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THE TALKING CURE:
FREUD, JUNG & SABINA SPIELREIN
The friendship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung lasted for just
six years after their first meeting in 1907, a brief chapter in
the lives of these two octogenarians. Yet during this short period,
psychoanalysis underwent an intense and formative crisis. The play
opens in 1904, three years before their meeting, and by the time
it closes in 1913, the split with Freud had brought Jung to the
brink of profound inner turmoil. It was out of this breakdown that
he was to draw together the materials for analytical psychology,
his own vast project to rival Freud's.
In 1904 Jung was working as a psychiatrist at the Burgholzli asylum,
attached to the university in Zurich, using word association experiments
to develop his study of complexes. He was in daily contact with
individuals who had lost contact with reality, schizophrenics who
smeared themselves with excrement, and a young catatonic who 'drank
up half the chamber pot of a fellow sufferer, with obvious relish'.
In his search for a cure, Jung was eager to test out Freud's new
theories. By contrast Freud, already in his fifties, was ensconced
in private practice in Vienna, treating well-to-do hysterics.
Into their disparate worlds stepped Sabina Spielrein, a young Russian
Jewess, sent to Jung for treatment when she was nineteen, suffering
from severe hysteria with schizoid features. Her affair with Jung
plays like a leitmotif throughout the whole period. The Freud-Jung
relationship is interwoven both intellectually and erotically around
the figure of Sabina. Later, when she herself was an analyst, she
sought to bridge the divide between the two men, but initially,
as a woman between two men, a sexual dimension was central to this
triangle. All three main players are captured by sexual drives and
their repression, with a fourth, the promiscuous Otto Gross, counter-pointing
their struggle.
Libido
This struggle embodies the conflicting interpretation of libido
, and the theoretical differences in turn reflect ethical
and philosophical conflicts, rooted in how individuals live their
lives and treat their fellow human beings. Freud defined libido
as sexual energy , which was continually sublimated
or repressed for the benefit of society. His Talking Cure method
had demonstrated to him that neurotic symptoms were traceable to
forgotten memories which were invariably sexual in origin. This
did not mean, however, that the cure for neurosis is an anything
goes liberation. In The Talking Cure , Gross's addictive
sexuality - 'whenever you see an oasis, you must always remember
to drink'- fails to see the drastic consequences of a refusal to
accept restraints.
Jung acknowledges the sexual component in libido, but he sought
a wider definition, and in his later work, he dropped the term libido
altogether, in favour of psychic energy . He agreed
with Freud that hysteria and obsessional neurosis showed abnormal
displacements of 'quite definitely sexual libido', but he thought
that neither psychosis in general, nor schizophrenia in particular,
matched Freud's theory about the sexual nature of libido. This was
because schizophrenic individuals suffer a complete loss of reality
, and since the loss of reality was so extreme, this loss
leads us to infer the displacement of other forces even more potent
than the sexual instinct, since 'no one is likely to maintain that
reality is a function of sex' .
If Jung's understanding of libido was right, it was important to
him to demonstrate a convincing prognosis of psychosis, in the same
way that Freud had done with neurosis. By doing so, he would establish
his own authority, independent of Freud. In pursuit of this goal,
Jung plunged into mythology, astrology and other occult studies,
seeking imagery that might bring into the light the operation of
these potent formations of psychic energy. If he could successfully
diagnose psychological states from these mythological images, then
he could force a redefinition of libido, and ultimately a revision
of psychoanalysis itself.
This project precipitated a redefinition of Freud's work on the
Oedipal complex and the incest taboo. The arguments on this theme
ran between them throughout their friendship, building up eventually
to Jung's publication, Symbols of Transformation (1911-12),
in which he rejected the exclusively sexual basis of libido and
advocated his theory of 'archaic residues' and a teleological, rather
than reductive, understanding of the unconscious. Jung's thesis
is that libido - psychic energy - must separate from the mother
in order to allow psychic growth and development, and that this
separation is like a spiritual rebirth. He disagreed with Freud's
understanding of the incest taboo and took the incest motif, not
as a literal desire for the mother, but as the carrier of a spiritual
desire to be reborn. To Jung, it was important that the individual
should not remain fixed in the incestuous bond but should 'redeem
those dynamic forces which lie bound up in incest in order to fulfil
himself'. As libido struggled to separate from that bond, images
arose which were not exclusively personal. The imagery reflected
themes common to the whole of humanity - archaic residues - and
these found expression in the mythology of all times and places.
Or so the theory goes. But in 1907, whichever way Jung and Freud
cut the libido cake seems to have mattered very little in the face
of the transference love of a young woman patient. Drinking at Sabina's
oasis led Jung not to a psychic rebirth, or to the free, unrepressed
state advocated by Gross, but to a very Freudian illustration of
libido. He concealed his sexual guilt from Freud, the one person
who could really call him out.
This furtive sexuality erupts with all the damaging effects which
psychoanalysts have come to expect from the 'return of the repressed'.
When Jung arrived in Vienna to see Freud in 1909, he was in a spent
condition after an exhausting year of overwork at Burgholzli. His
break with Sabina had just occurred, with the threat of scandal
bringing pressure to resign, so his ability to argue with Freud
about the non-sexual nature of libido was seriously compromised.
And now, here was Freud, attacking his interest in psychical research
and occult phenomenon, dismissing his mystical leanings as repressed
sexuality, and at the same time, anointing him Crown Prince of the
psychoanalytic movement. In such unspeakable circumstances, Jung's
red-hot diaphragm could not resist rocking Freud's book case, even
if he couldn't quite manage to topple the whole edifice of Freudian
theory.
Death & Sex
So we return to the counter-point of Otto Gross, with his admission
of the 'help' he gave to a suicidal woman, and to Sabina's own uncanny
premonition as she lies in Jung's embrace, and we arrive at what
was to become her most important contribution to analytic thinking,
the link between the sexual instinct and the death instinct. She
wondered why, if the sexual drive arises from the pleasure principle,
it should so readily get repressed. She suggested that this was
because of the destructive component in sexuality, the loss of oneself
to the other, leading the ego to repress sexuality in self-defence.
Jung recognised that this allowed the possibility of other unconscious
psychic forces, capable of over-riding both the ego and the sexual
impulse, forces linked to his work on archaic residues, and ultimately,
to the collective unconscious.
Finally, as Bruno Bettelheim observes [1], the German name 'Spielrein'
comes from two words spiel meaning to
play and rein meaning
clean . In his shabby treatment of Sabina,
who presented with a history of both defecating on herself and trying
to stop herself defecate, Jung neither played clean, nor did he
come clean. Yet in this dangerous game, the talking cure of Sabina
Spielrein played out both the uniting and the dividing of the analytic
project. She understood something that neither of the founding fathers
could easily acknowledge when she told Freud that he and Jung had
"not the faintest idea that you belong together far more than
you might suspect".
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© 2010 Maggie Hyde
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