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he overnight developed a huge reputation in the United States. Later that year he was invited to lecture at a symposium at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Freud too was invited to lecture and the two traveled together. As they sailed into New York harbor, Freud turned to Jung and said, “If they only knew what we are bringing to them.” During the crossing to the United States the two were together for a week, and often analyzed each other’s dreams. In the course of analyzing one of Freud’s, Jung asked him for details of his private life. Freud replied, “But I cannot risk my authority!” “That sentence burned itself into my memory,” Jung remembered. “Freud was placing personal authority above truth.”

In the United States Freud had a miserable time and suffered anxiety attacks, but Jung fell in love with the New World. He traveled to Maine and New York, where he immersed himself in the Egyptian, Cypriot, and Cretan collections at the Metropolitan Museum and studied the tapestries at the Pierpont Morgan Library and the palaeontology collections at the American Museum of Natural History.

He also met up with the Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James, brother of the novelist Henry James. The two immediately bonded. They discussed parapsychology, spiritualism, faith healing, and other nonmedical applications of psychotherapy, all of which went well beyond Freud’s view of the psyche.

Jung was convinced that Freud’s focus on sex limited his intellectual horizons. As far as Jung was concerned, Freud employed literal interpretations and so, for instance, “could not grasp the spiritual significance of incest as a symbol.” For Jung sex played no more than a role in the psyche. He was more interested in its “spiritual aspect and its numinous meaning.” Freud claimed that he was so far above sexual inclinations himself that he could judge a patient’s sexual disorders objectively. Jung, however, had begun to suspect that Freud was involved in an ongoing affair with his sister-in-law and even claimed that she had confessed it to him.

Clark University, 1909. Sigmund Freud is seated on the left; Carl Jung is seated on the right.

The tempestuous relationship between the two masters of psychoanalysis seemed likely to end in disaster. Yet between them they brought psychoanalysis to the New World.

The collective unconscious

Both Freud and Jung worked by analyzing dreams. But while Freud did so to probe an unconscious that he postulated as being made up of everyday experiences, Jung was interested in dreams as the portal to something that transcended the individual—a shared or collective unconscious.

Jung’s dreams were steeped in symbolic content. In one he was in a house, on the second floor. As he came downstairs he seemed to slip back in time. In the basement there were two skulls. Freud regularly interpreted dreams in terms of two conflicting drives in our mental life—the life drive (which includes sex) and the death drive. He was convinced there was a secret death-wish in Jung’s dream and suggested that it meant Jung wanted to murder someone. Driven into a corner, Jung jokingly suggested it must be his wife and sister-in-law. To his amazement Freud was greatly relieved for it appeared to support his analysis. For Jung, conversely, the ground floor simply represented the first level of his unconscious, and so on into the depths. The dream of the house revived Jung’s old interest in archaeology and symbolism. Crusaders and the Holy Grail began to enter his dreams.

Another dream that contained more than Jung initially realized was that of “the solar phallus man.” A severely schizophrenic patient interned at Burghölzli claimed that he had had a vision of a phallus hanging from the sun. When it swayed it produced weather and also allowed God to spread His semen. In those politically incorrect days, all the doctors, including Jung, thought this hilarious. Then, one day, Jung happened to read a book on Mithraic mythology. It described a liturgy of exactly the sort imagined by the schizophrenic patient. Jung