The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Since 1900 Freud had expended a great deal of time and energy extending the reach of the discipline he had founded; psychoanalytic societies now existed in six countries, and an International Association of Psychoanalysis had been formed in 1908. At the same time, the ‘movement,’ as Freud thought of it, had suffered its first defectors. Alfred Adler, along with Wilhelm Stekel, left in 1911, Adler because his own experiences gave him a very different view of the psychological forces that shape personality. Crippled by rickets as a child and suffering from pneumonia, he had been involved in a number of street accidents that made his injuries worse. Trained as an ophthalmologist, he became aware of patients who, suffering from some deficiency in their body, compensated by strengthening other faculties. Blind people, for example, as is well known, develop very acute hearing. A social Democrat and a Jew who had converted to Christianity, Adler tried hard to reconcile the Marxist doctrine of class struggle with his own ideas about psychic struggle. He formed the view that the libido is not a predominantly sexual force but inherently aggressive, the search for power becoming for him the mainspring of life and the ‘inferiority complex’ the directing force that gives lives their shape.56 He resigned as spokesman of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association because its rules stipulated that its aim was the propagation of Freud’s views. Adler’s brand of ‘individual psychology’ remained very popular for a number of years.

  Freud’s break with Carl Jung, which took place between the end of 1912 and the early part of 1914, was much more acrimonious than any of the other schisms because Freud, who was fifty-seven in 1913, saw Jung as his successor, the new leader of ‘the movement.’ The break came because although Jung had been devoted to Freud at first, he revised his views on two seminal Freudian concepts. Jung thought that the libido was not, as Freud insisted, solely a sexual instinct but more a matter of ‘psychic energy’ as a whole, a reconceptualisation that, among other things, vitiated the entire idea of childhood sexuality, not to mention the Oedipal relationship.57 Second, and perhaps even more important, Jung argued that he had discovered the existence of the unconscious for himself, entirely independently of Freud. It had come about, he said, when he had been working at Burghölzli mental hospital in Zurich, where he had seen a ‘regression’ of the libido in schizophrenia and where he was treating a woman who had killed her favourite child.58 Earlier in life the woman had fallen in love with a young man who, so she believed, was too rich and too socially superior ever to want to marry her, so she had turned to someone else. A few years later, however, a friend of the rich man had told the woman that he had in fact been inconsolable when she had spurned him. Not long after, she had been bathing her two young children and had allowed her daughter to suck the bath sponge even though she knew the water being used was infected. Worse, she gave her son a glass of infected water. Jung claimed that he had grasped for himself, without Freud’s help, the central fact of the case – that the woman was acting from an unconscious desire to obliterate all traces of her present marriage to free herself for the man she really loved. The woman’s daughter caught typhoid fever and died from the infected sponge. The mother’s symptoms of depression, which appeared when she was told the truth about the wealthy man she had loved, turned worse after her daughter’s death, to the point where she had to be sent to Burghölzli.

  Jung did not at first question the diagnosis, ‘dementia praecox.’ The real story emerged only when he began to explore her dreams, which prompted him to give her the ‘association test.’ This test, which subsequently became very famous, was invented by a German doctor, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). The principle is simple: the patient is shown a list of words and asked to respond to each one with the first word that comes into his/her head. The rationale is that in this way conscious control over the unconscious urges is weakened. Resurrecting the woman’s case history via her dreams and the association test, Jung realised that the woman had, in effect, murdered her own daughter because of the unconscious urges within her. Controversially, he faced her with the truth. The result was remarkable: far from being untreatable, as the diagnostic label dementia praecox had implied, she recovered quickly and left hospital three weeks later. There was no relapse.

