The German Genius

times.”
    The rupture with Freud first broke into the open in 1912, after they returned from America and Jung published the second part of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (translated as Symbols of Transformation ). This extended paper, which appeared in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse , was Jung’s first and public airing of what he called the “collective unconscious.” He 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. The more Jung explored religion, mythology, and philosophy, the further he departed from Freud and from the scientific approach. He pointed first to the “extraordinary unanimity” of narratives and themes in the mythologies of different cultures. He next argued that “in protracted analyses, any particular symbol might recur with disconcerting persistence 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.
    Jung’s other popular idea was the notion of archetypes, the theory that all people may be divided according to one or another basic (and inherited) psychological types, the best known being introvert and extrovert. These terms only relate to the conscious levels 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.
    Although Jung’s very different system of understanding the unconscious had first come to the attention of fellow psychoanalysts in 1912, it was only with the release of Symbols of Transformation in book form in 1913 (published in English as The Psychology of the Unconscious ) that the split with Freud became public. 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 nature as a science. 15 Henceforth, Jung’s work grew increasingly metaphysical, even quasi mystical, attracting a devoted but fringe following. From World War I on, the psychoanalytic movement was divided into two.
    Thanks to World War I, however, psychoanalysis was undergoing another change—it was achieving respectability. Until the war, it had still been regarded as an exotic speciality—or worse, British doctors referring slightingly to Freud’s “dirty doctrines.” What caused a change was the fact that, on both sides in the war, a growing number of casualties were suffering from shell shock (or combat fatigue, or battle neurosis, or post-traumatic stress disorder, to use the terms now favored). There had been cases of men breaking down in earlier wars, but their numbers had been far fewer than those with physical injuries. What seems to have been crucially different this time was the character of the hostilities—static trench warfare with heavy bombardment, and vast conscript armies, containing large numbers of men unsuited for war. The considerable incidence of battle neurosis shook psychiatry and medicine as a whole.
    Psychoanalysis was not the only method of treatment tried. Both the Allied and Central Powers found that officers were succumbing as well as enlisted men, in many cases highly trained and hitherto very brave men; these behaviors could not in any sense be called malingering. As one of Freud’s biographers says, the Freudian age dates from this moment.
    Early on it was discovered that men with neuroses could not be moved from the Front; if they were, they never came back and became a “pension burden.” In Germany there were several other methods of so-called aggressive treatments that were tried. One involved “phoney operations” in which the patient was encouraged to believe his illness was somatic and surgically curable; another was an isolation technique, an attempt to “bore” the patient out of his symptoms by deprivation of food, light, and human contact. Work groups of neurotic patients were formed, where the life was more arduous than at the Front. The two most widespread techniques were Max Nonne’s hypnotherapy in which it was suggested to patients that their symptoms were not real, and Fritz Kaufmann’s “overpowering” electrotherapy method in which patients were told to expect painful electric shocks through