Jung and Freud: Friendship, Break and Key Differences

How they met

Jung had read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams soon after it appeared, and his own word association experiments seemed to confirm Freud’s theory of repression. He defended Freud in print at a time when psychoanalysis was widely rejected in academic medicine. In April 1906 Freud wrote to thank him, and a correspondence began.

In March 1907 Jung visited Freud in Vienna. Their first conversation is said to have lasted about thirteen hours. Freud valued Jung highly, and also strategically: Jung worked at a respected university clinic in Zurich and was not part of Freud’s Viennese, largely Jewish circle, so he could help psychoanalysis gain wider acceptance.

The 1909 journey to America

In 1909 Freud and Jung, together with Sándor Ferenczi, travelled to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where both lectured and received honorary doctorates. During the long sea voyage they analyzed each other’s dreams.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung later wrote that Freud refused to give personal details about one of his dreams because it would risk his authority, and that from that moment Jung felt the friendship was doomed. It was on this journey, too, that Jung had the dream of the many-storied house that led him toward the idea of the collective unconscious.

Growing tensions

In 1910 Jung became the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Behind the scenes the differences grew. Jung could not accept that all psychic energy was sexual in origin. He was interested in religion, myth and occult phenomena, which Freud regarded with suspicion; Jung recalled that Freud asked him to make the sexual theory an unshakable dogma, a bulwark against occultism.

There were personal strains as well. Freud fainted twice in Jung’s presence, in Bremen in 1909 and in Munich in 1912, both times during conversations that touched, at least indirectly, on rivalry between father and son.

The break

The decisive step was Jung’s book Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1911 to 1912), later revised as Symbols of Transformation. In it he redefined libido as general psychic energy rather than sexual drive, and read the incest motif in myths symbolically, as a longing for renewal, rather than literally. In lectures at Fordham University in New York in 1912 he presented these views publicly.

In January 1913 Freud proposed that they abandon their personal relationship, and Jung agreed. Later that year Jung resigned as editor of the main psychoanalytic yearbook, and in April 1914 as president of the association. Freud gave his own account in “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement” (1914). For Jung the break was followed by years of inner turmoil, which he recorded in The Red Book.

Key differences between Freud and Jung

The two systems share much, above all the conviction that the unconscious shapes conscious life. The main differences are these:

The unconscious

Freud: mainly personal, made of repressed wishes and memories. Jung: a personal layer plus a deeper collective unconscious shared by all humans.

Libido

Freud: sexual energy, the drive behind psychic life. Jung: psychic energy in general, which can take sexual, creative, spiritual or other forms.

Dreams

Freud: disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes. Jung: natural, symbolic expressions of the present state of the psyche that compensate the conscious attitude. See Jung on dreams.

Religion

Freud: an illusion rooted in childhood wishes, as argued in The Future of an Illusion (1927). Jung: a genuine and important function of the psyche.

Direction

Freud: mainly causal, explaining the present by the past. Jung: also final or purposive, asking what a symptom or dream is for and where it is leading.

Development

Freud: personality largely formed in early childhood. Jung: development continues throughout life, especially in the second half, through individuation.

Method

Freud: the couch, free association and analysis of transference. Jung: usually face to face, with amplification, work with images and active imagination, although he also wrote extensively on transference.

Legacy of the split

Freud lost two prominent colleagues within a few years: Alfred Adler left in 1911, Jung in 1913. Psychoanalysis and analytical psychology developed into separate traditions with their own institutes and journals. Today both are more influential in psychotherapy and the humanities than in academic psychology, and many therapists draw on both.

The story has been told many times, including in John Kerr’s A Most Dangerous Method (1993) and the film based on it, A Dangerous Method (2011). Both give a central place to Sabina Spielrein, first Jung’s patient, then his student, and later a psychoanalyst whose ideas on destruction and transformation influenced both men.

Frequently asked questions