  There is already something defiant about Jung’s account of his discovery of the unconscious. Jung implies he was not so much a protégé of Freud’s as moving in parallel, his equal. Soon after they met, when Jung attended the Wednesday Society in 1907, they became very close, and in 1909 they travelled to America together. Jung was overshadowed by Freud in America, but it was there that Jung realised his views were diverging from the founder’s. As the years had passed, patient after patient had reported early experiences of incest, all of which made Freud lay even more emphasis on sexuality as the motor driving the unconscious. For Jung, however, sex was not fundamental – instead, it was itself a transformation from religion. Sex, for Jung, was one aspect of the religious impulse but not the only one. When he looked at the religions and myths of other races around the world, as he now began to do, he found that in Eastern religions the gods were depicted in temples as very erotic beings. For him, this frank sexuality was a symbol and one aspect of ‘higher ideas.’ Thus he began his famous examination of religion and mythology as ‘representations’ of the unconscious ‘in other places and at other times.’

  The rupture with Freud started in 1912, after they returned from America and Jung published the second part of Symbols of Transformation.59 This extended paper, which appeared in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, was Jung’s first public airing of what he called the ‘collective unconscious.’ Jung concluded that at a deep level the unconscious was shared by everyone – it was part of the ‘racial memory.’ Indeed, for Jung, that’s what therapy was, getting in touch with the collective unconscious.60 The more Jung explored religion, mythology, and philosophy, the further he departed from Freud and from the scientific approach. As J. A. C. Brown wrote, one ‘gets much the same impression from reading Jung as might be obtained from reading the scriptures of the Hindus, Taoists, or Confucians; although well aware that many wise and true things are being said, [one] feels that they could have been said just as well without involving us in the psychological theories upon which they are supposedly based.’61

  According to Jung, our psychological makeup is divided into three: consciousness, personal unconsciousness, and the collective unconscious. A common analogy is made with geology, where the conscious mind corresponds to that part of land above water. Below the water line, hidden from view, is the personal unconscious, and below that, linking the different landmasses, so to speak, is the ‘racial unconscious’ where, allegedly, members of the same race share deep psychological similarities. Deepest of all, equating to the earth’s core, is the psychological heritage of all humanity, the irreducible fundamentals of human nature and of which we are only dimly aware. This was a bold, simple theory supported, Jung said, by three pieces of ‘evidence.’ First, he pointed to the ‘extraordinary unanimity’ of narratives and themes in the mythologies of different cultures. He also argued that ‘in protracted analyses, any particular symbol might recur with disconcerting persistency but as analysis proceeded the symbol came to resemble the universal symbols seen in myths and legends.’ Finally he claimed that the stories told in the delusions of mentally ill patients often resembled those in mythology.

  The notion of archetypes, the theory that all people may be divided according to one or another basic (and inherited) psychological type, the best known being introvert and extrovert, was Jung’s other popular idea. These terms relate only to the conscious level of the mind, of course; in typical psychoanalytic fashion, the truth is really the opposite – the extrovert temperament is in fact unconsciously introvert, and vice versa. It thus follows that for Jung psychoanalysis as treatment involved the interpretation of dreams and free association in order to put the patient into contact with his or her collective unconscious, a cathartic process. While Freud was sceptical of and on occasions ho
stile to organised religion, Jung regarded a religious outlook as helpful in therapy. Even Jung’s supporters concede that this aspect of his theories is confused.62

  Although Jung’s very different system of understanding the unconscious had first come to the attention of fellow psychoanalysts in 1912, so that the breach was obvious within the profession, it was only with the release of Symbols of Transformation in book form in 1913 (published in English as Psychology of the Unconscious) that the split with Freud became public. After that there was no chance of a reconciliation: at the fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress, held in Munich in September 1913, Freud and his supporters sat at a separate table from Jung and his acolytes. When the meeting ended, ‘we dispersed,’ said Freud in a letter, ‘without any desire to meet again.’63 Freud, while troubled by this personal rift, which also had anti-Semitic overtones, was more concerned that Jung’s version of psychoanalysis was threatening its status as a science.64 Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, for example, clearly implied the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which had been discredited by Darwinism for some years. As Ronald Clark commented: ‘In short, for the Freudian theory, which is hard enough to test but has some degree of support, Jung [had] substituted an untestable system which flies in the face of current genetics.’65

