108 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
him as a man of great intellect. These qualifications prompted Freud to select Jung
as the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
In 1909, G. Stanley Hall, the president of Clark University and one of the
first psychologists in the United States, invited Jung and Freud to deliver a series
of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Together with Sándor
Ferenczi, another psychoanalyst, the two men journeyed to America, the first of
Jung’s nine visits to the United States (Bair, 2003). During their 7-week trip and
while they were in daily contact, an underlying tension between Jung and Freud
slowly began to simmer. This personal tension was not diminished when the two
now-famous psychoanalysts began to interpret each other’s dreams, a pastime
likely to strain any relationship.
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung (1961) claimed that Freud was
unwilling to reveal details of his personal life—details Jung needed in order to
interpret one of Freud’s dreams. According to Jung’s account, when asked for
intimate details, Freud protested, “But I cannot risk my authority!” (Jung, 1961, p.
158). At that moment, Jung concluded, Freud indeed had lost his authority. “That
sentence burned itself into my memory, and in it the end of our relationship was
already foreshadowed” (p. 158).
Jung also asserted that, during the trip to America, Freud was unable to inter-
pret Jung’s dreams, especially one that seemed to contain rich material from Jung’s
collective unconscious. Later, we discuss this dream in more detail, but here we
merely present those aspects of the dream that may relate to some of the lifelong
problems Jung had with women. In this dream, Jung and his family were living on
the second floor of his house when he decided to explore its hitherto unknown
levels. At the bottom level of his dwelling, he came upon a cave where he found
two old and mostly disintegrated human skulls.
After Jung described the dream, Freud became interested in the two
skulls, but not as collective unconscious material. Instead, he insisted that Jung
associate the skulls to some wish. Whom did Jung wish dead? Not yet com-
pletely trusting his own judgment and knowing what Freud expected, Jung told
Freud that he wished his wife and sister-in-law dead because those were most
believable.
Although Jung’s interpretation of this dream may be more accurate than
Freud’s, it is quite possible that Jung did indeed wish for the death of his wife. At
that time, Jung was not recently married but had been married for nearly 7 years,
and for the previous 5 of those years he was deeply involved in an intimate rela-
tionship with a former patient named Sabina Spielrein. Frank McLynn (1996)
claimed that Jung’s “mother complex” caused him to harbor animosity toward his
wife, but a more likely explanation is that Jung needed more than one woman to
satisfy the two aspects of his personality.
However, the two women who shared Jung’s life for nearly 40 years were
his wife Emma and another former patient named Antonia (Toni) Wolff (Bair,
2003). Emma Jung seemed to have related better to Jung’s No. 1 personality while
Toni Wolff was more in touch with his No. 2 personality. The three-way relation-
ship was not always amiable, but Emma Jung realized that Toni Wolff could do
more for Carl than she (or anyone else) could, and she remained grateful to Wolff
(Dunne, 2000).