Jung did not at first question the diagnosis, ‘dementia praecox.’ The real story emerged only when he began to explore her dreams, which prompted him to give her the ‘association test.’ This test, which subsequently became very famous, was invented by a German doctor, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). The principle is simple: the patient is shown a list of words and asked to respond to each one with the first word that comes into his/her head. The rationale is that in this way conscious control over the unconscious urges is weakened. Resurrecting the woman’s case history via her dreams and the association test, Jung realised that the woman had, in effect, murdered her own daughter because of the unconscious urges within her. Controversially, he faced her with the truth. The result was remarkable: far from being untreatable, as the diagnostic label dementia praecox had implied, she recovered quickly and left hospital three weeks later. There was no relapse.
There is already something defiant about Jung’s account of his discovery of the unconscious. Jung implies he was not so much a protégé of Freud’s as moving in parallel, his equal. Soon after they met, when Jung attended the Wednesday Society in 1907, they became very close, and in 1909 they travelled to America together. Jung was overshadowed by Freud in America, but it was there that Jung realised his views were diverging from the founder’s. As the years had passed, patient after patient had reported early experiences of incest, all of which made Freud lay even more emphasis on sexuality as the motor driving the unconscious. For Jung, however, sex was not fundamental – instead, it was itself a transformation from religion. Sex, for Jung, was one aspect of the religious impulse but not the only one. When he looked at the religions and myths of other races around the world, as he now began to do, he found that in Eastern religions the gods were depicted in temples as very erotic beings. For him, this frank sexuality was a symbol and one aspect of ‘higher ideas.’ Thus he began his famous examination of religion and mythology as ‘representations’ of the unconscious ‘in other places and at other times.’
The rupture with Freud started in 1912, after they returned from America and Jung published the second part of Symbols of Transformation.59 This extended paper, which appeared in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, was Jung’s first public airing of what he called the ‘collective unconscious.’ Jung concluded that at a deep level the unconscious was shared by everyone – it was part of the ‘racial memory.’ Indeed, for Jung, that’s what therapy was, getting in touch with the collective unconscious.60 The more Jung explored religion, mythology, and philosophy, the further he departed from Freud and from the scientific approach. As J. A. C. Brown wrote, one ‘gets much the same impression from reading Jung as might be obtained from reading the scriptures of the Hindus, Taoists, or Confucians; although well aware that many wise and true things are being said, [one] feels that they could have been said just as well without involving us in the psychological theories upon which they are supposedly based.’61
According to Jung, our psychological makeup is divided into three: consciousness, personal unconsciousness, and the collective unconscious. A common analogy is made with geology, where the conscious mind corresponds to that part of land above water. Below the water line, hidden from view, is the personal unconscious, and below that, linking the different landmasses, so to speak, is the ‘racial unconscious’ where, allegedly, members of the same race share deep psychological similarities. Deepest of all, equating to the earth’s core, is the psychological heritage of all humanity, the irreducible fundamentals of human nature and of which we are only dimly aware. This was a bold, simple theory supported, Jung said, by three pieces of ‘evidence.’ First, he pointed to the ‘extraordinary unanimity’ of narratives and themes in the mythologies of different cultures. He also argued that ‘in protracted analyses, any particular symbol might recur with disconcerting persistency but as analysis proceeded the symbol came to resemble the universal symbols seen in myths and legends.’ Finally he claimed that the stories told in the delusions of mentally ill patients often resembled those in mythology.
The notion of archetypes, the theory that all people may be divided according to one or another basic (and inherited) psychological type, the best known being introvert and extrovert, was Jung’s other popular idea. These terms relate only to the conscious level of the mind, of course; in typical psychoanalytic fashion, the truth is really the opposite – the extrovert temperament is in fact unconsciously introvert, and vice versa. It thus follows that for Jung psychoanalysis as treatment involved the interpretation of dreams and free association in order to put the patient into contact with his or her collective unconscious, a cathartic process. While Freud was sceptical of and on occasions hostile to organised religion, Jung regarded a religious outlook as helpful in therapy. Even Jung’s supporters concede that this aspect of his theories is confused.62
Although Jung’s very different system of understanding the unconscious had first come to the attention of fellow psychoanalysts in 1912, so that the breach was obvious within the profession, it was only with the release of Symbols of Transformation in book form in 1913 (published in English as Psychology of the Unconscious) that the split with Freud became public. After that there was no chance of a reconciliation: at the fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress, held in Munich in September 1913, Freud and his supporters sat at a separate table from Jung and his acolytes. When the meeting ended, ‘we dispersed,’ said Freud in a letter, ‘without any desire to meet again.’63 Freud, while troubled by this personal rift, which also had anti-Semitic overtones, was more concerned that Jung’s version of psychoanalysis was threatening its status as a science.64 Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, for example, clearly implied the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which had been discredited by Darwinism for some years. As Ronald Clark commented: ‘In short, for the Freudian theory, which is hard enough to test but has some degree of support, Jung [had] substituted an untestable system which flies in the face of current genetics.’65