In 1909, there was no international congress of psychoanalysts,
in part because three of the major players–Freud, Carl Jung, and
the Hungarian analyst Sandor Ferenczi–had already had an international
congress of sorts during their joint trip to Clark University in Worcester,
Massachusetts. In 1910, however, the congress reconvened for several
days in Nürnberg. According to Ernest Jones, the scientific content
of the meeting was good, but the organization of the meeting was
a nightmare. Jung was elected president of the newly-founded International
Psychoanalytic Association during the course of the congress; he
had also organized the conference, and a number of sore points
arose between him and the Viennese psychoanalysts. The Viennese
were concerned that the Swiss psychiatrists, of whom Jung was the
leader, were taking over the psychoanalytic movement. Their suspicions
increased when a motion was passed to make national and regional
psychoanalytic associations into branches of the International
Association. This motion would make the Viennese Psychoanalytic
Society and the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society, which had been founded
in 1908, into branches of the International Association.
Freud, the person who was in the best position to ease
tensions, did nothing to help the situation. Although he was aware
of the conflict, Freud sided exclusively with Jung and at first
did little to soothe the bruised egos of his Viennese colleagues.
On top of the personal disagreements over who should head the Association, there
was also a fairly visible undercurrent of ethnic conflict: the Viennese
Jews were polarized against the Swiss Gentiles. The fact that Freud,
the Viennese Jewish psychoanalyst par excellence, was allied against the
Viennese Jews, only made the situation more complicated.
Within a few weeks of the meeting, the conflicts had been resolved
to everyone's satisfaction. Jung remained the editor of the Jahrbuch and
the president of the International Association. The Viennese analysts
Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel were put in charge of the Viennese
Psychoanalytic Association–replacing Freud–and were given joint
editorship of a new journal: the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse. For
the time being, everyone seemed satisfied with the fragile balance
of power that had been attained.
That balance was not to last for long. The two-day Weimar
congress in September of 1911 went smoothly enough, but in the
same year, the conflicts between Freud and the Viennese analysts
reached a climax. Three months before the congress, in June of
1911, Alfred Alder had left the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and
in October, nine of his followers joined him in forming the Society
for Free Psychoanalysis. Adler's greatest disagreement with Freud,
aside from his resentment that Freud favored the Zurich psychoanalysts,
was over the basic causes of neurosis. Adler believed that issues
of dominance, submission, and aggression were at the center of
mental illness. In contrast, Freud believed that sex was at the
center of all mental illness. Adler's theory of neurosis focused
on the "inferiority complex." Adlerian psychology, as it came to
be called in English, became quite popular in its own right, in
part because of its wide appeal to psychotherapists who rejected
Freud's exclusive focus on sexuality. In October of 1912, Wilhelm
Stekel, who had been co-editor of the Zentralblatt with
Adler, also resigned from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Stekel
had had a complicated relationship with Freud; Ernest Jones, Freud's
biographer and an active member of the International Association
from its beginnings, claims that Stekel would frequently tell Freud
one thing in private and say another thing in public, as if to
challenge Freud to contradict him. Whatever its nature, this relationship
fell apart in 1912 and was never mended.
These bitter resignations were difficult for Freud. For
a time, the tight-knit community of psychoanalysts had shared an
"us against the world" attitude that brought them together against
the mainstream medical community. Now, however, the community was falling
apart just as it was beginning to gain an international foothold.
But for the time being Freud still had Carl Jung, whom he thought
of as the crown prince or heir apparent of psychoanalysis. In 1911,
he and Jung were still on excellent terms, although Freud had begun
to notice that Jung seemed far more interested in questions of
mythology and mysticism than he was in neurosis, the basic subject
matter of psychoanalysis. In 1912, however, Jung's interest in
mysticism led to a fundamental disagreement about the foundations
of psychoanalysis, and Freud's relationship with Jung rapidly fell
apart. In addition to rejecting the importance of sexuality to neurosis,
as had Adler and Stekel, Jung also personally disliked many of
his colleagues in the International Association, particularly those
Viennese psychoanalysts who still remained. In December of 1912,
Freud and Jung seemed reconcile for a brief time, but when the
fourth congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association met
in Munich in September of 1913, Freud was adamantly opposed to
Jung's ideas. Although Jung was re-elected president, he resigned
from the editorship of the Jahrbuch in October,
and from the presidency itself in April of 1914.
In the midst of all the turmoil within the psychoanalytic
camp, Ernest Jones, who remained staunchly dedicated to Freud and
to psychoanalysis, decided to take action. He approached Freud
with the idea of creating a secret group of loyal psychoanalysts
who would help to protect Freud, and psychoanalysis itself, from
defections such as Adler's, Stekel's, and Jung's. Freud agreed
enthusiastically. The "Committee," as it came to be called, consisted
of Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, Otto Rank, Hanns Sachs, Karl Abraham,
and, starting in 1919, Max Eitington. For the next fifteen years,
the Committee would be a mutual support group and early- warning network
that helped maintain psychoanalysis during the difficult years
during and immediately after the First World War.
In 1911, a new psychoanalytic journal called Imago was founded.
It focused on the non-medical applications of psychoanalysis. This
was an area in which Freud had become increasingly interested,
in part because of his conversations with Jung about the role of
unconscious symbols in mythology and legend. The role of such "collective"
symbols and archetypes was to become the center of Jung's psychology
after his break with Freud in 1913.
For Freud, the application of psychoanalysis to art and
history remained a life- long interest, one that became increasingly
important in the years after the First World War, although it
never took the prominence in his psychology that it did in Jung's.
Freud's essay Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, first
published in May of 1910, interpreted one of the artists dreams&mdashincorrectly,
it turns out, due to a crucial error in translation–as a sign of da
Vinci's homosexuality. A more important work was Freud's Totem
and Taboo, which was published in 1913. In it, Freud painted
a picture of a tribal horde in which a dominant father figure controlled
the women and children. His sons eventually rose up against him,
killed him, and ate him. Then, driven by the guilt of their act
and desirous of a way to prevent themselves from killing each other,
they instituted a law against mating within the horde, i.e. of
having sex with their sisters. This, according to Freud, was the
origin of the incest taboo. The totem, an animal that represented the
horde, was supposed to be a representation of the murdered father,
and thus a reminder of the sons' guilt and of the taboo against
incest. Anyone who shared the family totem was ineligible for mating.
Freud's work was based, to some extent, on previous reports of
the use of totems and taboos in "primitive" cultures, but it was
an extraordinarily speculative portrait. Freud continued this style
of speculative reasoning in occasional works throughout his life,
including Civilization and Its Discontents, published
in 1930, and Moses and Monotheism, published in
1938.
