FREUD’S AMERICA

“Who could have known that over there in America, only an hour away from Boston, there was a respectful old gentleman waiting impatiently for the next number of the ‘Jashrbuch,” reading and understanding it all, and who would then, as he expressed it himself, ‘Ring the bells for us’?”

--Sigmund Freud

“May we remain close together in 1909!” Sigmund Freud wrote at in Vienna at the end of the year to Carl Gustav Jung, his young psychoanalytic associate in Zurich, and noted that the coming year looked “promising … for our cause.” A fortnight earlier American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, as president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, had invited Freud to participate in his school’s 2oth anniversary proceedings, pointing out that Freud’s famous French rival Pierre Janet “has had a profound influence in turning the attention of our leading and especially our younger students of abnormal psychology from an exclusively somatic and neurological to a more psychological basis. We believe that a concise statement of your own results and point of view would now be exceedingly opportune, and perhaps in some sense mark an epoch in the history of these studies in this country.” In addition to opening the curtain on a fateful act in the history of psychoanalysis, Hall’s invitation also prompted an exchange of letters between Freud and his closest colleagues – presented here in the form of an epistolary playlet, a draft for an unfinished psychodrama.

dramatis personae

Sigmund Freud. The “father of psychoanalysis.” In his early fifties, at the threshold of legendary international fame but, in 1909, still living in what he regarded as his “splendid isolation” from the scientific community.

C. G. Jung. Although nearly 20 years younger than Freud, is better known to American psychologists. Nine years earlier, when only two weeks out of medical school, he began working at the pioneering Burghoelzli mental hospital, where one of his first duties was to prepare a staff report on Freud’s then-revolutionary methods of treatment. Among the psychoanalytic circle, and by Freud himself, is widely regarded as Freud’s “heir apparent.”

Karl Abraham. Two years younger than Jung, who at Burghoelzli had introduced him to Freud’s methods. The leader of the Berlin group of analysts.

Sandor Ferenczi. The same age as Abraham, and the leader of the Hungarian circle, he was also introduced to psychoanalysis by Jung.

G. Stanley Hall. A decade older than Freud. Founder of one of the first laboratories of experimental psychology in the United States and of the first important psychological journal in the western hemisphere.

[Freud and Jung center stage, with Abraham in background and Ferenczi busy offstage. Hall visible in the wings, beckoning.]

Freud (to Jung): I have been invited … to deliver four to six lectures in the first week of July. They expect my lectures to give a mighty impetus to the development of psychotherapy over there…. I have declined without even consulting you or anyone else, the crucial reason being that I should have had to stop work 2 [or 3] weeks sooner than usual, which would have meant a loss of several thousand kronen. Naturally the Americans pay only $400 for travel expenses. I am not wealthy enough to spend five times that much to give the Americans an impetus. (That’s boasting; two-and-a-half to three times as much!) Janet … is probably richer or more ambitious or has no practice to lose. But I am sorry to have it fall through on this account, because it would have been fun.

Jung: Perhaps you could arrange to go after the anniversary; even then your lectures would still be of interest to the Americans. Little by little your truth is percolating through to the public. If at all possible, you ought to speak in America if only because of the echo it would arouse in Europe, where things are beginning to stir too…. Janet’s travel expenses were amply compensated by his subsequent American clientele. Recently [Emil] Kraepelin gave one consultation in California for the modest tip of 50,000 marks. I think this side of things should also be taken into account.

Freud (gesticulating, shouting to Ferenczi offstage): America should bring in money, not cost money.

(to Jung): [I think that once the Americans] discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us. Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great. That is why I have no desire to risk the trip there in July. I can’t expect anything od consultations.

(to Abraham, conspiratorially): At least the invitation can be talked about here in Europe.

Jung: You are probably right…. So far these people simply haven’t a notion of what we’re at. One of these days they will creep into a corner, prim and abashed. Nevertheless it will rub off on some of them and is doing so already, despite their audible silence (Meyer and Hoch!). In any case the American medical material isn’t up to much. (Please don’t think of the fox and the grapes.)

[Pantomime: The matter does not rest there, however. On February 16, despite the rebuff, Hall renews Freud’s invitation, notifies him that the anniversary celebration has been moved to early September, and increases his travel allowance to $750.00. Freud accepts the revised invitation and resumes his dialogue.]

