George Makary (6:26)

Psychiatry has been a legitimate medical field for about a century.

Sally Helm (6:31)

That's George Makary, Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell in New York City. He says early practitioners in this field were thinking about mental problems in the same way that they would physical problems, like trying to find some problem in the brain itself.

George Makary (6:49)

They're thinking about brain anatomy, but they get, they don't get very far. The brain turns out to be super complicated.

Sally Helm (6:56)

This is the way that Sigmund Freud is thinking when he first starts out.

George Makary (7:00)

He becomes early on consumed with this idea, which is, how do you find an anatomical basis for mental illness? So he's slicing and dicing neurons of strange animals, lampreys, crawfish. They're very excited. They figured out the motor neuron, the sensory neuron, and he's been doing that for years, but actually it's taking him nowhere. He's good at it, but the people in his lab are better. And he's about to leave to go into private practice. And he has very few tools to help patients.

Sally Helm (7:35)

Freud travels to Paris, where he's exposed to new methods for treating psychological disorders. Things like hypnosis that obviously wouldn't directly treat a physical problem in the way that surgery would. So he thinks maybe there could be other treatments like these, treatments that use words, not a scalpel. He returns to Vienna inspired, and over the course of several years, he develops the practice of psychoanalysis.

George Makary (8:06)

The classic Freudian setup is that the patient comes in the office and they lie down on a couch and the analyst sits behind the patient. Why? Freud didn't like being looked at the entire session, but that's a lousy kind of reason.

Sally Helm (8:26)

Yeah, it's not just that. Makary says it has to do with the way Freud wanted his patients to feel.

George Makary (8:34)

The idea is Freud wanted people to go into slightly trance like states, you know, semi sleepy states with very little visual stimuli, including looking at the analyst. He said, lie down on the couch, say everything that comes to mind. I want you to associate. It's called free association. In psychoanalysis. If the patient hesitates, if they stop themselves, if they make a weird jump from one idea to the next, he starts to infer that there's something going on there. Repression, inhibition, a complex.

Sally Helm (9:11)

What Freud was seeing was that through free association, people would kind of circle back around to the important issues over and over again, and that's how you could identify them. Things that they wouldn't necessarily have come up with right away from their conscious minds. Meanwhile, as Sigmund Freud is refining his methods, Carl Jung is just getting his career off the ground. Jung was the son of a pastor in Switzerland. He initially trains to be a minister, but switches to medicine and chooses to specialize in this relatively new, only semi respected field, psychiatry. Satya Doyle Byock is an author and a Jungian psychotherapist.

Satya Doyle Byock (9:55)

And it was a shock when he decided to go into psychiatry as a young man. He was top of his class. Everyone adored him and, and he had a couple of dreams and insights that directed him towards studying psychiatry.

Sally Helm (10:11)

Jung, too is interested in buried complexes. He's living in Zurich, respected in his circle, but not well known.

Satya Doyle Byock (10:19)

And he was working on this test called the word association test.

Sally Helm (10:25)

How, how is he using word association? Can we pause on that for a minute? What was that?

Satya Doyle Byock (10:29)

So essentially, he has a list of something like 100 words and he has a person in front of him and he has a stopwatch or some kind of timer. And he reads a word off this list and asks the person each time to respond with the first word that comes to their mind.

Sally Helm (10:47)

So he says elephant. And one person might say, like the zoo, and another person might say trampling. And it's like, huh, Where? What is, what are those different directions?

Satya Doyle Byock (10:56)

Exactly. Certainly not perfect example. You have an indication that one person may have very little packed into that word and another person is completely overwhelmed by it. So he is observing the unconscious, he is proving the existence of the unconscious, and he is getting very, very clear results.

Sally Helm (11:18)

In one famous example, Jung works with a mother who's dealing with severe depression. Through word association, he's able to learn that she had knowingly let her children drink contaminated bathwater, resulting in one child's death. It was a horrific experience that she'd repressed deep in her unconscious.

