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This week David Cronenberg’s feature-length shrink cos­tume drama, A Dan­ger­ous Method, about the most famous — and doomed — love-affair in psy­cho­analy­sis, pre­mières in the UK. I’m talk­ing of course about the pas­sion­ate, twisted and teas­ingly uncon­sum­mated romance between Sig­mund Freud and Carl Jung.

Despite very mixed reviews I’ll be going to see it when it’s put on gen­eral release as I’m a sucker for this kind of costume-drama nos­tal­gia — and let’s face it, any­thing to do with psy­cho­analy­sis in the skin-deep Twenty First Cen­tury is nos­tal­gia. Although both are good actors, the cast­ing of Michael Fass­ben­der as the mous­ta­chioed Jung and Viggo Morten­son as the bearded Freud seems, like some of the lush loca­tions in the trailer, to be mostly an aes­thetic rather than dra­matic consideration.

Put another way, A Dan­ger­ous Method looks like Broke­back Alp, with cigars.

But this is a love-triangle, with Keira Knightly as Sabina Spiel­rein, an hys­ter­i­cal Russ­ian patient of Jung’s that he ends up hav­ing a sex­ual rela­tion­ship with, much to Freud’s dis­ap­proval. Spiel­rein, who despite (or because of) her entan­gle­ment with Jung ended up a patient and then con­fi­dante of Freud’s, was to become an ana­lyst her­self and her work may have inspired both men — who were to end up bit­ter enemies.

Although it’s pretty clear that in most impor­tant things Freud was right and Jung just plain wrong, nobody is really inter­ested in that. In fact, pre­cisely because of the airy-fairy inco­her­ence of his ideas, and because in his ruth­less ego­tism he was more of the kind of per­son we can relate to now, Jung seems to be regarded more sym­pa­thet­i­cally these days than Freud. Jung the keen astrologer who came up with the breath­tak­ingly neb­u­lous con­cepts of ‘racial mem­ory’, ‘the col­lec­tive uncon­scious’ and ‘syn­chronic­ity’ is hip. Or maybe, just a hipster.

But as an incur­able Freudian myself I would say that. Here’s a par­ti­san review I penned of a biog­ra­phy of Jung, The Ayran Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Gus­tav Jung’ by Richard Noll, back in the 20th Cen­tury — when such things seemed to matter.

JEW-ENVY AND OTHER JUNGIAN COMPLEXES

By Mark Simpson

(Orig­i­nally appeared in Scot­land on Sun­day, April 1998)

On Octo­ber 28, 1907 Carl Gus­tav Jung was in an unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally can­did mood. On that day he wrote a love let­ter to Sig­mund Freud, father of the new Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal Move­ment that Jung had just joined. But this love let­ter, in keep­ing with Freud’s own the­o­ries, was a touch ambiva­lent: ‘My ven­er­a­tion for you has some­thing of the char­ac­ter of a “reli­gious crush”,’ he admit­ted. ‘Though it does not really bother me, I still feel it is dis­gust­ing and ridicu­lous because of its unde­ni­able erotic under­tone. This abom­inable feel­ing comes from the fact that as a boy I was the vic­tim of a sex­ual assault of a man I once worshipped.’

It turned out just five years later that this some­thing ‘dis­gust­ing’, ‘ridicu­lous’ and ‘abom­inable’ did bother the impec­ca­bly Aryan doc­tor from an impec­ca­bly pious Swiss Ger­man bour­geois fam­ily after all, and Jung split from the Jew­ish Dar­win to found his own psy­cho­log­i­cal movement.

Inter­est­ingly, the split with Freud was osten­si­bly over Freud’s insis­tence that the sex­ual dri­ves were the orig­i­nal motor force of all human actions. Jung felt this didn’t allow for the ‘nat­ural’ reli­gious and spir­i­tual incli­na­tions of the human race. In other words, Freud refused to accept that ‘reli­gion’ was some kind of basic drive and that a ‘reli­gious crush’ might have ‘erotic under­tones’ but wasn’t erotic in ori­gin. In Jung’s eyes, he was once again a vic­tim of a sex­ual assault from a man he once wor­shipped. (He even wrote later of Freud’s ‘rape of the Holy’.)

