Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (29 page)

Freud’s break with Carl Jung, which took place between the end of 1912 and the early part of 1914, was much more acrimonious than any of the other schisms because Freud, who was fifty-seven in 1913, saw Jung as his successor, the new leader of ‘the movement.’ The break came because although Jung had been devoted to Freud at first, he revised his views on two seminal Freudian concepts. Jung thought that the libido was not, as Freud insisted, solely a sexual instinct but more a matter of ‘psychic energy’ as a whole, a reconceptualisation that, among other things, vitiated the entire idea of childhood sexuality, not to mention the Oedipal relationship.
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Second, and perhaps even more important, Jung argued that he had discovered the existence of the unconscious for himself, entirely independently of Freud. It had come about, he said, when he had been working at Burghölzli mental hospital in Zurich, where he had seen a ‘regression’ of the libido in schizophrenia and where he was treating a woman who had killed her favourite child.
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Earlier in life the woman had fallen in love with a young man who, so she believed, was too rich and too socially superior ever to want to marry her, so she had turned to someone else. A few years later, however, a friend of the rich man had told the woman that he had in fact been inconsolable when she had spurned him. Not long after, she had been bathing her two young children and had allowed her daughter to suck the bath sponge even though she knew the water being used was infected. Worse, she gave her son a glass of infected water. Jung claimed that he had grasped for himself, without Freud’s help, the central fact of the case – that the woman was acting from an unconscious desire to obliterate all traces of her present marriage to free herself for the man she really loved. The woman’s daughter caught typhoid fever and died from the infected sponge. The mother’s symptoms of depression, which appeared when she was told the truth about the wealthy man she had loved, turned worse after her daughter’s death, to the point where she had to be sent to Burghölzli.

Jung did not at first question the diagnosis, ‘dementia praecox.’ The real story emerged only when he began to explore her dreams, which prompted him to give her the ‘association test.’ This test, which subsequently became very famous, was invented by a German doctor, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). The principle is simple: 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 the unconscious urges is weakened. Resurrecting the woman’s case history via her dreams and the association test, Jung realised that the woman had, in effect, murdered her own daughter because of the unconscious urges within her. Controversially, he faced her with the truth. The result was remarkable: far from being untreatable, as the diagnostic label dementia praecox had implied, she recovered quickly and left hospital three weeks later. There was no relapse.

There is already something defiant about Jung’s account of his discovery of the unconscious. Jung implies he was not so much a protégé of Freud’s as moving in parallel, his equal. Soon after they met, when Jung attended the Wednesday Society in 1907, they became very close, and in 1909 they travelled to America together. Jung was overshadowed by Freud in America, but it was there that Jung realised his views were diverging from the founder’s. As the years had passed, patient after patient had reported early experiences of incest, all of which made Freud 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. Sex, for Jung, was one aspect of the religious impulse but not the only one. When he looked at the religions and myths of other races around the world, as he now began to do, he found that in Eastern religions 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 famous examination of religion and mythology as ‘representations’ of the unconscious ‘in other places and at other times.’

The rupture with Freud started in 1912, after they returned from America and Jung published the second part of
Symbols of Transformation.
⁵⁹
This extended paper, which appeared in the
Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse,
was Jung’s first public airing of what he called the ‘collective unconscious.’ Jung 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.
⁶⁰
The more Jung explored religion, mythology, and philosophy, the further he departed from Freud and from the scientific approach. As J. A. C. Brown wrote, one ‘gets much the same impression from reading Jung as might be obtained from reading the scriptures of the Hindus, Taoists, or Confucians; although well aware that many wise and true things are being said, [one] feels that they could have been said just as well without involving us in the psychological theories upon which they are supposedly based.’
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According to Jung, our psychological makeup is divided into three: consciousness, personal unconsciousness, and the collective unconscious. A common analogy is made with geology, where the conscious mind corresponds to that part of land above water. Below the water line, hidden from view, is the personal unconscious, and below that, linking the different landmasses, so to speak, is the ‘racial unconscious’ where, allegedly, members of the same race share deep psychological similarities. Deepest of all, equating to the earth’s core, is the psychological heritage of all humanity, the irreducible fundamentals of human nature and of which we are only dimly aware. This was a bold, simple theory supported, Jung said, by three pieces of ‘evidence.’ First, he pointed to the ‘extraordinary unanimity’ of narratives and themes in the mythologies of different cultures. He also argued that ‘in protracted analyses, any particular symbol might recur with disconcerting persistency 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.