Freud: I must admit that this has thrilled me more than anything else that has happened in the last few years – except perhaps for the appearance of the “Jahrbuch” -- and that I have been thinking of nothing else…. In 1886, when I started my practice, I was thinking only of a two-month trial period in Vienna; if it did not prove satisfactory, I was planning to go to America…. But unfortunately things went so well in Vienna that I decided to stay on…. And now, twenty-three years later, I am to go to America after all, not, to be sure, to make money, but in response to an honorable call! We shall have a good deal to say about this trip and our various consequences for our cause. I shall be leaving at the end of August. My brother, and probably also Dr. Ferenczi … want to come too. I am very curious about what will happen there and about the outcome of these lectures. The trip may certainly be mentioned, it is as sure as anything can be. Perhaps it will annoy some people in Berlin as well as in Vienna. That cannot do any harm.

(Exit Abraham, after whispering with Freud.)

Jung: I must congratulate you…. I believe you will get an American practice in the end.

Hall (from wings): We have given out no notice as yet; nevertheless, in some way the news of your coming has reached a number of people in this country who have been profoundly interested in your work and have written us expressing their pleasure and their desire to hear whatever you may have to say to us.

Abraham (entering): The people whom I told about it at your suggestion have unfortunately not taken sufficient umbrage.

Freud: If the trip does not annoy the Berliners, there is really nothing to be done with them. I wonder if it might not be a good idea to concentrate on psychology since Stanley Hall is a psychologist, and perhaps devote my 3-4 lectures entirely to dreams, from which excursions in various directions would be possible. Of course these questions have little practical interest in view of my inability to lecture in English.

Jung: If you don’t want to keep your American lectures entirely on the elementary didactic level, I fully agree that dreams offer the most suitable material. I have no great hopes of American psychiatry, some of the psychologists are better, but only a few. Anyway your success is guaranteed in advance, for the kudos lies in the appointment itself, and those who appointed you won’t go back on it if only for reasons of self-interest. What if you do lecture in German? There’s nothing they can do about it.

(At this point the play breaks off--)

Freud’s brother was unable to make the trip, but a more fateful substitute was provided – again by Hall, who invited Jung also to participate in the Clark conference. One of Hall’s chief associates at the university was unaware of the addition as late as May 28, but Jung chose to play down the correct chronology; as he put it, “Simultaneously, and independently of me, Freud was invited.” On June 12, several months after Freud’s invitation, Jung wrote to Freud to say that he had booked passage on the ship that would take Freud and Ferenczi to America and that he was anxious about the lectures he would deliver at Clark in his own right. Freud was overjoyed: “It changes my whole feeling about the trip and makes it important. I am very curious to see what will come of it all.” To Ferenczi he added that Jung’s acceptance “magnifies the importance of the whole affair.” Freud was more oracular than he could have dreamt.

He was, however, despite his professed enthusiasm, strangely lethargic about making preparations. While Freud procrastinated on his lectures, Ferenczi busily took English lessons and bought books on the US or the three voyagers to study. But Freud refused to read them. “The thought of America does not seem to matter to me, but I am looking forward very much to our journey together,” he told his Hungarian colleague. Less than a week before leaving he complained that he was “still completely unproductive…. Perhaps contact with Jung and Ferenczi … will stimulate something. Fortunately I am no longer so necessary and can gradually shrink into an ornament; perhaps there is a bit of providence there.”

The three psychologists met in Bremen on August 20, the day before their boat’s departure. Jung wanted to explore the city’s lead cellars for the reputed bodies of prehistoric people who had been buried in the local marshes; their hair and skin had been preserved by the same humic acid which had consumed their bones. During one of Jung’s frequent monologues on the subject that day, Freud fainted – and then accused Jung of projecting a death-wish onto him. Jung “was more than surprised by this interpretation. I was alarmed by the intensity of his fantasies….”

Except for some fog, the weather was pleasant, though the psychological meteorology was often stormy. Freud, who should have been pleased to catch the cabin steward reading his “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” whiled away the time with his colleagues analyzing each other’s dreams – the first group analysis in history. Freud’s dream dealt mainly with his fears for the future of his family and of his mission. Unable to give more than a partial analysis of one of Freud’s dreams, however, Jung asked the master for more details from his private life. “Freud’s response to those words was a curious look – a look of the utmost suspicion. Then he said, ‘But I cannot risk my authority!’ At that moment he lost it altogether. That sentence burned itself into my memory; and in it the end of our relationship was already foreshadowed. Freud was placing personal authority above truth.”

