Freud and Jung: A Complicated Relationship

 by Flo Yearsley

Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung defined the world of psychology in the 20th century, but after a close six-year friendship, the two intellectual titans met for the last time. It was September 1913. They were 57 and 38 years old, respectively. So, what went wrong?

When Freud and Jung met in Vienna in 1907, they became esteemed colleagues and great friends. Freud saw Jung as the future leader of his psychoanalytic movement and even referred to him as his 'crown prince'. Jung, in turn, idolised Freud and saw him as a mentor and father figure, and he became the energetic new prospect of Freud's movement. Freud truly believed Jung was his heir as the father of psychoanalysis. 

However, as their friendship deepened, differences in their beliefs and ideas began to emerge.

For one, Jung and Freud disagreed over the fundamentals and derivatives of dreams. Freud believed we learn more about a person through their unconscious than their conscious mind. He thought that when we are conscious, we do not act upon our most profound desires because of the considerations of reality and morality. But when we sleep, the forces that make us more reserved are weakened, meaning we can live our desires through our dreams.

Jung also believed that dream analysis allowed a window into the unconscious mind. But, unlike Freud, he did not think that the content of all dreams was mainly sexual or that they disguised their true meaning. He concluded that dreams concentrate more on symbolic imagery and have many meanings according to the dreamer's associations. And 

he also felt that they could anticipate future events and be sources of creativity.

The most significant disagreement between the two men was their conflicting views of human motivation. 

Freud famously believed repressed and expressed sex was the motivating force behind behaviour. Jung strongly disagreed. 

His Oedipus complex theory suggests that male children have strong sexual desires towards their mothers and hold resentment towards their fathers. The Electra Complex is the opposite, where female children resent their mothers and have sexual desires for their fathers.

Jung believed his friend and fellow psychoanalyst was unnecessarily obsessed with the sexual side of early human experiences. He argued that the 'child loves its mother for her protecting rather than her alluring qualities.' And that 'breastfeeding was a nutritional rather than a sexual act'. Since Jung considered that a child's early life was completely non-sexual, he refused to see the Oedipus complex as attaining primary importance in forming neurosis. He argued that forbidden wishes from childhood could not cause trauma but were by-products of a conflict in the present life of the subject. 

Looking at Freud and Jung 100 years on, it's essential to understand their complex personalities and the period in which they lived and worked. The day they met in Vienna, they spent 13 hours non-stop in deep conversation discussing their innermost thoughts. For six years, they were great friends and laid the foundations for today's psychotherapy. In retrospect, intellects as big as theirs would only agree for the briefest of times. 

For further reading, I recommend an excellent book, The Freud/Jung Letters, published in 1974. It contains 360 letters between them from 1907, when they met, until the acrimonious split in 1913.