Satya Doyle Byock (11:39)

Jung uncovers this entire story that she's never told anyone and hasn't really fully acknowledged herself. And as a result of her telling the story and him discovering it, she's relatively cured because she's now able to admit to herself what it is that she's been trying so hard to avoid and all of these feelings that had been dredged up.

Sally Helm (11:59)

So Carl Jung is doing this word association, inspired in part by Freud's free association, and he's finding it incredibly useful. But at the time, Freud's ideas are not universally accepted. James Hollis is a Jungian analyst.

James Hollis (12:17)

Freud was very well known, but not always in a good way. His emphasis upon human sexuality, including infantile sexuality. Now I really have to acknowledge by sexuality he doesn't just mean what adults tend to mean by that, he means that we are pleasure seeking, pain, avoiding animals, which is pretty obviously true. But his emphasis upon sexuality had Made him somewhat a scandal in European psychology. And he was widely attacked by many colleagues because many of them were carrying kind of moral bias about the place of sexuality. And Freud was not always in good repute at that time.

Sally Helm (12:59)

Yeah, Freud has been developing his understanding of the unconscious and he's really focused on the role of sexuality, how sexual desires get repressed and then drive us unconsciously become this really powerful force that we're not always looking at. Some of his ideas have European academics scandalized. But Carl Jung, he thinks that is unfair.

Satya Doyle Byock (13:24)

Well, I mean, this is a moment that I think is really quite beautiful.

Sally Helm (13:28)

Satya Doyle Byock again.

Satya Doyle Byock (13:30)

I think there's something to Jung that feels sort of schoolyard bully about that. It feels unfair to let this other academic get bullied when actually they're working in similar territory. So Jung goes in the opposite direction. He really reaches out to Freud, starts writing him, builds up friendship with him, a relationship with him.

James Hollis (13:49)

And so out of appreciation, he mailed a copy of his own researches in the word association experiment to Freud, not knowing that Freud had already purchased his own copy. And Freud wrote back a very appreciative letter and it led to an invitation to Jung to visit in Vienna, which he did.

Sally Helm (14:10)

This is that legendary 13 hour meeting.

George Makary (14:15)

Young did a lot of the talking.

Sally Helm (14:17)

George McCary again, he was very voluble.

George Makary (14:20)

Guy, very enthusiastic guy. So that makes sense.

Sally Helm (14:24)

He goes on for three hours.

George Makary (14:27)

Apparently he stopped and Freud said, okay, you've been talking about these categories of problems, A, B, C and D, so let's start with A. In other words, he really tried to give form to what was, you know, an anxious younger colleague's going on and on and on.

Sally Helm (14:44)

The conversation does turn to Freud's theories about sexuality. Freud says, I know people over where you are in Zurich don't love those theories of mine. You've got to defend them.

George Makary (14:56)

And when Jung says why? He says, what are we defending it against? He says, the black mud of occultism. Occultism. Now, the weird thing is Jung was really into the occult. He had been really into the occult as a younger person. His family was into spiritism and speaking to the dead and stuff like that.

Sally Helm (15:17)

Later that year, Jung would actually write to Freud about being elected an honorary fellow of the American Society for Psychical Research. Quote, in this capacity, I have been dabbling in spookery. Again. Jung had a strong interest in spirituality of all kinds, and Satya Doyle Bayak told us it was deeply tied to his work.

Satya Doyle Byock (15:41)

Jung began approaching spirituality and what he might call the divine in ways that are still a little hard to fully explain. And trying to explain Jungian psychology because it really enters into spaces that are not about kind of easily quantifiable scientific knowledge. And I don't think Freud was comfortable going there. For him, things really needed to be rooted in biology. He needed to prove the unconscious as related back as much as possible to the known, to the extroverted world, to the human body, to childhood, et cetera. And I think Jung felt, while trepidatious, more comfortable going into other territory.