At the same time, Jung felt that Freud’s interpretation of one of Jung’s dreams was not only inadequate but also inappropriate: “he was completely helpless in dealing with certain kinds of dreams and had to take refuge in his doctrine. I realized then that it was up to me to find out the real meaning of the dream.” Eventually, from Jung’s efforts at autoanalysis of that dream emerged his concept of collective unconscious.

Beyond Freud’s immediate Viennese circle, Jung had been the first important convert to psychoanalysis. In the decade since, he had contributed mightily to the movement’s theoretical and organizational structure. At Burghoelzli he had indoctrinated Ferenczi, Abraham, Ernest Jones, A. A. Brill, and other notables into the procedure. Begining in 1908-09 he edited the “Jahrbuch fuer psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen,” the first periodical to which Freud had free access to publish his papers. And, initially, it was Jung that provided the intellectual bridge to the Americans – even E. B. Titchener, an archenemy of all that Freud promulgated, saw fit in his own Clark University address to include Jung’s work in dementia praecox (as schizophrenia was then called) as one of the decade’s most significant psychological advances. The American excursion of 1909, as Freud and his friends never tired of telling one another beforehand, was not thought of as much more than a way of gaining European attention. Instead, ironically, the voyage to the US would become the impetus for the splintering of the psychoanalytic movement in its European homeland, even as it shifted westward to the US.

But the schisms, manifold as they proved to be, were still in the future; in 1909 the impact of Freud’s visit seemed to fulfill all of Freud’s hopes. Hall claimed that “the influence of Freudian views in this country, where they had been little known before … developed rapidly” after the Clark lectures, “so that in a sense this unique and significant culture movement owed most if its initial momentum in this country to this meeting.” Forty years afterwards, Jung still accepted Hall’s verdict: the lectures represented “the first official recognition of the existence of psychoanalysis and it meant a great deal to [Freud], because recognition in Europe for him was regrettably scarce.” Even Freud (who had an extreme distaste for things American, and came to regret not only the consequences of his visit there but also the influence of misguided American practitioners upon his doctrines) accepted Hall’s judgment on the impact of the Clark presentation. In his 1935 “autobiography” he recalled that “my short visit to the new world encouraged my self-respect in every way. In Europe I felt as though I were despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped on to the platform at Worcester to deliver my ‘First Lecture upon Psycho-Analysis’ it seemed like the realization of some incredible daydream: psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality.”

Freud, Ferenczi, and Jung arrived in New York on August 19, all three suffering from diarrhea and stomach cramps and no doubt some feelings of anxiety. Brill was waiting for them, and the group was joined next day by Jones. After some sightseeing, the five men left the city on September 4 and arrived in Worcester on the 5^th. Freud was scheduled to give a lecture daily for five days beginning at 11:00 on Tuesday the 7^th.

Hall had a genuine talent for publicly promoting psychology in general, his own ideas in particular, and his university institutionally. In 1899 he had used the occasion of Clark’s decennial anniversary to parade before the American academic community some of Europe’s most eminent scientists, including the just-retired Burghoelzli director August Forel, who discussed the recent advances in hypno-therapy by Freud and Josef Breuer and the limitations of hypnotism as a way of treating psychic disorders. Afterwards, as part of their 1901-02 lectures, Hall and his Clark colleague Adolf Meyer focused on the Breuer-Freud work on hysteria. Some five years later Hall published his two-volume “Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education.” The book (the subtitle of which did not exhaust its actual content) devoted a good deal of attention to the importance of sex to psychological states and developed Hall’s notions of “inhibition” and “irradiation” (analogous to Freudian “repression” and “sublimation”).  

For the 1909 bicentennial observation, Hall wanted to draw even more attention to Clark than he had 10 years before, and he did not shrink from capitalizing on the notoriety of Freud’s theories to promote the cause. The two-week celebration was held on a grand scale. The first week was devoted to discussing child welfare, one of Hall’s pet interests; at the close of the conference the 27 organizations that had participated federated into a national association, the first of its kind in the US. The second week was set aside for scientific conferences in those fields which Clark emphasized in its curriculum: math, chemistry, physics, biology, history, pedagogy, and especially psychology. Thirty honorary doctorates were conferred, more than thrice the number granted since the university’s foundation;. Freud, Titchener, Meyer, H. S, Jennings, Franz Boas, and Stern) received honorary degrees in psychology, and Jung was granted one in education and Wilhelm Stern (whom, because of an unfriendly review years before, Freud had snubbed on the voyage over) received honorary degrees in psychology, and Jung one in pedagogy and school hygiene. It was the only such honor Freud would ever receive.

