-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Freud, Jung and Hall the Kingmaker
Saul Rosenzweig�1992
Hogrefe & Hubert Publishers
Box 2487
Kirkland, Washington 98083-2487
206.820.1500 / 800.228.3749
ISBN 0-88937-1105
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An interesting book. The only visit to the US by Freud. G. Stanley Hall is
not a member of Skull & Bones but was heavily influenced by them. The text is
a bit obtuse, but underneath , one can discern the groundwork of studies that
were very helpful in MK-Ultra. Also note that Clark University was working
with the State Hospital at Worcester. 477pps.
Om
K
--[2]--
Chapter II
The Invitations
The Setting for the Invitations
Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, 40 miles west of Boston, was
founded and endowed by Jonas Clark in 1887 and opened for classes in the fall
of 1889.[1] The founder, son of a farmer, never had the benefit of a college
education but wanted to offer this advantage to future generations of young
men. As it turned out, this goal was to cause perennial conflict between him
and the first president, Granville Stanley Hall, pioneer American
psychologist and educator, until Clark's death. At the insistence of Hall and
under his presidency, Clark University began and continued for its first 12
years as an exclusively graduate school. Hall believed that at the time a
greater contribution could be made by training scientists, scholars and
teachers in preference to undergraduates, for there were no schools then
devoted solely to the education of such specialists. An undergraduate college
was, indeed, added in 1902, after the death in 1900 of Jonas Clark, who had
explicitly provided for it in his will and designated that it not be under
Hall's administration.
A mark of Hall's success in his own special goal was the large number of
advanced degrees in psychology granted during his tenure as head of
psychology and president of the University. In those 31 years, ending in
1920, degrees were awarded to 110 doctors of philosophy, including six women,
and to 81 masters of art, including 11 women. With this record, Clark
University stood for many years in first place among American institutions of
higher learning. This result bespoke Hall's influence even more eloquently
than did his published articles and books. Among the eminent pyschologists
trained at Clark were William Lowe Bryan, James Leuba, Edwin Starbuck, Henry
Goddard, Phyllis Blanchard, Florence Mateer, Arnold Gesell and Lewis M.
Terman. The various graduates ranged over a variety of subdisciplines in
psychology, pure and applied. Because Hall constantly allied psychology with
pedagogy-as education was then called-these specialists were well prepared
for teaching and the training of teachers. Moreover, Hall trained teachers as
such and worked cooperatively with educators at local and distant schools.
The University enjoyed the services of a distinguished Board of Trustees with
whom Hall was able to work successfully despite some conflict with the
founder, Jonas Clark, and the faculty. He devoted special attention to
medical psychology by enlisting the cooperation of nearby Worcester State
Hospital, one of the oldest in the country, established in 1833. Adolf Meyer,
its pathologist, who later became a leader in American psychiatry as well as
the psychiatry department chairperson at Johns Hopkins, was a personal friend
of Hall. At the time of the decennial celebration in 1899 Meyer was head of
the subdivision of psychopathology at Clark, and in 1909 he was one of the
honored participants.
The founding of the University had first been commemorated at the decennial
on a modest scale. Even then the event reached out to distinguished
scientists world-wide. There were five invited lecturers, including two in
the behavioral sciences. The group consisted of Emile Picard, Professor of
Mathematics at the University of Paris; Ludwig Boltzmann, Professor of
Theoretical Physics at the University of Vienna; Santiago Ramon y Cajal,
Professor of Histology at the University of Madrid; Angelo Mosso, Professor
of Physiology at the University of Turin, and August Forel, former Professor
of Psychiatry at the University of Zurich and Director of the Burgholzli
Mental Hospital. The conference was memorialized in a handsome volume with
chapters on the history of the University, reports by department heads, and
the lectures of the scientists.[1a] At this time the psychology department
consisted of five divisions: general psychology, headed by E. C. Sanford;
psychopathology, by Adolf Meyer; anthropology, by A. F. Chamberlain;
pedagogy, by W. H. Burnham; and philosophy, by G. Stanley Hall.
