like blood' as Rilke observed of arguments among Russian exiles. The International Psycho-Analytical Association, on the other hand, had seemlier ways. Though its members probed the underbelly of morality, they were Herr Doktors with academic dignities, well-shined shoes, watch-chainfestooned waistcoats, carefully knotted cravats. In 1913 they constituted a professional body, as subject as any other in the Imperial and Royal Crownlands of the House of Austria, to a hallowed sense of rank.
And Carl Jung's revolt shocked more than Alfred Adler's abandonment of the articles of faith two years earlier. In Adler's case the doctrinal often still veiled the personal. But in his letter Jung brazenly announced his intent 'to pluck the beard of the prophet.' He accused the founder of psychoanalysis of foisting his maladjustment on the psyche of his rivals. It went beyond heresy. It was a spit at the throne.
Freud's reply displayed well-mannered firmness a la Franz Joseph:
We have a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel ashamed of his own bit of neurosis. But someone who behaves abnormally yet keeps shouting that he is normal gives ground for suspicion that he lacks insight into his illness. Accordingly, I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely. I shall lose nothing by it, for my only emotional tie with you has long been a thin thread-the lingering effect of past disappointments…
These lines had been written early in 1913. But now it was July. In less than two months Freud would have to face Jung occupying the head chair of the Munich Psycho-Analytical Congress. The man he'd made President would now wield the gavel against him. This prospect loomed over Freud as he sipped the alkaline waters and walked the pinewood paths of Marienbad. The shadow under which he moved darkened as July approached, but it was a shadow that had engaged him all year. His latest manuscript, Totem and Taboo, dealt with the violent overthrow of a chief. As he would later admit, the theme contained an unconscious link to Jung, the usurper. And quite consciously Freud deployed Totem and Taboo as a weapon in this war. His essay explored the prehistoric lore of the 'primal horde' from which the totem evolved. Freud was staking out systematically, possessively, areas of myth and primitive religion that were Jung's turf.
The king had counterattacked the rebel. But the king couldn't rest easy. A month of taking the waters from mid-July to mid-August did little to relieve his rheumatic right arm. 'I can scarcely write,' says his note from Marienbad to Ernest Jones; '. we had a bad time here. The weather was cold and wet.' Nor was his mood sunny. His daughter Anna, who kept him company, would later report that this was the only time she remembered her father being depressed.
On August 11 the Freuds (daughter, wife, paterfamilias) traveled to San Martino di Castrozza, a lovely aerie of a resort 5,000 feet high in the Dolomites. Freud loved mountaineering but could spare little time for sparkling Alpine hikes. The Congress-and therefore combat with Jung-was now only a month away. His lieutenants in the International PsychoAnalytical Association were gathering around him at San Martino and took rooms next to his at the Hotel des Alpes. Sandor Ferenczi came from Budapest; Karl Abraham arrived from Berlin. Together they had long grim strategy sessions amplified by correspondence with Ernest Jones, Freud's field marshal in England.
The council ratified Freud's decision to continue his Franz Joseph stance: firmness, dignity, moderation. Neither Ferenczi nor Abraham was to assail Jung. Freud himself would read a paper-'The Predisposition to Obsessional Neuro- sis'-that was rather neutral in the context of the conflict. Only Jones would produce a paper criticizing, in measured tones, recent positions of the adversary.
Thus the battle plan; so the execution. When the Fourth International Psycho-Analytical Congress opened in Munich on September 7, Jung sat at a table apart from Freud with his phalanx of Swiss analysts. Two years earlier 'the Crown Prince' had done his presiding with cordial humor. Now, at the 1913 Congress, his face was taut, his manner brusque, his gavel partisan. He cut off arguments, ruled inconvenient points out of order, recognized speakers whenever it suited his offensive against Freud. At the final session the filling of the next presidential term had to be settled. Despite everything, Freud suggested to his followers that they re-elect Jung, who therefore won the vote. But out of 82 members present, 22 withheld their ballots-an unprecedented and significant number. (To Jones, one of the abstainers, Jung spoke one short sentence that spoke racial volumes: 'I thought you were a Christian.')