Hall seems to have given considerable thought to the composition of the psychology sessions. No record exists of who attended, but a group photo from September 10 had 42 people in it. Most were psychologists, but a few psychiatrists who were sympathetic toward the new psychotherapeutic approaches were present. J. McKeen Cattell. who (with Joseph Jastrow) had been Hall’s first psychology student, represented New York’s Columbia University. Attendees from Harvard and Yale had professional interests in developmental, educational, or clinical psychology. Indeed, most of the psychologists present had either been trained at Clark or, at Cornell, under Titchener, Hall’s professional ally and co-editor. Ten of the attendees pictured delivered lectures: during that week Freud delivered five, Jung three, and Ferenczi, Jones, Meyer, Titchener, Jennings, Stern, Boas, and William James, one each.

During the course of a half-hour walk each morning Freud organized his lecture for that day. Instead of concentrating on the analysis of dreams, as he and Jung had earlier discussed, he followed the advice of Jones to appeal to the Americans’ pragmatism and to use the opportunity to map out the entire psychoanalytic field in a general way. As Freud explained the situation to his audience on the third day, “a purely subjective and apparently secondary motive” decided him to abandon his original intention to offer them a thorough consideration of “traumdeutung.” “It seemed rather an impropriety that in this country, so devoted to practical pursuits, I should pose as ‘interpreter of dreams,’ before you had a chance to discover what significance the old and despised art can claim.” One suspects, however, that, given the recent shipboard unpleasantness, Freud may have had his temporary fill of dream analysis. At any rate, he spent considerable effort that week publicly mending his fences with Jung, going out of his way in his lectures and press interviews to extol his younger colleague’s work. He was also quite careful to distance himself from Janet, whom the Americans tended to regard as Freud’s mentor. In particular, Freud refuted the Frenchman’s claims that failure to remember traumatic experiences is due to hereditary degeneracy: “It was inevitable that my views should diverge widely and radically” from Janet’s, according to Freud, “for my point of departure was … not laboratory researches, but attempts at therapy.”

The “Boston Evening Transcript” sent psychologist Adelbert Albrecht as a special correspondent to cover the doings of the infamous Dr. Freud. But Albrecht had nothing but praise for his subject: “One sees at a glance that he is a man of great refinement, of intellect and of many-sided education. His sharp, yet kind, clear eyes suggest at once the doctor. His high forehead with the large bumps of observation and his beautiful, energetic hands are very striking. He speaks clearly, weighing his words carefully.”

Some months later, an anonymous reviewer for Hall’s “American Journal of Psychology” (probably Hall himself) further fleshed out the portrait. Freud’s lectures were “an experience never to be forgotten…. He spoke in German and without notes, and in a voice of so little power that his hearers drew their chairs in a semi-circle around him. But never in the writer’s experience have a group of advanced scholars, many of whom have achieved great eminence in this country, listened with greater interest to the words of a great teacher. His expositions were masterpieces of simplicity, and it is to be hoped and believed that the lucidity of his expositions … will lead to the recognition he deserves in this country.”

At the close of what Freud and his companions considered a great triumph for psychoanalysis, they first journeyed to Niagara Falls and then spent four days in the Adirondack Mountains with America’s leading neurologist. James Jackson Putnam had attended Harvard Medical School with William James, before going to Europe to study under Freud’s own mentor Jean Charcot, and then had joined the Harvard faculty in 1972; two years later, in addition to his teaching duties, he had become the director of the Massachusetts General Hospital. In the years that followed he became one of the leaders of the psychotherapy movement in the US. His first paper on the subject (1895) had referred to the work done by Janet and by Breuer and Freud, but he remained skeptical toward psychoanalysis until the May before Freud’s visit, when Jones won him over at the first American Therapeutic Congress to deal exclusively with psychotherapy. Whatever doubts Putnam may have still harbored about Freudian methods were dispelled through his personal contacts with Freud and his fellows that fall; the Clark conference affected his old schoolmate, James, quite differently, however: he continued to believe that Freudianism could “not fail to throw light on human nature” but thought Freud himself to be “a man obsessed with fixed ideas.” The Europeans left New York for home on September 21.