Sally Helm (16:27)

These two men are both deeply interested in the unconscious, this realm of symbols and dreams. But it's already becoming clear they do view it differently. Still, this meeting is the beginning of a passionate collaboration. Freud clearly sees Jung as his successor, someone who can take up the torch of psychoanalysis. And there's another important layer here. Jung is Christian and Freud is Jewish. There is a ton of anti Semitism at this time in Europe, especially in Vienna, and it is fueling Freud's critics. He knows the kind of things he's going to hear as people try to take down psychoanalysis.

George Makary (17:12)

It's a Jewish science. This Jewish obsession with sexuality is disturbed, distorted and disgusting. And so Freud sees this coming and as it comes, he sees that the possibility of securing psychoanalysis in Zurich with Protestants who are highly reputable psychiatrists. So all of that was Freud, I think, thought a real boon, that psychoanalysis would survive.

Sally Helm (17:42)

Freud, being Jewish, is an outsider, but Jung, the son of a pastor, is not. So Freud thinks this person can help me secure the future of my work.

James Hollis (17:54)

He called him my crown prince. And if that he's the. If Jung's the crown prince, then of course the king is Freud. And there was certainly a father son relationship there, father and son.

Sally Helm (18:08)

Freud writes to Jung that he is the spirit of my spirit, the Joshua to his Moses.

Satya Doyle Byock (18:14)

They have been in dialogue, they've been in colleagueship, they are corresponding frequently, which is a beautiful thing that we have records of.

Sally Helm (18:23)

Jung writes to Freud In June of 1907, I rejoice every day in your riches and live from the crumbs that fall. Freud replies modestly, I am very much surprised to hear that I am the rich man from whose table you glean a few, few crumbs. Soon enough, these men are invited to appear together to speak on these new theories about the unconscious and psychoanalysis broadly. The king and the crown prince. They embark on a trip across the ocean to America. And on that trip, their relationship will begin to source.

Ben (19:06)

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Sally Helm (20:13)

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Ben (21:04)

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Sally Helm (22:15)

Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud are on a steamship headed for New York. They've been invited to give a series of lectures at Clark University to some of America's leading psychologists and psychiatrists.

James Hollis (22:29)

As they pulled into New York Harbor, Freud said to Jung, little do they know we're bringing the plague with us. And I think what he meant by that, their certainty that what they think, feel and believe consciously constitutes the reality.

Sally Helm (22:44)

Basically all these people are about to learn the power of the unconscious. We're going to blow their minds. The lectures go well, and along the way, traveling to and through America, Jung and Freud start interpreting each other's dreams.

Satya Doyle Byock (23:04)

Jung tells Freud that he has a dream in which he is in this beautiful home with art on the walls. And he sees that there are many levels to the home and he descends many different layers and finds all these different kind of artifacts and things from different parts of the world. And he ultimately descends into the basement. And there are many things down there, but among them are two skulls, two human skulls.

Sally Helm (23:33)

Freud says, I know exactly what this means.

Satya Doyle Byock (23:37)

The two skulls must be a buried.

Sally Helm (23:39)

Death wish, meaning Jung secretly wants to die or he wants someone else to die. Now Jung thinks to himself, I actually don't think that's right.

Satya Doyle Byock (23:52)

This is a moment of conflict for the two of them. And Jung describes it as being an incredibly stressful moment for him because he knows the only way that he has to get out of this awkward encounter with Freud is that he has to lie to him. Jung ultimately feels like he has to tell Freud what his death wish is, even though he absolutely does not believe he has one. So Jung tells him, you know, oh, I have a death wish for my wife and my sister in law.

Sally Helm (24:19)

Like this should make Freud happy, but he's really thinking these skulls to me means something completely different. Jung has been developing a new theory about what he'll call the collective unconscious. He believes that if you dive into the depths of your own unconscious, you'll find symbols that humans throughout history have seen in their dreams, images that aren't specific to any one person's mind or their repressed desire.

Satya Doyle Byock (24:51)

Like Freud believes it's more like an archaeological dig. He's seeing, oh, there are parts of me. There are parts of my unconscious that are not, not known to me because I repress them. They're not known to me because I've never seen them before. My conscious mind has never seen them before. That's what these skulls actually represent for him. And that really becomes this moment of breakdown. Whether Freud knows it or not, it's when Jung begins to really, really go his, his own way.