It is noteworthy as a precedent that the celebration in 1899 occurred on July
5-10. The July date is specifically indicated as marking "the completion of
the 10th academic year of the University." The point is significant because,
in contradistinction, the 20th anniversary celebration presently to be
discussed was described in the resulting publication edited by Hall as
marking "the twentieth anniversary of the opening of Clark University." [2]
Lectures were presented on the first four days; honorary degrees conferred on
July 10, 1899. The honored guests stayed at the homes of various members of
the Clark faculty and Board of Trustees. It thus fell to President Hall to
serve as host for the physiological psychologist Professor Angelo Mosso. This
precedent was followed in 1909 when Hall invited Freud and Jung to be his
house guests.
The plan for the 20th anniversary celebration was far more ambitious than
that for 1899.[2a] The participating departments were mathematics, physics
and chemistry, biology, history, psychology and pedagogy. There were 29
invited lecturers and all were awarded honorary degrees. Psychology and
Pedagogy (the behavioral sciences) was represented by eight lecturers: Franz
Boas, anthropology; Leo Burgerstein, education and school hygiene; Sigmund
Freud, psychology and psychiatry; H. S. Jennings, biology; C. G. Jung,
psychology and pedagogy; Adolf Meyer, psychopathology; William Stern,
personality and forensic psychology; and E. B. Titchener, experimental
psychology. These sessions occurred in the period September 6-11, during the
second part of the vigentennial.
Following the decennial precedent, the first part of the psychology
celebration was held in July 1909. It was devoted to child research and
welfare. This general area of child development had for most of Hall's
professional life been of special importance to him and by 1909 he was well
known as an expert in this field. Because this emphasis in the early planning
of the celebration played a significant part in Freud's being invited to
participate, as well as for its intrinsic importance in Hall's career and
reputation, a summary of his devotion to the area is appropriate here.
Hall had embarked upon this specialization in 1883 while still at Johns
Hopkins. His first publication was entitled "The Contents of Children's
Minds" (Hall, 1883). In it he outlined the various topics that appeared to be
promising for serious investigation. These topics were actually pursued by
him and his students during the next 30 years, largely by the questionnaire
method. Though the method was later widely criticized for its lack of
precision, it was much imitated and its disclosure of children's knowledge
about life in the real world had a great influence.
Looking back at his life work one sees that, implicitly or explicitly, child
development was a complement to Hall's establishment in the same year of the
first systematic American laboratory of experimental psychology. For Hall,
the laboratory was to the science of psychology what the child study movement
was to pedagogy (or education).
But the decade prior to Hall's coming to Clark University was chiefly devoted
to experimental psychology. Child study was not pursued assiduously until
after he had lived through the first few years of administrative organization
and some conflict. Then, by 1893, he was able to turn to this type of work in
earnest. In that year he had been a prime mover in organizing the National
Association for the Study of Childhood, and in that same year he published a
paper containing a detailed outline of his investigative plans entitled
"Child Study: The Basis of Exact Education" (Hall, 1893). Ten years of
extensive child research followed, and at the same time he pursued his
reading and thinking with the resultant publication of his two-volume, major
work Adolescence (Hall, 1904a).
Concomitantly with this publication a national movement had been taking shape
under the leadership of labor leaders and social workers concerned mainly
with the evils of child labor. They established the National Child Labor
Committee in 1904 under the chairmanship of Felix Adler, founder of the
Ethical Culture Society. Largely through the influence of this committee
President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 called the first White House Conference
on the welfare of children. Three years later a Children's Bureau was
established in the U. S. Department of Commerce.
In 1909 Hall saw the possibility of combining the fruits of the child labor
movement and the child study movement. In the latter he had been one of the
chief architects. It was in terms of this integration that he thought of
organizing the early part of the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of
the founding of Clark University. Hence he organized and held at the
University a national conference on child study and care. There were five
days of meetings with 15 sessions of nearly 50 addresses by representatives
of 27 child welfare societies. During these sessions a new organization (The
National Child Conference for Research and Welfare) was formed, its
constitution drawn up, and its first officers elected. Hall was elected
President. The intention was to hold such conventions annually, and the
second was held at Clark University in 1910. The contributions of 1909 were
published as Proceedings of the Child Conference for Research and Welfare
held at Clark University in connection with the Celebration of the Twentieth
Anniversary, Worcester, Massachusetts, July 6-10, 1909. [2b]
In anticipation of the 1909 summer events, Hall had formulated a plan for a
Children's Institute at Clark and sought the support of the Board of
Trustees. By the following spring he had prepared a Prospectus. It was an
ambitious enterprise, including a new building for which preliminary
architectural plans were drawn up. Hall had successfully persuaded the Board
(at a special meeting on June 17, 1909) to take action. The minutes of the
meeting succinctly convey what Hall was to do at this time.
