Books: The Dark & Light of Dreams

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For all that, few latter-day psychoanalysts take Jung seriously, save for his early studies in word association and schizophrenia. The weight of his immense influence remains outside his science: clergymen are encouraged by his recognition of God (whom Freud considered a creation of man's imagination); esthetes and classicists are enriched by his devoted studies of art and symbol (to Freud, expressions of neurotic conflict); and spiritualists of all varieties take heart from his recognition of occult happenings (to Freud, nonsense).

Caesar's Curse. Jung's encounter with Freud was less a clash of intellects than a crash of personalities. Freud, Jewish and Austrian, thought at first that Jung, Swiss and Christian, was just the man to inherit leadership of the psychoanalytic movement and broaden it, and for a few years their association was close. But Jung's own thoughts soon diverged from Freud's, and with surprising pugnacity, the two analysts began their attacks on each other. Jung, in this book, prefers to discuss the conflict mainly in terms of the salient dreams that defined it for him. Whenever the two got together to swap dreams, Freud would invariably find parricidal elements in Jung's dream scenes. Freud, Jung says, began to smother him with paternalism—Freud the Father, Jung the Son—but he was obsessed with the idea that there was murder in Jung's heart. Once, when Jung told Freud of a dream in which he had seen two skulls, Freud nervously demanded to know whose they were. "My wife and my sister-in-law," Jung recalls lying. "After all, I had to name someone whose death was worth the wishing!"

When Jung at last dared to challenge Freud's early-libido theory (that neurosis results from sexual trauma in childhood), Jung recalls that Freud fainted dead away at the threat to his authority. Having lost his God, Jung says, Freud had made an even more terrible god out of sexuality. "Sexuality evidently meant more to Freud than to other people," Jung wrote. "For him it was something to be religiously observed." To Jung, Freud was a tragic figure—an authoritarian beset with the curse of the Caesars, a hollow old man haunted by obsessions. At last, Jung dreamed of Freud conclusively: he saw him dressed in the uniform of an imperial Austrian customs inspector.

Jung notes that nothing is a clearer symbol of peevish authority than a customs inspector—but that is only half the dream. Readers who respect the power of a pun are free to ponder which of his customs Jung didn't want Freud inspecting, and as far as Jung's critics are concerned, that is the heart of the matter. For how else account for a man whose method in science was often to find enlightenment in a dream, pronounce the dream a hypothesis, then dream it ten times over again, and announce the establishment of a theory? Delving into his own unconscious (he once took years off from his lecturing at the University of Zurich in order to devote himself to replaying the games of his childhood in the hope of finding clues to the riddle of his psyche), Jung often seemed in flight from his times, in flight from science, in flight from Freud.