The notion of archetypes, the theory that all people may be divided according
to one or another basic (and inherited) psychological type, the best known being introvert and extrovert, was Jung’s other popular idea. These terms relate only to the conscious level 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. It thus follows that for Jung psychoanalysis as treatment involved the interpretation of dreams and
free association
in order to put the patient into contact with his or her collective unconscious, a cathartic process. While Freud was sceptical of and on occasions hostile to organised religion, Jung regarded a religious outlook as helpful in therapy. Even Jung’s supporters concede that this aspect of his theories is confused.
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Although Jung’s very different system of understanding the unconscious had first come to the attention of fellow psychoanalysts in 1912, so that the breach was obvious within the profession, it was only with the release of
Symbols of Transformation
in book form in 1913 (published in English as
Psychology of the Unconscious)
that the split with Freud became public. After that there was no chance of a reconciliation: at the fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress, held in Munich in September 1913, Freud and his supporters sat at a separate table from Jung and his acolytes. When the meeting ended, ‘we dispersed,’ said Freud in a letter, ‘without any desire to meet again.’
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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 status as a science.
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Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, for example, clearly implied the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which had been discredited by Darwinism for some years. As Ronald Clark commented: ‘In short, for the Freudian theory, which is hard enough to test but has some degree of support, Jung [had] substituted an untestable system which flies in the face of current genetics.’
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Freud, to be fair, had seen the split with Jung coming and, in 1912, had begun a work that expanded on his own earlier theories and, at the same time, discredited Jung’s, trying to ground psychoanalysis in modern science. Finished in the spring of 1913 and published a few months later, this work was described by Freud as ‘the most daring enterprise I have ever ventured.’
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Totem and Taboo was an attempt to explore the very territory Jung was trying to make his own, the ‘deep ancestral past’ of mankind. Whereas Jung had concentrated on the universality of myths to explain the collective – or racial – unconscious, Freud turned to anthropology, in particular to Sir James Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
and to Darwin’s accounts of the behaviour of primate groupings. According to Freud (who said from the start that
Totem and Taboo
was speculation), primitive society was characterised by an unruly horde in which a despotic male dominated all the females, while other males, including his own offspring, were either killed or condemned to minor roles. From time to time the dominant male was attacked and eventually overthrown, a neat link to the Oedipus complex, the lynchpin of ‘classical’ Freudian theory.
Totem and Taboo
was intended to show how individual and group psychology were knitted together, how psychology was rooted in biology, in ‘hard’ science. Freud said these
theories could be tested (unlike Jung’s) by observing primate societies, from which man had evolved.

Freud’s new book also ‘explained’ something nearer home, namely Jung’s attempt to unseat Freud as the dominant male of the psychoanalytic ‘horde.’ A letter of Freud’s, written in 1913 but published only after his death, admitted that ‘annihilating’ Jung was one of his motives in writing
Totem and Taboo.
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The book was not a success: Freud was not as up-to-date in his reading as he thought, and science, which he thought he was on top of, was in fact against him.
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His book regarded evolution as a unilinear process, with various races around the world seen as stages on the way to ‘white,’ ‘civilised’ society, a view that was already dated, thanks to the work of Franz Boas. In the 1920s and 1930s anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict would produce more and more fieldwork confirming
Totem and Taboo
as scientifically worthless. In attempting to head off Jung, Freud had shot himself in the foot.
⁶⁹

Nevertheless, it sealed the breach between the two men (it should not be forgotten that Jung was not the only person Freud fell out with; he also broke with Breuer, Fliess, Adler, and Stekel).
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Henceforth, Jung’s work grew increasingly metaphysical, vague, and quasi-mystical, attracting a devoted but fringe following. Freud continued to marry individual psychology and group behaviour to produce a way of looking at the world that attempted to be more scientific than Jung’s. Until 1913 the psychoanalytic movement had been one system of thought. Afterward, it was two.

