a woman patient, whom years ago I pulled out of a very sticky neurosis with greatest devotion, has violated my confidence and my friendship in the most mortifying way imaginable. She has kicked up a vile scandal solely because I denied myself the pleasure of giving her a child. I have always acted the gentleman towards her, but before the bar of my rather too sensitive conscience I nevertheless don’t feel clean, and that is what hurts the most because my intentions were always honourable. But you know how it is—the devil can use even the best of things for the fabrication of filth.
Jung, one should note, does not deny a sexual relation; he admits only his refusal to father a child. But Freud, who has heard about the woman’s complaints from another source, refuses even to believe that Spielrein was Jung’s mistress. He assumes that his son and heir is being “slandered and scorched” by “the neurotic gratitude of the spurned,” and he tries to soothe Jung’s feelings by explaining that the incident represents an occupational hazard for the psychoanalyst: “it will never be possible to avoid little laboratory explosions.”
Jung is “relieved and comforted” by Freud’s assurances, but he can’t hide his telltale guilt or a seeming awareness that his confession has put him in a permanently vulnerable position with his mentor: “my father-complex kept on insinuating that you would not take it as you did but would give me a dressing down”—one more or less disguised as brotherly love. Nine days later, he adds: “Although not succumbing to helpless remorse, I nevertheless deplore the sins I have committed, for I am largely to blame for the highflying hopes of my former patient.” He goes on “very reluctantly [to] confess to you as my father” that he unprofessionally (and untruthfully) wrote a letter to Spielrein’s mother saying that he “was not the gratifier of her daughter’s sexual desires, but merely her doctor.”
Two years earlier Jung had disclosed to Freud his view that “sexual repression is a very important and indispensable civilizing factor, even if pathogenic for many inferior people.” But in the wake of his difficulties with Sabina Spielrein—who will go on to become a more orthodox Freudian analyst than Jung himself—he ponders the possibilities of “sexual freedom” and infidelity: “The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the licence to be unfaithful.”
The real adultery that Jung requires is intellectual, a long-postponed apostasy that’s no doubt been inhibited by all the invective he’s accustomed to hearing—and speaking—against foes of the Freudian movement. Early on, Freud tells Jung of his own “inclination … to treat those colleagues who offer resistance exactly as we treat patients in the same situation.” The “enemy camp” produces “emotional drivel.” Dissidents are not merely sick; they are malicious and sometimes satanic. The psychiatrist Adolf Albrecht Friedländer, an opponent of analysis, is a horned “Beelzebub,” according to Freud, who tells him off in person and then confesses to Jung that he had “a fiendishly good time” doing it; “I couldn’t get enough.” Jung quivers vicariously over the report: “I hope you roasted, flayed, and impaled the fellow.”
Jung can be even more vivid than Freud in expressing disgust and fantasizing revenge. The opposition makes him “feel the urgent need of a bath,” he says, and it’s a “pity there are never enough good men around to applaud loudly whenever these weaklings, mixtures of muck and lukewarm water, have to eat humble pie.”
Freud admits to a certain childishness in his own makeup but doesn’t recognize the megalomania that from time to time has him sounding like Ayn Rand: “when a man stands firm as a rock, all the tottering, wavering souls end by clinging to him for support.” He may advise Jung to treat the battle “with humour as I do except on days when weakness gets the better of me”—but that would be most days. Freud insists that his colleague not “regard me as the founder of a religion,” but a certain cultishness seems distinctly permissible. As late as 1910, Jung himself suggests to the master that psychoanalysis “thrives only in a very tight enclave of like minds,” and even a year after that he’s asking: “May we know the names of the dissidents soon? In my view this purge is a blessing.”
In one of his first letters, Freud speaks of “the torments that can afflict an ‘innovator,’” and after his friendship with Jung has flowered makes a telling joke about his intellectual suffering: “sometimes it annoys me that no one abuses you—after all you too have some responsibility in the matter.” But even when Jung at last rises to full-throated rebellion, Freud himself will not abuse the younger man, at least not forthrightly. His own letters remain a model of passive aggression—as they have been from the beginning, when he told Jung: “I should be very sorry if you imagined for one moment that I really doubted you in any way.” Whether straightening him out on the subject of paranoia or playing him off against another disciple (“Apart from that, you have every advantage over him”), it has been Freud himself cranking the spin cycle that Jung speaks of being caught in: “The feeling of inferiority that often overcomes me when I measure myself against you has always to be compensated by increased emulation.”