"Upon the recommendation of the Committee upon the subject, appointed at the
last meeting, it was voted that the Trustees appropriate from the current,
unused income of the University funds, five thousand dollars ($5,000) a year
for three years beginning September 1, 1909, to establish an Institute for
the collection, diffusion and increase of the scientific knowledge of
childhood and for its practical application to child welfare; this Institute
to be organized and directed by Dr. Hall under the guidance and control of
the Board of Trustees, to be a department of the University, and to be
located in the new building." (Minutes of the Board, p. 248).
It is in this setting of Hall's early plans for the vigentennial that one
must seek to understand the first invitation he extended to Sigmund Freud.
Hall was apparently at this point in 1908 attempting to enlist Freud to
further his aims in the establishment of a Children's Institute. He saw Freud
as a developmental psychologist whose views on early childhood, including
sexuality and the unconscious, were crucial for understanding the child below
the surface of everyday observation.
Freud's Invitations
Freud received two invitations to participate in the 20th anniversary Clark
celebration-the first dated December 15, 1908, which he declined; the second,
dated February 16, 1909, which he accepted. The differences between the two
invitations, as well as his different reactions, are more than casually
instructive. In the first invitation, Clark's president G. Stanley Hall,
after introducing himself in terms of a profound and long interest in Freud's
work, proposed a group of four to six lectures, either in German or English,
"setting forth your own views" to be presented during the first week of July
1909 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Clark University's founding.
Hall proposed "an honorarium of four hundred dollars or 1600 marks, to cover
expenses." (It is of some interest that on the same date Hall invited Wilhelm
Wundt, his former teacher and the founder of the first experimental
laboratory of psychology, to whom he offered $750 [3000 marks].) When Freud
declined in a letter dated December 29, 1908, he acknowledged the honor with
appreciation but could not accept the invitation for the reason that at the
proposed date he would lose three weeks of private practice which continued
to July 15, then resumed at the end of September. As a prelude to his
statement of regret, Freud mused, "I do not know how the following difficulty
can be overcome." When Hall wrote again two months later, the obstacle was
removed: the honorarium was raised to $750 and a postponement was made to the
second week of September. Moreover, an honorary degree was now promised
Freud. When Freud accepted the second invitation, in a letter dated February
29, 1909, he not only noted the increase in "travel expenses" but mentioned
the honorary degree. It was in these four letters of December 15, 1908
through February 29, 1909 that the correspondence between the two men began,
and it would continue, more sparsely at the end, until 1923, the year before
Hall died. (See Part Two.)
This statement of the facts regarding the two invitations received by Freud
requires now to be supplemented by a consideration of the motivation that had
presumably led Freud to decline the first one almost impetuously but to
accept the second with distinct enthusiasm. From an examination of Freud's
contemporary correspondence with Jung, as well as with other colleagues,
e.g., Karl Abraham, one learns that both decisions were accompanied by a
penumbra of interpersonal and intrapersonal motives that go far toward
explaining other aspects of the American visit. To pause on the threshold and
consider these circumstances in some detail will make it possible more fully
to comprehend later events at Bremen, New York, and Worcester, and in the
aftermath of the Clark celebration.
Three days before declining Hall's first invitation Freud had written to Karl
Abraham, a disciple in Berlin. The occasion was the rejection by Morton
Prince, editor of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, of a paper on sexual
trauma by Abraham that Prince had earlier seemed interested in receiving.