What effect did the Clark conference have on the future of American psychoanalysis?  Was the occasion as instrumental in gaining professional and popular acceptance for the treatment as Hall, Jung, and Freud all insisted? In order to evaluate the Clark connection correctly one must first be able to gauge how concerned turn-of-the-century intellectuals had reacted to Freudian notions. To do this, for instance one could examine the age’s four leading American psychological journals – Hall’s “American Journal of Psychology” (AJP), the “Psychological Review” (PR), the “Psychological Bulletin” (PB), and the “Journal of Abnormal Psychology” (JAP). (The “Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease” [JNMD], the official organ of the American Neurological Association, the Boston Society of Psychiatry and Neurology, and the New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago Neurological Societies, had paid a considerable amount of attention to Freud’s early, strictly neurological, studies,could also be profitably consulted, but throughout the period in question it was chiefly concerned with somatic rather than psychodynamic methods – even though it was owned by Smith Ely Jelliffe and its advisory board included such psychoanalytic stalwarts as Putnam, Meyer, and William A. White.)

The second issue of PR (March 1894) featured the first pubic American reference to Freud’s non-neurological (but still pre-psychoanalytic) approach: William James, who had studied in Paris under Janet, reviewed the preliminary (1893) findings of two Viennese physicians, Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, and concluded that they provided “independent corroboration” of Janet’s theories. After breaking the psychoanalytic ground, however, the “Review” did not bother to cultivate the field; except for a passing mention or two by Morton Prince in 1905, and an occasional notice, without comment, in the “Books Received” section, Freud and his theories were studiously ignored until the outbreak of the Great War in Europe.

The same was nearly true for Hall’s “American Journal” as well. Although Breuer and Freud published their final conclusions in 1895, no one in the US deigned to notice until 1899, when the AJP ran a fairly detailed critique. Perhaps because of his tardiness, the reviewer began rather apologetically, admitting that the talking cure was “not so generally known … perhaps as its interest and importance” warranted, and ended by twitting his colleagues, “The book will thus prove suggestive to those hide-bound psychological thinkers who are over-dogmatic in fixing the limits of the normal in conscious life, as well as those who view the abnormal as ipso facto of no direct value to the task which psychology has ever in hand, the systematic explanation of conscious experiences.” In spite of these brave words, though, the journal made no further mention of Freud or his work until the approach of the Clark conference.

Despite the lack of public attention, rival intellectual circles in Boston and nearby Worchester maintained an interest in psychotherapy. James and Putnam, Hall and Meyer, were early leaders. Others became important later: Morton Prince, Boris Sidis, Hugo Muensterberg. But in the 1890s and early 1900s their chief inspiration was still Janet, who reinforced the link by lecturing in Boston in 1904 and 1906. Janet even dedicated the 1906 lectures, published as “The Major Symptoms of Hysteria,” to Putnam. The Massachusetts groups retained only a peripheral interest in Freud, who meanwhile had parted company with Breuer and had begun to explore a more radical approach to the understanding of mental phenomena. In 1899/1900 he published his psychoanalytic manifesto, “Die Traumdeutung” (the Interpretation of Dreams). In eight years the book only sold some 600 copies, but its influence – some would say notoriety – was much larger than its sales: in 1905 Sidis recommended it to James, and Prince asked Freud to contribute an article to the inaugural issue of the forthcoming JAP. Freud wrongly believed that the US did not recognize or protect foreign copyrights and resolutely refused to submit any work to American journals.

Despite the interest exhibited by influential figures, however, the American psychological climate of opinion remained hostile toward Freudian approaches. To mark the centenary and bicentennial anniversaries, respectively, of the deaths of proto-psychologists Immanuel Kant and John Locke, in 1904 the PR staff launched a separate monthly, PB, to handle reviews of current literature. Its 10th issue is remarkable as an implicit illustration of just how infertile the American soil was for the seeds of psychoanalysis, even though the only explicit mention of Freud’s name – indeed, the only such mention made during the entire first year of the “Bulletin” – was a fleeting reference in connection with Theodore Flournoy’s categorization of dreams as mediumistic communication: First there was a sharp assault against Cesare Lombroso’s idea that genius results from an epileptoid irritation of the cortex (merely a somatic variant of Freud’s view that genius was sublimatically related to neurosis); then Fleurnoy’s topography of spiritualistic communication (automatic writing, telepathy and clairvoyance, and dreams). And, finally, a pair of reviews by Mary Calkins, one of which summarized Jastrow’s rejection of an independent unconscious organization, and the other the opinion that mediate association is caused by unconscious ideas. Nonetheless, despite the lack of public acknowledgement, Freud’s work seems to have been rather well known, as evidenced by Jelliffe’s 1905 JNMD book reviews which discussed Freud’s views in such a way that he must have thought everyone was already familiar with them.

