The German Genius

used actual documentation, was the “wilful romanticization of war,” the “predatory greed” and “insatiable imperialism” that were for him the real driving force behind the war effort. It is now generally accepted that much of what Kraus put in his play was factually wrong, but dramatically it was the equivalent of Otto Dix’s frightening automaton/cripples that became so familiar in the Weimar Republic, and his thesis is an anticipation of Hannah Arendt’s idea about “the banality of evil.” 13
    One of the other main changes wrought by the war lay in the field of psychiatry, where two developments overtook psychoanalysis.
    By the time of the outbreak of the fighting, psychoanalytic societies 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 seen a number of other prominent figures emerge—most of them German-speaking—and 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. He conceived the idea 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. His phrase “inferiority complex” passed into general usage.
    Freud’s break with Carl Jung, which took place between the end of 1912 and early 1914 was more serious—and more acrimonious—than any of the other schisms because Freud, fifty-eight at the outbreak of war, saw Jung as his successor. 14 Although Jung was devoted to Freud at first, he had squabbled with other early analysts, and the break with the master came because, like Adler, Jung revised his views on two fundamental Freudian ideas. He thought that the libido was not, as Freud insisted, a solely sexual instinct but more a matter of “psychic energy” as a whole, a reconceptualization that vitiated the entire idea of childhood sexuality, not to mention the Oedipal relationship. Second, and perhaps even more important, Jung argued that he had discovered the existence of the unconscious for himself, independently of Freud.
    He had discovered this, he said, when he realized that a woman he was treating, at Burghölzli hospital in Zurich, who was allegedly suffering from an untreatable mental illness, dementia praecox, had in fact killed her favorite child (by poisoning her with infected water) in order to free herself for a lover, the woman acting from an unconscious desire to obliterate all traces of her present marriage to make herself available for the man she really loved. Jung did not at first query the diagnosis of dementia praecox. The real story only emerged when he began to explore her dreams, prompting him to give her the “association test.” This test, which subsequently became famous, was invented by Wilhelm Wundt (see Chapter 26). 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 unconscious urges is weakened. Using the test Jung revealed the woman’s unconscious motives and was able to face her with the unpleasant truth. Within weeks, he claimed, she was cured.
    There is already something defiant about Jung’s account of his discovery of the unconscious, the Swiss implying he was not so much a protégé of Freud’s as his equal. Soon after they met, they became very close and in 1909 traveled to America together. Jung was overshadowed by Freud in America, but it was there that he realized his views were diverging. As the years passed, patient after patient reported early experiences of incest, all of which encouraged Freud to 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. When he looked at the religions and myths of other peoples around the world, as he began to do, he found that in Eastern religions (Hinduism, for example) 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 examination of religion and mythology as “representations” of the unconscious “in other places and at other