Without mentioning Hall's invitation, Freud commented about the situation in
America with some reflections that he must have had in mind when he wrote to
Hall: "The hostility by which we are surrounded bids us hold together. Morton
Prince, who has always been a kaleidoscopic character, is this time really
lamentable. Where do the Americans expect to get with this fear of public
prudery?... He [Prince] always begins by over-compensating for his cowardice
and then withdraws into it. In fact he intended to come to Salzburg.[3]
For the Salzburg conference, April 26, 1908, Morton Prince had announced a
paper "Psychogalvanic reactions in a case of multiple personality," but in
the end he was unable to attend. This vacillation on Prince's part was not
lost on Freud who guarded his cause with care and zeal.[ 4]
Freud, therefore, had misgivings about America that entered into his prompt
declination of Hall's first invitation apart from financial considerations.
Writing to Jung the day after he declined, he told him the good news about
the invitation but explained that he had declined "without even consulting
you" for the "crucial reason" that a loss of "several thousand kronen" would
have resulted. He concluded, "I don't really believe that Clark University, a
small but serious institution, can postpone its activities for three
weeks."[5] Nevertheless, it is clear from this statement that when Freud
declined, he had meant to leave open the possibility of a postponement. In
the event, he must have felt elated because Hall ostensibly complied. Freud
did not realize that the whole celebration had not been postponed until
September.
Resuming the question of Freud's having turned down the first invitation, we
find a second letter to Jung that repeated the negative appraisal of America.
After mentioning that Brill and Jones had communicated some positive aspects
of the American response to psychoanalysis, Freud added: "I also think that
once they discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will
drop us.
Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great. That
is why I have no desire to risk the trip in July." [6]
There is a revealing bit of contretemps at this point in the correspondence.
In Freud's letter of mid-January Jung detected a slip of the pen criticizing
Jung's sexual attitudes. In response, Jung wrote: "We have noticed this
prudishness, which used to be worse than it is now; now I can stomach it. I
don't water down the sexuality any more." [7] Jung's hypersensitivity is
singular because in this letter of his for the first time the parallel
between Freud's patient, Little Hans, and Jung's disturbed young daughter
Agathe came to the fore. He explicitly observed at the end of it that the
girl was aware of the "beautiful bottom" of her little brother and
underscored this observation by a long gloss about children's words for the
cloacal and genital areas. He concluded with the statement that the child was
plainly referring to these areas. In view of the special importance of the
"castration threat" to Little Hans (by Freud's interpretation), Jung's
statement implied that the little girl had noticed the difference between her
bottom and that of her new brother. And a week later the parallel between the
two cases in this regard was noted by Freud with stress on the nucleus of the
neurosis.[8] However, when Jung recounted the case at Clark in September, he
omitted this point.
As for Prince's prudishness, there was no abatement. His hostility to
Freud's ideas persisted. That is probably why he did not attend the Clark
celebration in the fall. But he wrote to Freud in advance to explain that he
was committed to be in Europe at that time-to which Freud quipped, "so that
he will miss me on both continents, etc. I shall be just as glad not to see
him." [9]
In a special sense Prince epitomized what Freud perceived as the entrenched
American resistance to psychoanalysis. Hence it required a strong antidote
for Freud to change his mind; and Hall provided it in his second invitation
with its extraordinary concessions. He seemed to sense, as if by a personal
sympathy, what Freud needed-an identification that perhaps reflected his own
differences with Prince and, as will presently appear, with Prince's mentor,
William James.
One thus arrives at the question of how Freud overcame his concern about
American prudery when, on February 29, he accepted Hall's second invitation.
The increase in the honorarium coupled with the new date (that enabled Freud
to continue his practice until mid-July and to resume at the end of
September) surely entered into his decision. But probably even more
significant was Hall's promise that Freud would receive an honorary degree.
That promise assured Freud that at least Hall and his associates did not
entertain reservations. A friendly reception could be expected in Worcester.