As Freud feared, Jung and his mytho­log­i­cal mumbo-jumbo proved to be a ral­ly­ing point for many who rejected the pes­simistic and dif­fi­cult view of the human con­di­tion that psy­cho­analy­sis put for­ward, pre­fer­ring Jung’s roman­tic meta­physics of ‘the col­lec­tive uncon­scious’ and ‘arche­types’ to seri­ous enquiry into the nature of human desire. To this day peo­ple at par­ties talk­ing about being in ther­apy often say, ‘Oh, but it’s not Freudian, of course. It’s Jun­gian.’ As if this were some­thing to brag about.

Richard Noll’s book The Ayran Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Gus­tav Jung should make them and all the New Age Jun­gian groupies think twice before using his name as a byword for artsy sophis­ti­ca­tion and rejec­tion of authoritarianism.

For all Freud’s flaws next to Jung he’s a blem­ish­less as Lou Andreas-Salome’s foun­da­tion cream. If Noll’s research only claimed that Jung was a char­la­tan who lied about his research and took the credit for the dis­cov­er­ies of oth­ers – which it does – then few peo­ple would turn a hair. But his book goes much fur­ther than this. It shows how Jung set out to turn analy­sis into a Dionysian reli­gion with him­self as its lion-headed god­head, how he believed him­self to be the Aryan Christ and how his Volk­ish, pagan beliefs com­pli­mented and fed into National Social­ism and anti-semitism. And how he brain­washed and dom­i­neered his mostly female patients who had a ‘reli­gious crush’ on him (which he fre­quently exploited in that ‘spir­i­tual’ way that reli­gious cult lead­ers too often do).

The pic­ture that Noll – who is, it’s impor­tant to point out, is a non-Freudian psy­chol­o­gist – pieces together of Jung is worse than even Jung’s for­mer Freudian col­leagues sus­pected at the time. Jung was, by any stan­dards, bark­ing.

But it was Jung’s rela­tion­ship with Freud that seemed to shape his mad­ness; even his obses­sion with Mithraism. Just before his split with Freud, Jung wrote exten­sively about the tau­roctony, or rit­ual slay­ing of a bull that was cen­tral image of Mithraism. Mithras is depicted as pin­ning down a bull and slay­ing it by plung­ing a dag­ger into its neck. A scor­pion or lion is usu­ally depicted attack­ing the bull’s tes­ti­cles. Jung, nat­u­rally, was a great fol­lower of astrol­ogy and Freud’s star-sign was Tau­rus – The Bull. Even the scor­pion attack­ing the bull’s tes­ti­cles looks like Jung’s attack on Freud’s libido theory.

Freud had pub­li­cally anointed Jung as his ‘son’, declared his love for him, and looked for­ward to him inher­it­ing the lead­er­ship of Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal Move­ment (as a hand­some Aryan Chris­t­ian he would bring the respectabil­ity to psy­cho­analy­sis which Freud craved, but which he knew he could never quite deliver). Hubris­ti­cally, per­haps, Freud turned out to be a vic­tim of the very Oedi­pus Com­plex he’d dis­cov­ered. Jung failed to nego­ti­ate his ambiva­lent feel­ings towards Daddy Freud and ‘mur­dered’ him. Jung turned psy­cho­analy­sis into a reli­gion to replace Chris­tian­ity and realised a long-held Ger­man aspi­ra­tion by replac­ing the Jew­ish ‘Christ’, Freud, with his Aryan self.

My own the­ory is that Freud was a vic­tim of Jew-envy. Jung knew that Freud was a smarter, bet­ter, big­ger man than him and his ego was out­raged and suf­fo­cated by this real­i­sa­tion. Like his brown-shirted coun­try­men were to do twenty years later, he resolved rid him­self of the incon­ve­nient reminder of his infe­ri­or­ity. Indeed, when the Nazis – strongly influ­enced by the same Volk­ish tra­di­tions as Jung – gained power in the Father­land, it was Jung who per­suaded the Inter­na­tional Soci­ety for Psy­chi­a­try to accept the expul­sion of Jews from the Ger­man Society.

