Jung, C. G. - Jung contra Freud (Princeton, 2012)

September 28, 1912. The New York Times featured a full-page interview

withJung on the problems confronting America, with a portrait

photo entitled "America Facing Its Most Tragic Moment" the

first prominent feature of psychoanalysis in the Times. It was

Jung, the Times correctly reported, who "brought Dr. Freud to the

recognition of the older school of psychology." The Times went on

to say, "[H]is classrooms are crowded with students eager to understand

what seems to many to be an almost miraculous treatment.

His clinics are crowded with medical cases which have baffled

other doctors, and he is here in America to lecture on his subject."

Jung was the man of the hour. Aged thirty-seven, he had just completed

a five-hundred-page magnum opus, Transformations and Symbols

of the Libido, the second installment of which had just appeared

in print. Following his first visit to America in 1909, it was he, and

not Freud, who had been invited back by Smith Ely Jelliffe to lecture

on psychoanalysis in the new international extension course

in medicine at Fordham University, where he would also be

awarded his second honorary degree (others invited included the

psychiatrist William Alanson White and the neurologist Henry

Head).

Jung's initial title for his lectures was "Mental Mechanisms in

Health and Disease." By the time he got to composing them, the

title had become simply 'The Theory of Psychoanalysis."J ung commenced

his introduction to the lectures by indicating that he intended

to outline his attitude to Freud's guiding principles, noting

that a reader would likely react with astonishment that it had taken

him ten years to do so. The explanation lay in the fact that when

he first encountered Freud's work, he did not feel in a position to

exercise criticism. To understand this more fully, we need to look

back atJung's initial engagement with psychoanalysis.