That Freud did not overprize the honorary degree was borne out by later
events. This was the only such degree Freud would receive though he attained
great renown during the remaining 30 years of his life. Hall caught the
contemporary significance for Freud in a synoptic article he published about
the 20th anniversary soon after the celebration: "It was remarked at Clark
several times by his chief European pupil, Professor Jung of Zurich, who was
with him, that the invitation to America, the honorary degree bestowed upon
him, and especially the sympathetic attitude of those who heard him, came at
the psychological moment for him personally as well as for his views." [10]
Another factor that may have influenced Freud to accept concerned Pierre
Janet. In inviting Freud to participate, Hall in his first letter held out
the inducement that the distinguished French psychopathologist, a rival of
Freud in respect to the theory of neurosis, had previously visited America
and given a series of lectures which had had a profound influence. Hall
wrote: "We believe that a concise statement of your own results and point of
view would now be exceedingly opportune, and perhaps in some sense mark an
epoch in the history of these studies in this country." [11] Janet's lectures
were given in 1906 on the occasion of the inauguration of new buildings of
the Harvard Medical School in Boston. When these lectures were published the
next year, the book was dedicated to James Jackson Putnam, Professor of
Neurology at the Harvard Medical School. [12] Putnam's subsequent support for
Freud, during and after the Clark celebration, indeed did, as Hall had
surmised, represent a clear gain for psychoanalysis vis-a-vis Janet's views.
Hall may also have been thinking of Janet's earlier visit to the U.S.A. when
he addressed the Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis at the
widely-known World's Fair of 1904. On that occasion Morton Prince also
spoke.[13] Prince's opposition to Freud has been noted; it may now be added
that Prince was an adherent of Janet in formulating a structural theory of
dissociation. Both Janet and Prince differed from Freud in his espousal of a
dynamic theory emphasizing the repression of sexual conflict.
In addition to the rational and conscious factors that appear to have brought
about Freud's rapid acceptance of Hall's second invitation, there was a
further influence that arose from very private aspects of his idioverse. In
these terms Freud's expressed earlier reservations were overcome by an
accrual of unconscious motives which explain aspects of the journey that the
rational grounds do not. One can discern some of this dynamic contribution
from the correspondence with Jung, especially Freud's letters of March 9 and
April 16, 1909, the one before Jung visited Freud in Vienna (the second
visit) and the other, 18 days after that Visit.[14] Here we have Freud's own
free associations-essentially a part of his continuing self-analysis.
In the letter of March 9, Freud told Jung that he had accepted Hall's second
invitation and "that the festivities had been postponed to the week of
September 6." He continued: "In 1886, when I started my practice, I was
thinking only of a two-month trial period in Vienna; if it did not prove
satisfactory, I was planning to go to America and found an existence that I
would subsequently have asked my fiancee in Hamburg to share. You see, we
both of us had nothing, or more precisely, I had a large and impoverished
family and she a small inheritance of roughly 3000 fl. from her Uncle Jacob,
who had been a professor of classical philology in Bonn. But unfortunately
things went so well in Vienna that I decided to stay on, and we were married
in the autumn of the same year. And now, twenty-three years later, I am to go
to America after all, not, to be sure, to make money, but in response to an
honorable call!"[15]
This passage indicates that the now accepted invitation to America had a
longstanding meaning for Freud. Hence it meant more to him than "anything
that has happened in the last few years" and, as he stated, he could think of
nothing else. That he entertained a plan to emigrate to America if his
practice in Vienna did not prove successful is, however, only part of what
particularly happened in 1886. There is substantial ground for the view that
just prior to his marriage, while serving as a military doctor during
maneuvers in August-September at a locale about 40 miles west of his own
birthplace (Freiberg), Freud experienced a regressive personality disturbance
quite similar to that of his later patient the "Rat Man."[16] Though the full
details for this hypothesis cannot be presented here, it is essential to take
advantage of Freud's reminiscences to explore this hypothesis. One can then
comprehend better a number of odd incidents during the journey: for example,
the fainting episode at Bremen and the attack of prostatitis during the trip
to Columbia University, discussed in Chapters III and IV. It thus becomes
possible to interpret the deeper currents of the Freud/Jung "mutual
enchantment."
The "Rat Man" was the convenient name for a case of obsessional neurosis
analyzed by Freud in 1907-1908, in which rats played a prominent part in the
obsessions. The patient came to Freud for treatment in October 1907. He was a
lawyer, age 29, whose initial complaints consisted of fears that some injury
might befall his father and/or his lady friend, to both of whom he was very
attached. His complex feelings toward his father were dominated by hostility,
including death wishes. The patient was superstitiously concerned about
questions of death, particularly of relatives whose demise he often seemed
able to predict. He was therefore sometimes called "carrion crow." Hostility
towards his father and others was often deflected to himself. Thus he
experienced suicidal compulsions, such as the temptation to cut his own
throat with a razor. During childhood he also believed that his father was
able to read his thoughts and that his own thoughts (or wishes) were often
transformed into reality by a kind of magic ("omnipotence of thought").