  Freud, to be fair, had seen the split with Jung coming and, in 1912, had begun a work that expanded on his own earlier theories and, at the same time, discredited Jung’s, trying to ground psychoanalysis in modern science. Finished in the spring of 1913 and published a few months later, this work was described by Freud as ‘the most daring enterprise I have ever ventured.’66 Totem and Taboo was an attempt to explore the very territory Jung was trying to make his own, the ‘deep ancestral past’ of mankind. Whereas Jung had concentrated on the universality of myths to explain the collective – or racial – unconscious, Freud turned to anthropology, in particular to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and to Darwin’s accounts of the behaviour of primate groupings. According to Freud (who said from the start that Totem and Taboo was speculation), primitive society was characterised by an unruly horde in which a despotic male dominated all the females, while other males, including his own offspring, were either killed or condemned to minor roles. From time to time the dominant male was attacked and eventually overthrown, a neat link to the Oedipus complex, the lynchpin of ‘classical’ Freudian theory. Totem and Taboo was intended to show how individual and group psychology were knitted together, how psychology was rooted in biology, in ‘hard’ science. Freud said these theories could be tested (unlike Jung’s) by observing primate societies, from which man had evolved.

  Freud’s new book also ‘explained’ something nearer home, namely Jung’s attempt to unseat Freud as the dominant male of the psychoanalytic ‘horde.’ A letter of Freud’s, written in 1913 but published only after his death, admitted that ‘annihilating’ Jung was one of his motives in writing Totem and Taboo.67 The book was not a success: Freud was not as up-to-date in his reading as he thought, and science, which he thought he was on top of, was in fact against him.68 His book regarded evolution as a unilinear process, with various races around the world seen as stages on the way to ‘white,’ ‘civilised’ society, a view that was already dated, thanks to the work of Franz Boas. In the 1920s and 1930s anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict would produce more and more fieldwork confirming Totem and Taboo as scientifically worthless. In attempting to head off Jung, Freud had shot himself in the foot.69

  Nevertheless, it sealed the breach between the two men (it should not be forgotten that Jung was not the only person Freud fell out with; he also broke with Breuer, Fliess, Adler, and Stekel).70 Henceforth, Jung’s work grew increasingly metaphysical, vague, and quasi-mystical, attracting a devoted but fringe following. Freud continued to marry individual psychology and group behaviour to produce a way of looking at the world that attempted to be more scientific than Jung’s. Until 1913 the psychoanalytic movement had been one system of thought. Afterward, it was two.

  Mabel Dodge, in her letter to Gertrude Stein, had been right. The explosion of talent in 1913 was volcanic. In addition to the ideas reported here, 1913 also saw the birth of the modern assembly line, at Henry Ford’s factory in Detroit, and the appearance of Charlie Chaplin, the little man with baggy trousers, bowler hat, and a cunning cheekiness that embodied perfectly the eternal optimism of an immigrant nation. But it is necessary to be precise about what was happening in 1913. Many of the events of that annus mirabilis were a maturation, rather than a departure in a wholly new direction. Modern art had extended its reach across the Atlantic and found another home; Niels Bohr had built on Einstein and Ernest Rutherford, as Igor Stravinsky had built on Claude Debussy (if not on Arnold Schoenberg); psychoanalysis had conquered Mann and Lawrence and, to an extent, Proust; Jung had built on Freud (or he thought he had), Freud had extended his own ideas, and psychoanalysis, like modern art, had reached across to America; film had constructed its first immortal character as opposed to star. People like Guillaume Apollinaire, Stravinsky, Proust, and Mann were trying to merge together different strands of thought – physics, psychoanalysis, literature, painting – in order to approach new truths about the human condition. Nothing characterised these developments so much as their optimism. The mainstreams of thought, set in flow in the first months of the century, seemed to be safely consolidating.