During the PB’s second year of publication, however, Meyer began widely propagating Freudian notions. He had left Clark in 1901 to direct the Pathological Institute of New York and, as part of his duties, to coordinate the laboratory work of all 13 of the state’s mental hospitals. Two years later he began to hold briefing classes for his staff (Brill was a member of the first class). Soon, Meyer was regularly acquainting his colleagues with Jung’s work in particular. By the end of the decade the Institute was by far the most important dissemination center for psychoanalytic ideas in the US.

Meyer went public in the PB in 1905 with a strongly positive review of two of Jung’s recent publications on association experiments (which, as it turns out, were also the means by which Freud became acquainted with Jung’s work). Next year he surveyed two more articles by Jung and two by Freud, the most important of which was his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” According to Meyer, “In a systematic presentation of is experience with the sexual life of his patients, Freud has opened the eyes of the physician to an extension of human biology which differs very favorably from the sensational curiosity-shop of the literature on perversions, and is especially illuminating on account of the pedagogically important study of the infantile period.” In other words, Freud’s work was “absolutely essential” and “to the psycho-pathologist as important as the study of dietetics is to the general physician.”

In the PB for the following year Meyer reviewed Jung’s work on dementia praecox, calling it “a very striking corroboration of Freud’s principles of the processes in hysteria in this field” and “a decided amplification of Freud’s views” which “must be studied in full as one of the best applications of the method.” In this way Jung, whose work was already quite accessible to the American psychological community, was directly linked to the rather more disreputable Freud. In addition, George H. Kirby, who had followed Meyer from Worchester to New York, further reviewed Jung’s work for the PB in 1907.

Meanwhile, Meyer and his future successor at the Institute, August Hoch, had joined forces with prominent Boston coterie members Muensterberg, Sidis, Putnam, and Charles L. Dana, to launch Prince’s JAP in 1906, the first periodical in English devoted exclusively to abnormal psychology. The premier issue opened with a piece by Janet, the psychological mentor to most of the editors. Though Freud declined to submit an article, Putnam reported on the first clinical test of psychoanalysis in an English-speaking country. Although Putnam was still ambivalent about many Freudian assumptions, he did “not hesitate to assert that Freud’s method constitutes a distinct enrichment of our means of treatment.” The second issue contained a review by Hoch of three new reports by Jung, plus one by Sidis on Freud’s “Psychopathology of Everyday Life.” Before the first year of publication was completed, JAP even featured an article by Jung himself, the first in America by a genuine psychoanalyst.

So by 1907 two prominent American psychological journals were devoting considerable space to the psychoanalytic work of Jung and Freud. In addition, JAP abstracted some recent material by Abraham and opened its last issue of the year with a pair of new articles by Jung and Jones themselves. Its third volume contained several more articles, abstracts, and reviews by or about Jung, Jones, and Brill, as well as a highly critical balancing article by Walter D. Scott. By the fourth volume, Jones was a regular contributor, whose varied work appeared in 5 of that year’s 6 issues, while one review each was published by Brill and his friend B. Onuff, who used his official position to facilitate the disembarkation of Freud and his companions upon their arrival in New York in September.

At the same time, in the PB, Kirby provided another favorable review of Jung’s work, and Jones made his own debut the following year (1909). With all the recent publicity, it is no wonder that conservative Philadelphians began an anti-Freudian campaign at the 1908 American Neurological Association meeting. And it is no wonder that Hall conceived of turning that attention to his own ends by installing first Freud and then, for good measure, Jung as the centerpiece for the Clark bicentennial. To make sure his audience got the point, he opened the pages of volume 20 of his AJP to the psychoanalysts for the first time in a decade. Prior to the Clark conference one issue featured reviews of Franz Wittels’ “Die Sexuelle Not” (a book dedicated to Freud), “Analyse der Phobie eines 5-jaehrigen Knaben” (compiled by “acquaintances of Freud working under his direction”), and the Brill translation of Jung’s “Psychology of Dementia Praecox.” So, notwithstanding Hall’s own boasts of the influence that his Clark conference had on psychoanalysis, the only three of the four major American journals which would concern themselves with Freudian thought before World War I were already doing so before that conference occurred.