Freud soon discovered that two incidents during recent army maneuvers had
brought the patient's symptoms to the fore and led to his being consulted.
One of these involved the recounting to the patient by a fellow officer, whom
he called the "Cruel Captain," of a form of punishment, practiced in the
East, in which a pot containing live rats was strapped to a man's buttocks.
The Captain seemed to derive a sadistic satisfaction from the telling. (One
surmises that the Captain was allusively threatening the patient with such
punishment on account of some offense, but this intent is not spelled out.)
The patient was fascinated by the "Cruel Captain's" narrative. It appeared to
Freud that some homosexual attraction (and revulsion) was involved. The
second special incident during maneuvers concerned the patient's losing his
pince-nez. Again, the "Cruel Captain" was in some way implicated in the
confusion that arose in the payment of 3.80 kronen due at the post office
upon the arrival of a replacement of the glasses from Vienna.
In attempting to reconstruct the early influences that had contributed to the
symptoms, the patient's biting of a sibling (as a rat might do) during
childhood stood out. He felt implicated in the death of a sister (Katherine)
who was three-and-one-half years old., Severe punishment of the patient by
the father, including a dire prophecy about the future of the miscreant (a
"castration" threat), lay at the root of the illness. Not only jealousy
between siblings but infantile sexual misdeeds, including masturbation, were
involved.
Freud presented the case as the keynote address at the first psychoanalytic
congress, which occurred at Salzburg, April, 1908. The analysis was then
still in progress. The treatment lasted for about a year, until September
1908, at which time the patient seemed to be cured of his major complaints.
But the publication of the case did not occur until the middle of 1909, and
during the interim Freud was able to mull over the details of the analysis.
It was Freud's practice to destroy the notes and drafts he had used in
preparing any publication, including his five classic case histories, but in
the case of the Rat Man, he made an unexplained exception. A portion of the
current treatment record was found among his papers after his death. Though
most of the notes were absorbed in the published account, the following
points, among others, were omitted: that the patient had been "confined to
barracks" for a three-week period during his compulsory military career; and
three direct or indirect allusions to his having one undescended testis
(unilateral cryptorchism), a condition that entered into his dream life and
into his relationship with his lady (who had at one time had an ovariectomy).
In view of these omissions, it is noteworthy that at one point in the
original record, after Freud had mentioned incidents connected with the death
of the patient's sibling Katherine, he wrote: "My uncertainty and
forgetfulness on these last two points seem to be intimately connected ....
(They were forgotten owing to complexes of my own.) ... Death was brought
close to him by his sister's death, and he really believed that you die if
you masturbate'' (Standard Edition, 10, 264).
As above stated, Freud began the treatment of the Rat Man in October 1907 and
continued it until September 1908. He remained in touch with him for some
time afterwards; thus we learn from the letters Freud wrote to Jung that the
Rat Man had married in the fall of 1910. During 1909, notably after Jungs
second visit to Freud in Vienna, Freud, despite other obligations and
considerable fatigue, resolved to write up the case. Thus on June 3, 1909 he
told Jung that he had the sudden impulse to write up the case history. He
wrote: "I suddenly feel like writing up the Salzburg Rat- Man, and if you
like I can give you the piece for the second number [of the Jahrbuch]. It
will not be long because in print I shall have to be much more discreet than
in a lecture. But here is a case that will enable me to throw full light on
certain aspects of the truly complicated phenomenon of obsessional neurosis.