Freud's gesture was noblesse oblige of majestic proportions, a theatrical flourish masterfully Viennese. By comparison, his Zurich opponent looked mean and crude. When it was all over, Jung remained in possession of the title, but Freud walked away with much of his prestige and power intact. He could not arbitrarily strip Jung of the presidency. However, Freud proposed to his adherents that the Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest chapters petition Jung-without crass quarreling-to dissolve the International Association. On Jung's refusal they would quietly resign, thereby triggering resignations in England and America and signalling the probability of a new international group under Freud. All this needed to be done slowly, slowly enough for a face-saving interval during which Jung could evaluate the prospect and sue for peace.
The plan disquieted Freud's retinue. To them the moment called for outspokenness and action, not for gradual, indirect maneuvers. Jung was Serbia. Dr. Karl Abraham and Dr. Ernest Jones, Freud's two principal generals, took the line of General Conrad, the Austrian Chief of Staff: a harder, quicker, more damaging countermove must be made.
Of course the ultimate decision was Freud's. But in the days and weeks that followed, Freud, strangely enough, did nothing-nothing except hesitate.
The day after the Psycho-Analytical Congress ended, on September 10, 1913, Freud took the express from Munich to Italy. In Rome he continued his hesitation in a way that was so ambivalent that he left two contradictory accounts of his sojourn. To Jones he wrote a letter mentioning the 'delicious days' in the Eternal City. But later he would confess to the peculiar and pensive compulsion that marked his irresolute stay:
Every day for three lonely weeks in September 1913… I mounted the steps of the unlovely Corso Cavour where the deserted church [of San Pietro in Vincoli] stands… [Every day for three weeks] I stood in the church in front of the statue…
The statue was Michelangelo's monumental Moses, originally created for Pope Julius II's tomb in the Vatican. Moses mesmerized-and paralyzed-Freud during those unsure days after his collision with Jung. Of course, Rome itself had for years touched off an odd resonance inside him. Long before he had been able to afford traveling there, Freud's wishes and fantasies had centered on Rome to a degree he himself had called 'neurotic' in lines to a colleague. The Rome fixation had also emerged in his self-analysis in The Interpretation of Dreams. Here he connected it to his boyhood worship of Hannibal, the Carthaginian (and hence Semitic) generalissimo who conquered much of the Roman Empire-except Rome itself.
In other words, it was Freud's conquistadorial self that wanted to complete a glory not attained by his hero. When he had finally reached Rome in 1901, he'd found his way quickly to Michelangelo's Moses, for that, too, was a familiar fascination ever since he had seen a copy of the statue in the Vienna Academy of Art. Like Hannibal, Moses was a great Semitic conqueror. He had overcome Egypt and had led his people to greatness without himself reaping its fruit: He had died outside the Promised Land just as Hannibal had not lived to capture the Capitoline Hill. But on that very hill, Freud had walked year after year since 1901, with much more than a tourist's abandon.
Was this his will for the conquistadorial absolute? Did he want to outdo his foremost models? Did he mean his conquests to exceed even theirs? His close friend Hans Sachs observed that 'in the execution of his duty he was untiring and unbending, hard and sharp like steel, a'good hater' close to the limits of vindictiveness.'
'He reminded me of a conqueror,' said Theodore Dreiser, who never met the man but knew him percipiently through his books, 'a conqueror that has taken a city, entered its age-old prisons and there generously proceeded to release from their gloomy and rusted cells the prisoners of formulae, faiths, and illusions which have wracked and worn men for thousands and thousands of years…'
Such a chieftain might be flexible in strategy; he might array himself in sovereign, iron calm. But he must never compromise his purpose by one-thousandth of an inch. Freud usually aspired to all of these traits. But not during that Roman September of 1913. Not during those feckless weeks before his return to Vienna. It was Europe's last peaceful September before an irremediable explosion. It was the aftermath of his clenched confrontation with Jung. Back and forth Freud went along the via Cavour on his daily pilgrimages to Moses. Back and forth strode the doctor from Vienna with his graying beard and his conquistadorial bent. Peculiarly enough, he was trying to walk his way toward the idea of an unconquistadorial moderation; a moderation he saw embodied in Michelangelo's