Psychoanalytical literature was, however, featured even more prominently after the conference was over. Putnam and Jones each delivered papers on the subject at the 1909 American Psychological Association meeting, which abstracted in PB. In 1910 PB also reviewed Jones’ AJP article on Hamlet and accepted two new articles by him. Beginning with the 5^th volume, Jones was the assistant editor of JAP and its most prolific writer, providing 14 contributions that first year alone, including a review of the entire contents of that year’s “Jahrbuch.” Brill and Isodor Coriat also contributed work, and Wilhelm Stekel, Freud’s first follower, made his American debut as well. But it was the 1910 AJP that gave the Freudians their greatest coverage. The January issue not only featured Jones’ oedipal analysis of Hamlet but acknowledged the reception of works by Jung, Abraham, Otto Rank, and two by Freud, but also a lengthy review of Brill’s translation of Freud’s “Selected papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses” – the anonymous reviewer (Hall?) claimed that though psychoanalysis was “by far the most interesting and original line of development which modern psychology has had since the experimental movement began” under Wilhelm Wundt (whose first pupil had been Hall, and whose rejection of the invitation to the Clark conference had made it possible for Hall to improve his offer to Freud), the method was nonetheless “only a further development of Wundt’s association reactions.” The 2^nd issue featured all five of Freud’s Clark lectures and Brill’s translation of Jung’s, plus dream-interpretation articles by Jones and Ferenczi, and notices of a new book by Ferenczi and (rather belatedly) Freud’s 1891 work on aphasia.

Throughout 1910 Freud and Ferenczi had urged Putnam to establish an American branch of the new International Psychoanalytic Association, but Jones expressed doubts that there was enough support to maintain it in addition to the new American Psychopathological Association that he and Prince had just organized. Prince helped decide the issue, however, when in the JAP he sharply criticized what he regarded as the cultish aspects of psychoanalysis. Jones quickly appeared with a rebuttal, which Prince coupled with his own reply. In private, Jones threatened to resign his editorial duties and began advising Putnam to consider founding a strictly psychoanalytic journal. For a while Putnam was able to mediate the dispute, but nonetheless he and Jones, Meyer, Hoch, and Trigant Burrow (another of Jung’s personal converts) created the American Psychoanalytic Association in May 1911. A year later the APA still only had 24 members (though the New York Psychoanalytic Association founded in February 1911 by Brill, Onuf, and H. W. Frink already had 26, including Jelliffe, who did not join the APA until 1912.)

Jelliffe, like Putnam, had known about psychoanalysis long before he became its champion. With his long-time publishing partner William A. White he had traveled to Amsterdam in 1907 to attend the First International Congress for Psychiatry, Neurology, Psychology, and the Nursing of the Insane. Janet spoke, of course, and Gustav Aschaffenburg launched a blistering attack against Freud’s ideas. In reply, Jung defended the psychoanalytic insights, talking past his allotted time and then storming off the platform. The next day Jelliffe made Jung’s acquaintance and then visited him at the Burghoelzli before returning to the US. It was the beginning of a long friendship, but Jelliffe (though impressed) was not yet a convert. A year later he was back in Europe, studying in Paris and Berlin (where he got to know Abraham) and did not return home until shortly after the Clark conference was over. He went to work with Brill at the New York Neurological Institute. ”Our walks through the park started something in me of inestimable value,” he told Brill many years later. “I had been reading Freud, but you made it vital and real for me.” That year he and White published the first English translation of Freud, Brill’s translation of “Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses” and began a life-long involvement in psychoanalysis.

Despite Prince’s growing disenchantment with the subject, however, the JAP continued as the American Freudians’ major forum. For its sixth volume Jones provided 14 more pieces, Coriat 9, Brill 3, and Putnam, Stekel, Burrow, White, E. W. Taylor, and Eugen Bleuler others that dealt with psychoanalytic subjects or approaches, as well as special abstracts taken from the “Jahrbuch.” The seventh volume had major articles by Jones, Coriat, Putnam, Wells, Burrow, Brill, Frink, Jelliffe, and L. E. Emerson, as well as various dissenting articles, plus the usual coverage via reviews and abstracts. Jones, Putnam, Coriat, Brill, Emerson, and Jung contributed to volume 8, but a sharply critical article by Janet caused the internecine war between Jones and Prince to flare up again.

