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in the Freud archives, has insisted that the supposed liaison is a fiction. (This
is one more example where the policies of the Freud archives until very
recendy had done everyone, including Freud, a major disservice.)
Swales's unsupported assertion is fundamental for the argument of
John Kerr's book,
A Most Dangerous Method,
on the Freud-Jung split, a
work I admire for its literacy and for the important scientific issues it rais–
es. However, there are problems with some of its arguments and
conclusions. Kerr, an historian and editor, assumes the gospel truth of the
Minna affair.
It
is essential to his interpretation of two important matters:
first, when Freud refused to disclose his associations to a dream on the trip
to America and said he could not risk his authority; what he refused to dis–
close was this intimate relationship. But why need it be the Minna affair?
Why not something else?
It
is pure conjecture on Kerr's part. Second, he
assumes that Jung's knowledge of the affair and Freud's ofJung's relation–
ship with Spielrein was a kind of symmetrical blackmail that each held over
the other and that underlay their final split. But let us assume the Minna
affair did not happen. Were there not plenty of grounds for disagreement
on fundamental matters? What I think stuck in Freud's craw, as it were, was
his sense ofJung's equivocal religiosity and mysticism. After all,Jung soon
was exploring mandalas, the Tibetan
Book of the D ead,
and alchemy, along
with astute observations about the life cycle and the stereotypical modes
of perception that the theory of archetypes entailed. If the Minna affair did
not occur, then it cannot be argued that Freud was blinded to the signifi–
cance of present conflict because he could not face the implications of his
sexual imbroglio in 1909 and 1910. There is little evidence that Freud was
conflicted or deeply disturbed in this particular period of his life. What
Ellenberger calls his creative illness that led to his self-analysis occurred
earlier, beginning in 1894 and ending around 1900, just as the split with
Freud inaugurated Jung's creative illness. Finally, Zvi Lothane has argued
persuasively that Spielrein played no role at all in Freud's break with Jung.
But let us take up Kerr's far more serious concerns, that the split and
the defection of the Swiss, Bleuler and Jung, prevented the psychoanalyt–
ic movement from becoming a truly scientific forum in which data were
openly criticized and tested.
Kerr, like Esterson, also deplores Freud's inability to spell out precisely
how he made his interpretations, on what evidence, and with what criteria of
judgment. These are, of course, serious charges. But I think a close reading of
Freud's case histories suggests how it was done, since Freud is perfectly can–
did about his reconstructions and what the patient actually remembered.
I am at a loss to see quite how Freud-or Jung for that matter-could
have produced a text that would have encompassed the interpretation of
the large variations that would inevitably arise in individual cases, although