Mabel Dodge, in her letter to Gertrude Stein, had been right. The explosion of talent in 1913 was volcanic. In addition to the ideas reported here, 1913 also saw the birth of the modern assembly line, at Henry Ford’s factory in Detroit, and the appearance of Charlie Chaplin, the little man with baggy trousers, bowler hat, and a cunning cheekiness that embodied perfectly the eternal optimism of an immigrant nation. But it is necessary to be precise about what was happening in 1913. Many of the events of that annus mirabilis were a maturation, rather than a departure in a wholly new direction. Modern art had extended its reach across the Atlantic and found another home; Niels Bohr had built on Einstein and Ernest Rutherford, as Igor Stravinsky had built on Claude Debussy (if not on Arnold Schoenberg); psychoanalysis had conquered Mann and Lawrence and, to an extent, Proust; Jung had built on Freud (or he thought he had), Freud had extended his own ideas, and psychoanalysis, like modern art, had reached across to America; film had constructed its first immortal character as opposed to star. People like Guillaume Apollinaire, Stravinsky, Proust, and Mann were trying to merge together different strands of thought – physics, psychoanalysis, literature, painting – in order to approach new truths about the human condition. Nothing characterised these developments so much as their optimism. The mainstreams of thought, set in flow in the first months of the century, seemed to be safely consolidating.

One man sounded a warning, however, in that same year. In
A Boy’s Will,
Robert Frost’s voice was immediately distinct: images of the innocent, natural
world delivered in a gnarled, broken rhythm that reminds one of the tricks nature plays, not least with time:

The outbreak of World War I took many highly intelligent people by surprise. On 29 June, Sigmund Freud was visited by the so-called Wolf Man, a rich young Russian who during treatment had remembered a childhood phobia of wolves. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary and his wife had taken place in Sarajevo the day before. The conversation concerned the ending of the Wolf Man’s treatment, one reason being that Freud wanted to take a holiday. The Wolf Man later wrote, ‘How little one then suspected that the assassination … would lead to World War I.”
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In Britain, at the end of July, J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron and soon after became president of the Royal Society, was one of the eminent men who signed a plea that ‘war upon [Germany] in the interests of Serbia and Russia will be a sin against civilisation.’
²
Bertrand Russell did not fully grasp how imminent war was until, on 2 August, a Sunday, he was crossing Trinity Great Court in Cambridge and met the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was hurrying to borrow a motorcycle with which to travel to London. He confided to Russell he had been summoned by the government. Russell went to London himself the following day, where he was ‘appalled’ by the war spirit.
³
Pablo Picasso had been painting in Avignon and, fearing the closure of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler’s gallery (Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer, was German) and a slump in the market for his own works, he rushed to Paris a day or so before war was declared and withdrew all his money from his bank account – Henri Matisse later said it amounted to 100,000 gold francs. Thousands of French did the same, but the Spaniard was ahead of most of them and returned to Avignon with all his money, just in time to go to the station to say good-bye to Georges Braque and André Derain, who had been called up and were both impatient to fight.
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Picasso said later that he never saw the other two men again. It wasn’t true; what he meant was that Braque and Derain were never the same after the war.

World War I had a direct effect on many writers, artists, musicians, mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists. Among those killed were August Macke, the Blaue Reiter painter, shot as the German forces advanced into France; the sculptor and painter Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who died in the French trenches near the English Channel; and the German expressionist painter Franz Marc at Verdun. Umberto Boccioni, the Italian futurist, died on
Italy’s Austrian front, and the English poet Wilfred Owen was killed on the Sambre Canal a week before the Armistice.
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Oskar Kokoschka and Guillaume Apollinaire were both wounded. Apollinaire went home to Paris with a hole in his head and died soon afterward. Bertrand Russell and others who campaigned against the war were sent to jail, or ostracised like Albert Einstein, or declared mad like Siegfried Sassoon.
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Max Planck lost his son, Karl, as did the painter Käthe Kollwitz (she also lost her grandson in World War II). Virginia Woolf lost her friend Rupert Brooke, and three other British poets, Isaac Rosenberg, Julian Grenfell, and Charles Hamilton Sorley, were also killed. The mathematician and philosopher Lieutenant Ludwig Wittgenstein was interned in a ‘Campo Concentramento’ in northern Italy, from where he sent Bertrand Russell the manuscript of his recently completed work
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
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Many of the intellectual consequences of the war were much more indirect and took years to manifest themselves. The subject is vast, engrossing, easily worth the several books that have been devoted to it.
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The sheer carnage, the military stalemate that so characterised the hostilities that took place between 1914 and 1918, and the lopsided nature of the armistice all became ingrained in the mentality of the age, and later ages. The Russian Revolution, which occurred in the middle of the war, brought about its own distorted political, military, and intellectual landscape, which would last for seventy years. This chapter will concentrate on ideas and intellectual happenings that were introduced during World War I and that can be understood as a direct response to the fighting.