The 1911 PB did not feature any specifically Freudian material, though its October issue contained a pair of articles on childhood and adolescence that commented favorably on Freud’s work. In 1912 it only had two psychoanalytical contributions, one by Jones and one that scanned some recent literature on the field. But PB did not make any other references to psychoanalysis before World War I. Interest on the subject even began to wane at the AJP: in 1911 Rudolf Archer made a lengthy survey of “Recent Freudian Literature” and Jones contributed a long essay on the psychopathology of quotidian life, but otherwise the journal only contained four notices, without commentary, of Freud’s works received. In 1912 James S. Van Teslaar contributed two more general surveys, and Rank’s “Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage” was reviewed but, as Freud had predicted, Hall’s unease over the therapy’s sexual implications was making him wary.

The movement in Europe was splintering badly. Jung’s dispute had begun with the American trip in 1909 and continued to worsen. Out of the alternative interpretation he gave to his shipboard dream he developed his concept of the collective unconscious and consolidated his new approach into a rival school of psychotherapy, which he called “analytical psychology” – Janet’s term. Perhaps even more than the defection of his heir-apparent, this christening must have been bitter gall for Freud, who had spent most of his career in Janet’s shadow. In 1912 Jelliffe arranged for Jung to receive a new honorary degree at Fordham University in New York; instead of his scheduled presentation as part of the university’s International Extension Course, Jung gave a series of lectures “Concerning Psychoanalysis” in which he publicly set forth his differences with Freud. Others, like Stekel and Alfred Adler, and later Rank, would also split with Freud’s doctrines and lead their own psychotherapeutic movements.

Soon after, Jelliffe and White sought Hall’s advice on starting a new psychoanalytic journal. Hall offered to give them an autonomous section of the AJP but no final agreement was made. In 1913 the journal featured Preserved Smith’s “Luther’s Early Development in the Light of Psycho-Analysis” (anticipating Erik Erikson’s seminal work on psychohistory by almost a half century) and a review of Brill’s “Psychoanlaysis, Its Theories and Practical Application” which clearly marked Hall’s disenchantment with the theory he had done so much to promote: “The intelligent reader cannot but regret, however, that more space [in Brill’s book] was not given to the extremely important and suggestive departures by Jung, who seems to be breaking away from the master and evolving a new set of views of his own, with which, however. Brill seems to have no great sympathy.” The 25^th volume of AJP (1914) contained only short reviews or notes of received works by Freud, Brill, and Jones, plus a critical piece by William Brown.

By then the JNMD was beginning to pay some attention to psychoanalysis, including a serialization of Jelliffe’s translation of Rank’s “Myth of the Birth of the Hero,” but most of the psychological journals had turned to other subjects. So Jelliffe and White finally launched their “Psychoanlaytic Review: A Journal Devoted to Human Conduct” in November 1913. The first issue featured a warm congratulatory letter by Jung on the success of their new venture and the first of his lectures “Concerning Psychoanalysis.” Freud distanced himself from the venue, though Brill provided some translations of his work. Freud told White in 1914 that he regarded the “Review” as a commercial competitor of his own new “Internationale Zeitschrift fuer aerztliche Psyoanalyse” and disapproved of “Jelliffe’s intimacy with Jung” who, Freud complained, “in spite of his presidency has never lifted a finger for the International Association or its organs, but only pursued his own aggrandizement.”

Thus it was that psychoanalysis became firmly planted in the American soil. In time, even before Freud’s death in exile from Nazi Germany, the US became the movement’s international center. In 1909, the year of the Clark conference, Jones and Brill, his two most important American supporters, had already been indoctrinated by Jung and were already trying to convert Putnam, Jelliffe, and others to the cause. Hall, Meyer, and Prince helped the process of proselytizing but remained skeptical; even Jelliffe remained obstinately heterodox. But, whatever misgivings Freud had about the American capacity to adopt his teachings, he was almost desperate to attract favorable European notice. So he undertook a personal mission, hoping that by trumpeting his message in the New World he could open the ears of the Old. During the voyage across the Atlantic, however, he alienated his most effective disciple; ,as a result Jung repudiated his master’s thought, slandered his reputation with rumors of an adulterous relationship with his nephew’s wife, and began preaching a powerful doctrine of his own. As other close followers went their separate ways, Freud became increasingly critical of his American “success.” He accused Hall of having “a touch of the ‘king-maker’ about him, a pleasure in setting up authorities and in then deposing them.” And, as the influence of the American school grew, Freud more and more frequently bewailed what he regarded as its simplicity and superficiality – qualities which, given the general tone of his Clark lectures, he was himself partly responsible for.

As he grew older he blamed his intestinal problems and even his deteriorating handwriting on his month in America.