Sally Helm (25:18)

They continue to clash. At another point, Jung is telling Freud about these bog men that can be found in some places in the world.

George Makary (25:27)

The bog men, these skeletons that were found that were preserved in bogs. And Freud was getting kind of nauseous, asked him to stop, but Jung kept going and kept going and kept going, and Freud fainted.

Sally Helm (25:44)

For Freud, this incident also revealed a death wish, perhaps that Jung wanted Freud.

Satya Doyle Byock (25:50)

Dead, that he wants to take down the father, he wants to kill the father.

Sally Helm (25:56)

It's that Oedipus complex Freud talked about that men desire their mothers and feel aggression towards their fathers. And Freud and Jung do have that kind of relationship.

Satya Doyle Byock (26:08)

Fred Freud, again, is developing this very deep insecurity that Jung wants to destroy him and take him down. And I think on Jung's side, he's just sort of irritated that this keeps getting in the way for the two of them. So there's a lot of buildup to Jung feeling as though he can no longer be seen or understood. And his ability to really digest these things he's excited about has waned because now they're in this jostle for power that Jung just doesn't have interest in at this point.

Sally Helm (26:40)

But the two men keep working together. In 1910, with Freud's backing, Jung is named president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

George Makary (26:50)

The deal is going to be that Jung is going to be president, which means he's going to control the journals, control who's in and who's out, and his term is going to be for life.

Sally Helm (27:01)

The members of the International Psychoanalytical association, they balk at that. A lifetime term is a long time. Jung eventually has to settle for two years.

George Makary (27:11)

But that was an idea that I think made sense for Freud and Jung. He was going to be the heir apparent for life.

Sally Helm (27:19)

But even with this plush appointment, Jung is continuing to diverge from his colleaguementor. And soon he'll do so very publicly.

Satya Doyle Byock (27:36)

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George Makary (28:39)

You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first.

Sally Helm (28:49)

Ba da ba ba ba. In 1912, Carl Jung releases a book called Psychology of the Unconscious. In it, he expands on his ideas about what he'll later call the collective unconscious, a kind of psychic plane that he believed we all shared across borders, even across time. The plane he was tapping into when he saw those skulls in his dream. And in this book, Jung takes it a step further. He explicitly acknowledges that his ideas about the unconscious are not compatible with Freud's theories. It doesn't have to do so much with repressed sexual desire. George Makary says, Fred, for Freud, this is essentially a worst case scenario.

George Makary (29:39)

This is precisely the kind of repudiation of sexuality that Freud feared. I think that he saw it as a fundamental attack on something that he considered central to psychoanalysis.

Sally Helm (29:53)

Their relationship deteriorates rapidly.

George Makary (29:57)

It is really hard to see how they would have continued together under the same umbrella.

Sally Helm (30:03)

Freud's reaction to Jung's book is bitter. In their letters, dear friend becomes Dear Dr. Jung. And in January of 1913, Freud sends the letter that ends it all. Dear Dr. It begins and goes on. I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely. I shall lose nothing by it, for my only emotional tie with you has long been a thin thread. Jung later replies, I accede to your wish that we abandon our personal relations, for I never thrust my friendship on anyone. Here's James Hollis.

James Hollis (30:41)

It was a traumatic breaking for both of them. There's no question about that.

Sally Helm (30:48)

Soon Carl Jung is out as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. His going against Freud has made him a pariah in that group. And remember, this was the position that he was originally supposed to hold for life.

George Makary (31:03)

He resigned, actually, rather easily. He was pushed a little and then he jumped.

Sally Helm (31:07)

Freud surrounds himself with supporters. He holds his psychoanalytical ground. Jung, on the other hand, his career is shattered.

Satya Doyle Byock (31:17)

He's lost most of his friends and colleagues, they've all abandoned him. And he dives into his unconscious. He has what we call the confrontation with the unconscious. He himself begins to wonder if he's becoming schizophrenic or going schizophrenic in the terms of the day. And he begins writing down these visions and he starts writing all these dialogues down and all these stories down, and.

