Carl Jung left Sigmund Freud because he stopped believing two of Freud’s central claims. Freud held that human motivation is at root sexual and that the unconscious is personal to each of us. Jung came to see sex as one part of a wider life force. Below the personal unconscious he placed a deeper, shared layer. After the break he built his own school and gave it the name “analytical psychology”.
A friendship that lasted a few years
The two men worked together for only a short time, as a 2012 BBC Radio 4 documentary by Lisa Appignanesi stressed. Jung was then a psychiatrist at the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich, working under Eugen Bleuler. In 1906 he published Studies in Word Association and mailed a copy to Freud. At their first meeting in Vienna the pair talked for 13 hours without a pause, Psychology Today reports.
Freud called the younger man his “son and heir”. By 1910 he had made Jung president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. The Conversation suggests Freud may also have hoped that a Swiss pastor’s son would counter the view that psychoanalysis was a Jewish movement.
When it ended
The sources differ on the year. The BBC programme dates the final split to 1912. The Conversation puts the bitter break in 1913. The BBC adds that the two men never worked together again.
What the split was about
The Conversation traces the rift to different views of what drives people and what the unconscious holds. For Freud the unconscious stored what one person had repressed over a lifetime. Jung proposed a collective unconscious common to all humanity and inherited from our ancestors.
Dreams split them too. Freud read a dream as a desire in disguise. Jung read it as a symbolic picture of the state of the unconscious.
The school that followed
Analytical psychology kept Freud’s belief that unconscious forces shape the mind and behaviour. It added archetypes, the shared patterns Jung found in myth and religion across many cultures. The school has never agreed a fixed list of them. Examples include the hero, the sage and the mother.
Its other idea was individuation, the growth towards a whole and authentic self. That view ran against the psychoanalytic belief that personality sets early in life. The Conversation notes that recent research finds personality keeps changing through adulthood. The essay also credits Jung with the discovery of introversion and extraversion.
Jung went on seeing patients, writing and lecturing until he died in 1961. Appignanesi’s documentary asked how much of the later divide in the field goes back to that one quarrel.