  One man sounded a warning, however, in that same year. In A Boy’s Will, Robert Frost’s voice was immediately distinct: images of the innocent, natural world delivered in a gnarled, broken rhythm that reminds one of the tricks nature plays, not least with time:

  Ah, when to the heart of man

  Was it ever less than a treason

  To go with the drift of things,

  To yield with a grace to reason.71

  9

  COUNTER-ATTACK

  The outbreak of World War I took many highly intelligent people by surprise. On 29 June, Sigmund Freud was visited by the so-called Wolf Man, a rich young Russian who during treatment had remembered a childhood phobia of wolves. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary and his wife had taken place in Sarajevo the day before. The conversation concerned the ending of the Wolf Man’s treatment, one reason being that Freud wanted to take a holiday. The Wolf Man later wrote, ‘How little one then suspected that the assassination … would lead to World War I.”1 In Britain, at the end of July, J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron and soon after became president of the Royal Society, was one of the eminent men who signed a plea that ‘war upon [Germany] in the interests of Serbia and Russia will be a sin against civilisation.’2 Bertrand Russell did not fully grasp how imminent war was until, on 2 August, a Sunday, he was crossing Trinity Great Court in Cambridge and met the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was hurrying to borrow a motorcycle with which to travel to London. He confided to Russell he had been summoned by the government. Russell went to London himself the following day, where he was ‘appalled’ by the war spirit.3 Pablo Picasso had been painting in Avignon and, fearing the closure of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler’s gallery (Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer, was German) and a slump in the market for his own works, he rushed to Paris a day or so before war was declared and withdrew all his money from his bank account – Henri Matisse later said it amounted to 100,000 gold francs. Thousands of French did the same, but the Spaniard was ahead of most of them and returned to Avignon with all his money, just in time to go to the station to say good-bye to Georges Braque and André Derain, who had been called up and were both impatient to fight.4 Picasso said later that he never saw the other two men again. It wasn’t true; what he meant was that Braque and Derain were never the same after the war.

  World War I had a direct effect on many writers, artists, musicians, mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists. Among those killed were August Macke, the Blaue Reiter painter, shot as the German forces advanced into France; the
sculptor and painter Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who died in the French trenches near the English Channel; and the German expressionist painter Franz Marc at Verdun. Umberto Boccioni, the Italian futurist, died on Italy’s Austrian front, and the English poet Wilfred Owen was killed on the Sambre Canal a week before the Armistice.5 Oskar Kokoschka and Guillaume Apollinaire were both wounded. Apollinaire went home to Paris with a hole in his head and died soon afterward. Bertrand Russell and others who campaigned against the war were sent to jail, or ostracised like Albert Einstein, or declared mad like Siegfried Sassoon.6 Max Planck lost his son, Karl, as did the painter Käthe Kollwitz (she also lost her grandson in World War II). Virginia Woolf lost her friend Rupert Brooke, and three other British poets, Isaac Rosenberg, Julian Grenfell, and Charles Hamilton Sorley, were also killed. The mathematician and philosopher Lieutenant Ludwig Wittgenstein was interned in a ‘Campo Concentramento’ in northern Italy, from where he sent Bertrand Russell the manuscript of his recently completed work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.7

  Many of the intellectual consequences of the war were much more indirect and took years to manifest themselves. The subject is vast, engrossing, easily worth the several books that have been devoted to it.8 The sheer carnage, the military stalemate that so characterised the hostilities that took place between 1914 and 1918, and the lopsided nature of the armistice all became ingrained in the mentality of the age, and later ages. The Russian Revolution, which occurred in the middle of the war, brought about its own distorted political, military, and intellectual landscape, which would last for seventy years. This chapter will concentrate on ideas and intellectual happenings that were introduced during World War I and that can be understood as a direct response to the fighting.