James Hollis (31:44)

Wrote in a book that was mythical when I was in training in Zurich.

Sally Helm (31:47)

Jung's estate refused to publish this book until 2009.

James Hollis (31:52)

We've all read since. The Red Book was his personal journal of his encounter with psychological forces and so forth.

Satya Doyle Byock (32:01)

It's sort of active dreaming or trancing or visioning without any assists of psychedelics. And in these huge pages creates these incredible paintings and they express all sorts of things. But the book itself is. Is stunning.

George Makary (32:18)

The drawings are fabulous. He was actually a great draftsman, George McCary, so. And it's wild. And he's on a journey of some sort.

Sally Helm (32:26)

Jung draws a wooden ship with a giant sea monster beneath it and a snake spewing fire from its mouth. The pages look like they're from some kind of illuminated medieval manuscript.

George Makary (32:39)

It's kind of impossible to read. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Sally Helm (32:43)

Sense. Yet this Red book contains important insight about the unconscious.

George Makary (32:49)

It is an amazing document of someone who's going to come out on the other side with ideas about symbols and dream life and alternate kinds of states of consciousness that is going to be, you know, obviously formulated through his more rational processes so that actually we can understand what he's writing.

Sally Helm (33:09)

Jung slowly begins teaching again, publishing, building up his school of thought and regaining his prestige. In a way, it all came out of this dark period in the wake of his breakup with Freud.

Satya Doyle Byock (33:23)

When those two worlds broke apart, Jung had to reconstruct his own world and certainly his own community. Students began flocking to him from all over the world.

Sally Helm (33:37)

Sigmund Freud goes in a different direction. His world gets smaller. He becomes more defensive, a little paranoid.

George Makary (33:45)

He became quite controlling and even dictatorial about what constituted psychoanalysis and what didn't.

Sally Helm (33:52)

But soon his own movement begins to move on, especially in the wake of World War I.

George Makary (33:59)

The Freudians rebuild not so much under the kind of central authority of Sigmund Freud, but more as a broader psychoanalytic community, where they really did try to allow for more intellectual freedom and have Freud not be like the final say on whether a theory was correct or not.

Sally Helm (34:23)

In the world of psychology, there's still a divide between the Freudian and the Jungian schools of thought, and both men have certainly shaped how we think of the mind. From Freud, we get the idea of defenses of repression, projection and paranoia, dream and fantasy interpretation. From Jung, dream interpretation too. Of course, he also invented the terms extraversion and introversion. He creates the entire field of personality types, which goes on to inform the Myers Briggs test. All kinds of things that have seeped into the culture. James Hollis says, you don't necessarily have to divide these two men to understand their legacies. Yes, they had some important differences, differences that drove them apart, but they also had a lot in common, beliefs that are still influential in the field they helped shape.

James Hollis (35:20)

What Freud and Jung did together was they told us there's another world, the ignorance of which rises up and bites us from behind. Once in a while people scratch their heads and ask the question, what was I thinking when I chose this person or this career? Or I thought that was a good idea. But at some point what we did at the time made sense to the ego at that time, little knowing that there was another field of energy at which work.

Sally Helm (35:56)

Thanks for listening to History this Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel. To stay updated on all things History this Week, sign up at history this week podcast.com and if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email@historythisweekistory.com Special thanks to our guests Satya Doyle, Byock Jungian psychotherapist and author of the Search for Self in Early Adulthood and director of the Salome Institute of Jungian Studies Dr. James Hollis, Jungian psychoanalyst and author of A Life of Relocating, your Center of spiritual gravity and Dr. George McCary, psychiatrist, historian and author of Revolution in Mind, the Creation of Psychoanalysis. He is also Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell. This episode was produced by David Weisbord, produced and sound designed by Ben Dickstein and also produced by me, Sally Helm for Back Pocket Studios. Our executive producers are Ben Dickstein and David Weisbord from the History Channel. Our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow rate and review History this week, right wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next week.