I am no longer tired, I shall have a full schedule in June, but shall only be
working half time during the first two weeks in July and am confident of
being able to complete the article before the summer holiday." [17]
By the end of the month he again referred to the case history. He confessed
that his energy was "pretty well exhausted, except for one undertaking":
"This one undertaking is my paper about the Rat Man. I am finding it very
difficult for it is almost beyond my power of presentation; the paper will
probably be unintelligible ... outside our immediate circle.... Unfortunately
this paper ... is becoming too bulky. It just pours out of me, and even so
it's inadequate, incomplete and therefore untrue. A wretched business. I am
determined to finish it before leaving and to do nothing more before setting
sail for our America" (p. 238). This description of the process of
composition- the resolve to finish the business, the difficulties encountered
though the material poured out but was "incomplete and therefore untrue"
-suggest that he was not only being discreet with respect to the private life
of the patient but was probably omitting much of its resemblance to his own
life.
With these considerations in mind the earlier disclosures about 1886 that
Freud made to Jung may be viewed as perhaps paving the way for the
composition of the Rat Man case. Was he perhaps now recording in the
composition of this case, even if obliquely, events and fantasies similar to
those he had entertained for much of his troubled life-fantasies that will
reveal themselves to the prepared reader of The Interpretation of Dreams and
Freud's various other contributions (e.g., the Leonardo essay)?
It should, of course, be understood that Freud was not actually the
obsessional neurotic that he presented to his readers in the long case
history published in 1909. There was a contemporary patient whom he treated
in 1907-1908. But in keeping with the scheme he used in common with many
creative writers, Freud's chief case histories expressed three levels of
communication. At the recondite (the inframediate level)�the most personal-he
used himself or some well-known relative or friend as a prototype. At the
next (intermediate) level came the observed patient and, finally, at the
immediate level of the narrative, a rough blend of the other two levels was
presented. For this reason the history of the actual patient when known
usually exhibits gaps which it is possible to fill from below, as it were.
Reciprocally, one can read the case presentation as a partial communication
of the inframediate level.[18]
To return now to the case itself, we now know that there was an obsessional
neurotic, Ernst Lanzer, who came to Freud for treatment in 1907. But what has
not hitherto been recognized is that this contingency resembled in essence
what Freud himself had experienced in 1886 at Olmutz, Moravia. Freud appears
to have had a serious personality disturbance toward the end of the army
maneuvers which lasted from August 9 to September '10. By this hypothesis
Freud, in his writing of Lanzer's case history in 1909, drew also upon his
own experience of 1886, particularly when he felt the need to fill the gaps
in his patient's narrative.
This process is clarified by the second letter from Freud to Jung mentioned
above, dated April 16, 1909. Allusion to it opens the extended discussion of
Freud's identity as Rat Man and leads into confirmatory evidence of the
identity hypothesis. [18a]
The reasoning involved will appear strange to conscious ratiocination, but
one cannot expect to understand the thinking of a Rat Man by sticking to
conscious logic. In the world of the obsessional neurotic, who has a
particular history, one must exploit the "compliance of chance," explained in
Note [18a], to patch up discrepancies and repair failing friendship by
exercising ingenuity. By composing the Rat Man case history in the following
weeks, Freud would try to accomplish this feat And perhaps also give the feat
a certain permanence. Hence his resolve, as we have seen, to perform the task
before leaving for America in August. With that journey he would enter a new
phase of his unconsciously determined life, and appear on the lecture
platform in Worcester as if by the "omnipotence" of his own thought and
wishes he was fulfilling an "incredible daydream."
