Two Minds That Delved into the Depths of the Human Mind, the Libido They Could Not Cross, the Mysterious Black and Red Books, and the Indians Who Help the Sun Cross the Sky Every Day
When we mention psychoanalysis, who’s the first person that comes to mind? Of course — Sigmund Freud. It’s impossible to avoid Freud; after all, he was the founder of psychoanalysis — a theory centered on the deep study of the human being.
But Freud knew his ideas couldn’t end with him — and he had many, at every stage of his life. He was looking for a successor. Who could inherit the legacy of the great Austrian psychoanalyst? Perhaps a Swiss one.
Yes, the first name that comes to mind when we say “psychoanalysis” will probably always be Freud — but what’s the second? Without a doubt: Carl Jung.
He was younger than Freud, born in 1875 — Freud was 19 years his senior.
After completing his studies, Jung worked at the famous Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Switzerland, under the mentorship of the renowned psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. Around the turn of the century, Bleuler introduced Jung to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.
“My adopted son, my crown prince!”
It’s worth noting that psychology itself — let alone psychoanalysis — was a very new science at the beginning of the 20th century, still in its infancy. Freud, meanwhile, needed concrete validation for his ideas from young scientists. What he really needed were followers — and the young Jung fascinated him immensely.
They first met, after exchanging letters, on March 3, 1907, in Vienna. Jung was 32, Freud 51. Jung later recalled that their first meeting lasted over 13 hours — 13 hours of intense, uninterrupted conversation. It was more than clear that two like-minded intellects had just found each other.
Six months later, Freud sent Jung his entire collection of newly published essays to Zurich. This was the beginning of an intense six-year collaboration and correspondence.
They worked closely, traveled together, and organized major meetings of leading psychologists around the world. Together, they went to America to popularize psychoanalysis across the Atlantic.
Freud was — to put it mildly — fascinated by his younger colleague. In 1910, he even proposed Jung as lifetime president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, calling him “my adopted eldest son, my crown prince.” However, Freud’s colleagues in Vienna were less enthusiastic, and Jung was appointed for only a two-year term.
Libido and a Shattered Friendship
Everything went “wonderfully” until around 1912, when Jung began expressing skepticism about Freud’s theory of the libido. Freud had placed libido at the very center of psychoanalysis since 1894. According to him, libido represented sexual energy — the primary, if not the sole, driving force of human behavior.
But Jung — what a scandal! — refused to agree with his mentor. He argued that libido could not be understood solely as sexual energy. Sexuality, he said, was only one of many drives that move the psyche — alongside hunger, creativity, and others. In other words, Jung didn’t reject the concept of libido, but he downgraded its importance — something Freud found utterly unacceptable.
Tensions escalated when Freud visited his colleague Ludwig Binswanger in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland (only about 40 km from Zurich), yet deliberately did not visit Jung. The incident became known as “the Kreuzlingen gesture.”
Soon after, Jung traveled again to the U.S., where he gave a series of lectures at Fordham University. These were later published in 1912 as The Psychology of the Unconscious (later reissued as Symbols of Transformation). Many agree that this book defined the “psychoanalytic Jung,” even though in later decades he would become known for analytical psychology (and no — psychoanalysis and analytical psychology are not the same; many would say the former is Freudian, the latter Jungian).
“The publication of this book cost me my friendship with Freud,” Jung later said.
They would see each other again in Munich later that same year, 1912, at a psychoanalytic congress. An interesting anecdote: while Jung was giving his lecture, Freud suddenly fainted, and Jung carried him to a couch to help him recover.
The two met for the last time in September 1913, also in Munich, during another congress. There, Jung publicly presented his groundbreaking theory of extraversion and introversion for the first time.
A Decade of Isolation with the Black and Red Books
All this tension must have deeply affected the still-young Jung, who, in 1913, withdrew into near-total isolation that lasted almost a decade. It was later revealed that, at the age of 38, he experienced what he himself called “terrifying confrontations with the unconscious.” He had hallucinations, heard voices, and feared he was developing schizophrenia. But, as a true scientist, he soon embraced these experiences, deliberately inducing them in a process he termed active imagination to better understand the workings of his psyche.
He carefully recorded everything in what he called The Black Book. Later, he transcribed and expanded these entries — with additional commentary, reflections, and illustrations — into The Red Book. He worked on it, with pauses, for 16 years.
He did all this purely for himself, with no apparent intention of ever publishing it (he left no instructions to do so after his death). For decades, scholars tried to persuade Jung’s grandson, Ulrich Hoerni — who inherited the archives — to release it, but he refused. It wasn’t until 2008 that The Red Book was finally published by the Jung Foundation. From the first half of the 20th century until that publication, it’s believed that only about ten people had ever seen its contents.
In her New York Times review, Sara Corbett wrote:
“The book is bombastic, baroque, and, like so much connected with Carl Jung, strange — aligned with a primordial and mystical reality.”
Interestingly, about two-thirds of the book consists of Jung’s own drawings accompanying his texts.
After emerging from isolation (a kind of midlife crisis, perhaps?), Jung traveled extensively — to England, the U.S., East Africa, and India.
In 1943, he became a professor of psychology at the University of Basel, but the following year he suffered a heart attack and retired from professional life. He lived quietly, writing, until his death in 1961 at the age of 85.
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