jung had been treating Joseph Medill McCormick of the McCormick newspaper dynasty, for alcoholism. When he suddenly managed to bring about a cure,