Freud's remark at Clark about this realization of an "incredible
daydream" lends itself to idiodynamic interpretation. Not only should one
consider that portion of his idioverse in which he is identified with the Rat
Man (cf. "omnipotence of wishes"), but one should take into account a
theoretical formulation that he set forth at this time. It appeared as an
unsigned interpolation in a mono-graph by Otto Rank (1909) entitled, The Myth
of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology. It
consisted of six pages (ibid., 63-68), later included in the Standard Edition
under the title "Family Romances." (The German original in-cluded the further
words "of Neurotic Individuals," which the translator infelicitously
omitted.) To Rank's psychoanalytic inter-pretation of the myths of such
heroes as Oedipus, Moses, Jesus, Siegfried and Tristan, Freud added his very
own formulation of the theme. In it he invoked the personal mythologies of
certain talented neurotic patients in whom the Oedipus complex is
uncon-sciously elaborated to include the elements of mysterious birth,
often accompanied by congenital and social handicaps which are
compensated in fantasy by eventual greatness. This contribution by Freud (and
Rank) at this point in the history of psychoanalysis has a peculiar relevance
to Freud himself as just such a neurotic hero who in 1909 received the
vocation to international fame by the invitation of Stanley Hall. With it
came the historic turning point in the fate of Freud's Oedipal theory and,
simultaneously, of his own neurotic fantasies. Little wonder that both Freud
himself and some unsympathetic critics referred to psychoanalysis as a
Freudian mythology. But from the Freudian standpoint (as ex-pounded
by Rank and Freud in 1909) social epochs have often been an expression of a
leader's private and "neurotic" fantasy projected to become a social reality,
with historic effect, fortunate or unfor-tunate for humanity. Yet as William
James (1902, pp. 6-21, 374--378) has maintained, the origins of a belief do
not constitute the best criteria for judging its validity. Nevertheless, they
do provide a guide for the understanding of its nature or shape. Thus the
exploits of military leaders like Alexander and Napoleon or religious
leaders like Moses and Jesus have had unconscious meaning that Rank
and Freud could quite pertinently attribute to an Oedipus complex, and they
thus explained in psychoanalytic terms the significance of the hero myth. At
the stage of the history of psychoanalysis that was-involved in the visit to
America in September 1909, Freud was, in terms of his own neurosis as well as
of his social mission, not only enacting a biographical event but was
simultaneously corroborating his theory of the unconscious. Hence his sense
of realizing an "incredible daydream" as he stepped on the lecture platform
at Clark University in a galaxy of internationally recognized scientific
leaders such as the physicists Ernest Rutherford, Albert Michelson and Robert
W. Wood.
Jung's Invitation
White the evidence for Freud's invitations to participate in the Clark
vigentennial is quite explicit, Jung's invitation is veiled in something of a
mystery. That he was invited is in itself surprising because he was only 34
years old-the youngest of all the invited lecturers-and his record of
publications was then neither lengthy nor unusually impressive. It is true
that Hall was acquainted with Jung's work on word-association which he
employed conspicuously in his study of Mrs. Piper, the medium, conducted in
collaboration with Amy Tanner in the spring of 1909 (as discussed at length
in Chapter V below). But Hall called it the "Jung-Freud tests" and thus
linked Jung to Freud although Jung had independently used this method (of
Francis Galton) to explore the validity of Freud's theories. The implication
is that Hall did not consider Jung an important scientific innovator in his
own right.
But the mentioned enigma does not arise from Jung's status as a tyro in
science. It exists because none of the extant contemporary correspondence of
Hall, Jung or Freud mentions the initial invitation. Yet there is a
voluminous file of correspondence between Freud and Jung (cf. the Freud/Jung
Letters) and a supposedly complete file of the correspondence between Freud
and Hall concerning the visit (published in Part Two of this volume). No
correspondence between Hall and Jung has been found though it has been
assiduously sought in both the Jung Archives in Switzerland and the Hall
Papers at Clark University in Worcester.
The first mention of Jung's invitation to Clark is a retrospective reference
in a letter from Jung to Freud dated 12 June 1909. Jung alluded to the
invitation in the words, "Isn't it splendid about America?" In a footnote the
editor added, "Jung evidently had sent Freud the news of his invitation to
Clark University, but the telegram or letter is missing." He then stated that
Freud wrote Pfister, the Swiss pastor-psychoanalyst, on June 13 about Jung's
invitation and implied that by then Pfister probably had the news from Jung.
The editor continued that though, according to Jung's autobiography, Jung and
Freud had been invited "simultaneously and independently," this assertion
could not be verified because it had not been possible to document Hall's
invitation to Jung.[19]
The consistent omission of letters in contradiction to normal expectations
recalls "Silver Blaze" by Conan Doyle with the curious incident of the dog
that didn't bark in the nightmissing evidence that Holmes interpreted to mean
that the thief was not a stranger to the dog. The theft did prove to be an
"inside" job. In the present instance, the absent letters similarly suggest
design. Did Hall, Jung and Freud agree not to reveal the initial
circumstances of the invitation to Jung?
pps. 13-35
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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