Jung’s femme-fatale seduction-assassination syn­drome was not only directed at Freud. As Freud put it, in a let­ter to San­dor Fer­enczi in Novem­ber 1912 about his last seri­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Jung: ‘I spared him noth­ing at all, told him calmly that a friend­ship with him couldn’t be main­tained, that he him­self gave rise to the inti­macy that he so cru­elly broke off; that things were not at all in order in his rela­tions with men, not just with me but with oth­ers as well. He repels them all after a while…’. This is why Jung lit­er­ally turned him­self into a God – there wasn’t room for other men in his world, or, per­haps, the dis­gust­ing, ridicu­lous and abom­inable feel­ings they pro­voked in him.

But per­haps the most intrigu­ing part of Freud’s obser­va­tion was his ref­er­ence to Jung’s trusted – and recently deceased – assis­tant: ‘His refer­ring to his sad expe­ri­ence with Honeg­ger reminded me of homo­sex­u­als or anti-Semites who become man­i­fest after a dis­ap­point­ment with a woman or a Jew.’

Johann Jakob Honeg­ger was a young assis­tant Jung took under his wing in 1909, telling Freud he had entrusted every­thing he knew to Johann. He was also to anoint him as his ‘son’ and heir in the way that Freud had done with Jung. But by 1911, when he was only 25, Honeg­ger com­mit­ted sui­cide with an over­dose of mor­phine. Noll doesn’t go into the details of what prompted this – sui­cides are fre­quently acts of revenge – but he does give a star­tling account of how twenty years later Jung ‘mur­dered’ the dead man.

In 1911, the same year as his death, Honeg­ger had dis­cov­ered in a psy­chotic patient of his the famous ‘solar phal­lus’ hal­lu­ci­na­tion – the basis of Jung’s the­ory of the ‘col­lec­tive uncon­scious’ and notion of ‘racial mem­ory’. But accord­ing to Noll, from 1930 onward, know­ing that Honeg­ger had been dead twenty years and had no liv­ing heirs to com­plain, Jung deleted Honeg­ger from his­tory and took the credit for the case himself.

Jung was so excited by this hal­lu­ci­na­tion, in which the patient imag­ined that a large phal­lus hung from the sun mov­ing back and forth cre­ated the wind, because it seemed remark­ably sim­i­lar to a rit­ual enacted in the pre-Christian Mithraic litur­gies. But Noll shows how Jung later lied about the details of this case, claim­ing that the patient could have had no access to infor­ma­tion about Mithraic rit­u­als, in an attempt to use it to ‘prove’ the exis­tence of the col­lec­tive unconscious.

But the philoso­phies of East and West occult reli­gions had any­way been dis­sem­i­nated for years by pam­phlets and books that could be bought at news­pa­per kiosks. Neo-paganism any­one? Hel­lenis­tic mys­tery cults? Zoroas­tri­an­ism? Gnos­ti­cism? Her­meti­cism? Alchemy? Swe­den­bor­gian­ism? Spir­i­tu­al­ism? Veg­e­tar­i­an­ism? Hin­duism? Or per­haps a nice well-matured bit of Neo-Platonism? Jung’s whole ana­lyt­i­cal psy­chol­ogy cult was pieced together out of pre­cisely this roll-call of despair; a pick ‘n’ mix of hys­ter­i­cal symptoms.

Noll’s case study is slightly more sym­pa­thetic to Jung (or at least non-judgemental) than I make out in this con­densed ver­sion of his argu­ments (full dis­clo­sure: I’m an incur­able Freudian). But I would imag­ine that after read­ing it most peo­ple would find it dif­fi­cult not to con­clude that if Carl Gus­tav were alive today he’d be liv­ing in L.A., scan­ning the hori­zon for fly­ing saucers, writ­ing astrol­ogy columns for the National Enquirer and sell­ing Solar-Phallus key fobs on his website.

And still mut­ter­ing about that old bearded Jew­ish guy with the cigar whom he wor­shipped once but turned out to just have one thing on his mind.