Paul Fussell, in
The Great War in Modern Memory,
gives one of the most clear-eyed and harrowing accounts of World War I. He notes that the toll on human life even at the beginning of the war was so horrific that the height requirement for the British army was swiftly reduced from five feet eight in August 1914 to five feet five on 11 October.
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By $ November, after thirty thousand casualties in October, men had to be only five feet three to get in. Lord Kitchener, secretary of state for war, asked at the end of October for 300,000 volunteers. By early 1916 there were no longer enough volunteers to replace those that had already been killed or wounded, and Britain’s first conscript army was installed, ‘an event which could be said to mark the beginning of the modern world.’
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General Douglas Haig, commander in chief of the British forces, and his staff devoted the first half of that year to devising a massive offensive.

World War I had begun as a conflict between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But Germany had allied itself with Austro-Hungary, forming the Central Powers, and Serbia had appealed to Russia. Germany mobilised in response, to be followed by Britain and France, which asked Germany to respect the neutrality of Belgium. In early August 1914 Russia invaded East Prussia on the same day that Germany occupied Luxembourg. Two days later, on 4 August, Germany declared war on France, and Britain declared war on Germany. Almost without meaning to, the world tumbled into a general conflict.

After six months’ preparation, the Battle of the Somme got under way at seven-thirty on the morning of I July 1916. Previously, Haig had ordered the bombardment of the German trenches for a week, with a million and a half shells fired from 1,500 guns. This may well rank as the most unimaginative military manoeuvre of all time – it certainly lacked any element of surprise. As Fussell shows, ‘by 7.31’ the Germans had moved their guns out of the dugouts where they had successfully withstood the previous week’s bombardment and set up on higher ground (the British had no idea how well dug in the Germans were). Out of the 110,000 British troops who attacked that morning along the thirteen-mile front of the Somme, no fewer than 60,000 were killed or wounded on the first day,
still
a record. ‘Over 20,000 lay dead between the lines, and it was days before the wounded in No Man’s Land stopped crying out.’
¹¹
Lack of imagination was only one cause of the disaster. It may be too much to lay the blame on social Darwinist thinking, but the British General Staff did hold the view that the new conscripts were a low form of life (mainly from the Midlands), too simple and too animal to obey any but the most obvious instructions.
¹²
That is one reason why the attack was carried out in daylight and in a straight line, the staff feeling the men would be confused if they had to attack at night, or by zigzagging from cover to cover. Although the British by then had the tank, only thirty-two were used ‘because the cavalry preferred horses.’ The disaster of the Somme was almost paralleled by the attack on Vimy Ridge in April 1917. Part of the infamous Ypres Salient, this was a raised area of ground surrounded on three sides by German forces. The attack lasted five days, gained 7,000 yards, and cost 160,000 killed and wounded – more than twenty casualties for each yard of ground that was won.
¹³

Passchendaele was supposed to be an attack aimed at the German submarine bases on the Belgian coast. Once again the ground was ‘prepared’ by artillery fire – 4 million shells over ten days. Amid heavy rain, the only effect was to churn up the mud into a quagmire that impeded the assault forces. Those who weren’t killed by gun- or shell-fire died either from cold or literally drowned in the mud. British losses numbered 370,000. Throughout the war, some 7,000 officers and men were killed or wounded every day: this was called ‘wastage.’
¹⁴
By the end of the war, half the British army was aged less than nineteen.
¹⁵
No wonder people talked about a ‘lost generation.’