When Emma Jung grows concerned about the increasing tension between her husband and his mentor, she begins her own correspondence with Freud and pinpoints the nature of Freud’s selfishness: “Doesn’t one often give much because one wants to keep much?” She asks that he not discuss their exchanges with Jung (“he was astonished to see one of your letters addressed to me; but I have revealed only a little of their content”) and admits to her own difficulties with her husband: “I find I have no friends, all the people who associate with us really only want to see Carl.”
As the spring of 1912 approaches, Jung is quoting Nietzsche to Freud, on the need for the student to rebel against the teacher. He has begun tugging noisily at his chain, explaining to the possessive and suspicious older man, “I have not kept up a lively correspondence during these last weeks because I wanted if possible to write no letters at all, simply in order to gain time for my work and not in order to give you a demonstration of ostentatious neglect. Or can it be that you mistrust me?” Freud responds with tender manipulation: “The indestructible foundation of our personal relationship is our involvement in ΨA [psychoanalysis]; but on this foundation it seemed tempting to build something finer though more labile, a reciprocal intimate friendship. Shouldn’t we go on building?”
In fact, a new dispute over the libido is ready to blow the house to smithereens. Jung has concluded that incest is “primarily … a fantasy problem,” a desire that didn’t even exist until it was forbidden. He stands his ground against Freud’s more primal view of the matter and is soon delivering a series of lectures in New York that put his heresies on public display. He expresses a hope that things can remain friendly between them but also asserts that professional matters must now trump all else. His correspondent gets the message: for years Freud has saluted the younger man as “Dear friend,” but the next letter from Vienna opens with a stiff new “Dear Dr Jung.”
A move toward reconciliation proves futile, and Jung responds to Freud’s attempt at an elegiac tone (“for me our relationship will always retain an echo of our past intimacy”) with belligerence and sarcasm: “It is only occasionally that I am afflicted with the purely human desire to be understood intellectually and not to be measured by the yardstick of neurosis.” Finally, after a letter in which Freud points out a Freudian slip that Jung has made, the younger man has had enough: “You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty. For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard….” Freud replies with a bland assertion that Jung is mentally ill; the only proposal he can now make is “that we abandon our personal relations entirely.”
Amid all of Freud’s bilious anger and comical formality and jargon (he at one point declares that an Italian vacation “has supplied several wish-fulfilments that my inner eco
nomy has long been in need of”), a reader of these letters may forget how much fright and pain Freud swept away from so many mental attics—let alone the bravery it took for him to accomplish that. Auden’s famous elegy to the doctor concedes that “often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,” but holds that when he died, “Only Hate was happy.” One playful image from Freud’s letters to Jung—“the ego is like the clown in the circus, who is always putting in his oar to make the audience think that whatever happens is his doing”—feels pleasantly similar to the homely, approachable ones in Auden’s tribute. Alas, this clown simile arose in the course of Freud’s denouncing one more heresy committed by one more errant psychoanalyst.
LIKE THE EPISTOLARY NOVEL, the suicide note caught on in the eighteenth century. In his introduction to an anthology called … Or Not to Be, Marc Etkind shows how newspapers catering to the “newly literate” of that era began to print suicide notes that would soon change society’s view of their authors: “Once suicides were considered satanic, now the notes showed them to be human, suffering from such common problems as poverty, infidelity, and plain bad luck.”
Such notes continue to range from the pointedly accusing (“May you always remember I loved you once but died hating you”) to the wanly philosophic: “If we can enter eternal sleep,” wrote the Japanese novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa in 1927, before swallowing sleeping pills, “we may at least have peace, even if we may not enjoy happiness.” Suicide notes are written not only to different audiences—sometimes even pets, Etkind points out—but also in an ever-expanding range of media. The minister who not long ago hanged himself and wrote “God forgive me” on the package containing the rope could today use one of the Internet bulletin boards available to both the sincerely desperate and the perversely joking.
How often an expression of apology enters these notes! Dying from Nembutal as he writes, Dr. Stephen Ward, the London doctor caught up in the Profumo scandal of 1963, manages to say: “I do hope I have not let people down too much.” Virginia Woolf, before drowning herself during the Second World War, addresses her husband, Leonard, in the kind of simple declarative sentences she’d practically banished from the English novel:
I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time … I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And I know you will. You see I can’t even write this properly.
In the early days of Bill Clinton’s administration, the president’s depressed aide Vincent Foster, beset with an unexpected host of political enemies, devoted most of his suicide note to rebutting them, but he began by saying, “I made mistakes from ignorance, inexperience and overwork.” And in the end, before shooting himself, Foster ripped his own note into twenty-seven pieces, which he then threw into his briefcase. As Etkind points out, such destruction is common, “since many who feel they are unworthy to live also feel their final thoughts aren’t worth sharing.”
CHAPTER EIGHT War
The sun is just rising and how beautiful! It makes one feel sad to think this beautiful spring day must be spent just slaughtering human beings.