The most brutally direct effects of the war lay in medicine and psychology. Major developments were made in the understanding of cosmetic surgery and vitamins that would eventually lead to our current concern with a healthy diet. But the advances that were of the most immediate importance were in blood physiology, while the most contentious innovation was the
IQ – Intelligence Quotient –
test. The war also helped in the much greater acceptance afterwards of psychiatry, including psychoanalysis.
*

It has been estimated that of some 56 million men called to arms in World War I, around 26 million were casualties.
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The nature of the injuries sustained was different from that of other wars insofar as high explosives were much more powerful and much more frequently used than before. This meant more wounds of torn rather than punctured flesh, and many more dismemberments, thanks to the machine gun’s ‘rapid rattle.’ Gunshot wounds to the face were also much more common because of the exigencies of trench warfare; very often the head was the only target for riflemen and gunners in the opposing dugouts (steel helmets were not introduced until the end of 1915). This was also the first major conflict in which bombs and bullets rained down from the skies. As the war raged on, airmen began to fear fire most of all. Given all this, the unprecedented nature of the challenge to medical science is readily appreciated. Men were disfigured beyond recognition, and the modern science of cosmetic surgery evolved to meet this dreadful set of circumstances. Hippocrates rightly remarked that war is the proper school for surgeons.

Whether a wound disfigured a lot or a little, it was invariably accompanied by the loss of blood. A much greater understanding of blood was the second important medical advance of the war. Before 1914, blood transfusion was virtually unknown. By the end of hostilities, it was almost routine.
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William Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood in 1616, but it was not until 1907 that a doctor in Prague, Jan Jansky, showed that all human blood could be divided into four groups, O, A, B, and AB, distributed among European populations in fairly stable proportions.
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This identification of blood groups showed why, in the past, so many transfusions hadn’t worked, and patients had died. But there remained the problem of clotting: blood taken from a donor would clot in a matter of moments if it was not immediately transferred to a recipient.
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The answer to this problem was also found in 1914, when two separate researchers in New York and Buenos Aires announced, quite independently of each other and almost at the same time, that a 0.2 percent solution of sodium citrate acted as an efficient anticoagulant and that it was virtually harmless to the patient.
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Richard Lewisohn, the New York end of this duo, perfected the dosage, and two years later, in the killing fields of France, it had become a routine method for treating haemorrhage.
²¹
Kenneth Walker, who was one of the pioneers of blood transfusion, wrote in his memoirs, ‘News of my arrival spread rapidly in the trenches and had an excellent effect on the morale of the raiding party. “There’s a bloke arrived from G.H.Q. who pumps blood into you and brings you back to life even after you’re dead,” was very gratifying news for those who were about to gamble with their lives.’
²²

Mental testing, which led to the concept of the IQ, was a French idea, brainchild of the Nice-born psychologist Alfred Binet. At the beginning of the century Freudian psychology was by no means the only science of behaviour. The Italo-French school of craniometry and stigmata was also popular. This reflected the belief, championed by the Italian Cesare Lombroso and the Frenchman Paul Broca, that intelligence was linked to brain size and that personality – in particular personality defects, notably criminality – was related
to facial or other bodily features, what Lombroso called ‘stigmata.’

Binet, a professor at the Sorbonne, failed to confirm Broca’s results. In 1904 he was asked by France’s Minister of Public Education to carry out a study to develop a technique that would help identify those children in France’s schools who were falling behind the others and who therefore needed some form of special education. Disillusioned with craniometry, Binet drew up a series of very short tasks associated with everyday life, such as counting coins or judging which of two faces was ‘prettier.’ He did not test for the obvious skills taught at school – math and reading for example – because the teachers already knew which children failed on those skills.
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Throughout his studies, Binet was very practical, and he did not invest his tests with any mystical powers.
²⁴
In fact, he went so far as to say that it didn’t matter what the tests were, so long as there were a lot of them and they were as different from one another as could be. What he wanted to be able to do was arrive at a single score that gave a true reflection of a pupil’s ability, irrespective of how good his or her school was and what kind of help he or she received at home.

Three versions of Binet’s scale were published between 1905 and 1911, but it was the 1908 version that led to the concept of the so-called IQ.
²⁵
His idea was to attach an age level to each task: by definition, at that age a normal child should be able to fulfil the task without error. Overall, therefore, the test produced a rounded ‘mental age’ of the child, which could be compared with his or her actual age. To begin with, Binet simply subtracted the ‘mental age’ from the chronological age to get a score. But this was a crude measure, in that a child who was two years behind, say, at age six, was more retarded than a child who was two years behind at eleven. Accordingly, in 1912 the German psychologist W. Stern suggested that mental age should be
divided
by chronological age, a calculation that produced the intelligence quotient.
²⁶
It was never Binet’s intention to use the IQ for normal children or adults; on the contrary, he was worried by any attempt to do so. However, by World War I, his idea had been taken to America and had completely changed character.