Henry Morrison, Fourth Virginia Volunteer Infantry,
May 5, 1864
WHEN IT APPEARED time to fly “to war and arms” on behalf of his beleaguered king, the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace first had to take leave of “Lucasta,” in a hasty lyric that might as well be a letter. Lovelace’s Casablanca-style apologia explains that the problems of two seventeenth-century aristocrats don’t amount to a hill of beans in a world with Cromwell on the horizon; and so, however faithless it might seem:
… a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field,
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Once he’s gone, Lucasta will understand and be proud:
this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.
The history of letter writing demonstrates the human inability to make war without making love. Wartime encourages hasty romances, sunders existing ones (the “Dear John” letter is war’s own epistolary innovation) and with its fiery tests of separation and danger solders the strongest marriage into something even stronger. As the World War II generation takes its long farewell, what once seemed a mundane tendency to do its duty has begun to look not just heroic but romantic. The veterans’ aging children are making bestselling anthologies out of the micro-sized V-Mail their fathers sent home to sweethearts and young wives.
The generally plainspoken GIs tend to move us with their matter-of-factness, but an earlier century’s emotional flourishes have not lost their affecting power, either. The great epistolary moment of Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary came with a letter composed by Sullivan Ballou of the Second Rhode Island Volunteers a week before his death in the First Battle of Bull Run. Writing from Camp Clark, Washington, on July 14, 1861, Major Ballou assures his wife Sarah that
my love for you is deathless; it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.
The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grown up to honorable manhood, around us.
However less jauntily, Ballou makes the same case Lovelace does about the competing claims of love and honor. Something “whispers” that he “shall return to my loved ones unharmed,” but his letter is more alert to the possibility that war will have its own say about both honor and love. Should he die, Ballou offers his wife a ghostly substitute attendance until the two of them can meet once more in eternity:
But, O Sarah! if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights … always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheeks, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.
Over and over, from Peloponnesus to the Persian Gulf, war acts as love’s destroyer and enabler. The soldier, in his letters, follows the orders of both.
NOT ALL OF Ballou’s comrades in arms could use the language so elegantly as he. But refinement and eloquence are not the same thing, and many ordinary Civil War soldiers do rise to the latter in the kind of straight, simple utterance now being rediscovered in their descendants’ V-Mail. Private James Binford of the Twenty-first Virginia Volunteer Infantry begins one letter home, after the Battle of Cedar Mountain, with a sort of record-setting concision: “Dear Carrie and Annie: Thanks to merciful providence, I breathe and have all my limbs.” On the Union side, Private Chester Tuttle of the Eighty-first New York tells of how his company tended its wounded inside a rebel’s house after the Battle of the Wilderness. A spinet piano “was used to cut off legs and arms on. Ben Ballard … said that the blood run down in on to the strings.”
If the Civil War had one letter writer able to use starkness and economy to astonishing effect, it was Private Tuttle’s commander-in-chief, Abraham Lincoln. On his second-floor desk in the Executive Mansion, the president kept a small stack of cards, suitable for fast responses to pleading widows and office seekers, but the lawyer in him was generally averse “to getting on paper, and furnishing new grounds for misunderstanding.” If Jefferson’s letters can be a sort of Louisiana Purchase, lighting out for more territory than they require, Abraham Lincoln’s are a struggle for union, battles for exactitude and strict coherence, limited-objective
campaigns fought on short rhetorical rations. The mere three or four hundred letters Lincoln himself probably composed as president—similar to Jefferson’s only in their neat, undemonstrative handwriting—have become, by their scarceness and brevity, as familiar to us as his speeches. They are the literal circumscriptions of a man hemmed in by catastrophe. In his White House correspondence, this great storyteller has no time for telling stories.
Lincoln passed many of his presidency’s most important hours in the telegraph office at the War Department, receiving and responding to news from the battlefield. Samuel F. B. Morse, who grew considerably richer off the military’s use of his invention, spent the war agitating for peace with the rebels, but he had provided the president he so disliked with a formidable instrument, one that made the most of Lincoln’s natural powers of brevity and sarcasm. The telegram was practically designed for letting remarks hang in the air, for doubling the impact of the dead-bolt closings Lincoln had already mastered in his letters. “If the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg,” he cables General Hooker, “and the tail of it on the Plank road between Fredericksburg & Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?” The president responds to a serving of McClellan’s usual molasses—this time a dispatch about tired horses—with a wire that ends: “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?” McClellan had failed to heed two earlier sign-offs, the magnificently casual one just before Antietam (“Destroy the rebel army, if possible”), and the urgent underlining (“But you must act”) in a letter five months prior to that.
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