Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was originally a physician and a neurologist. He developed a keen interest in the unconscious mind when his father died in 1896. Freud was forty at that time. For the next three years he analyzed his own dreams and published his masterpiece Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 that has been read as the Bible of psychoanalysis by his disciples.

Freud started developing his theories when his older colleague Joseph Breur referred him a young patient known in the psychoanalytic literature as Anna O, who suffered from hysteria, a common condition in women at that time in Vienna and Europe. While Breur was treating her hysterical symptoms, Anna O fell in love with him and declared that she was pregnant. Breur, who was a married man, and a respectable doctor of his community, got scared and left town to protect his social image.

When Freud started treating Anna O he discovered that she was not pregnant. It was one the symptoms of her clinical condition. As Freud analyzed the case he concluded that hysteria was the result of unresolved sexual conflicts of patient’s childhood. Later on Freud and Breur jointly wrote a paper on Hysteria sharing their clinical observations and experiences.

As Freud developed his treatment method he called in psychoanalysis. One of the salient features of this method was the recognition that patient transfers her feelings from her past to the therapist, that he called transference and psychotherapy helps patient to resolve those feelings so that she could live in reality and not project the past into the present. The more the patient resolves her transference the more she can let go of the symptoms and gets cured.

Freud investigated a series of patients day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year lying on the couch doing free association while he sat in chair behind the patient taking notes smoking his cigar. Freud’s clinic in Vienna became the labour room that gave birth to the philosophy and practice of psychoanalysis. In that clinic he developed the concept of repression, in which patient pushes the painful experiences in the unconscious mind and other defence mechanisms, like denial, projection, rationalization and magical thinking that give rise to psychological symptoms of anxiety, depression, panic disorder and other neurotic disorders.

With the help of free association and psychoanalysis Freud helped his patients bring the unconscious unresolved conflicts to the conscious mind and then deal with them realistically to get healed and cured and free themselves of symptoms.

Alongside unhealthy defence mechanisms Freud also developed the concept of healthy coping mechanisms like humour, creativity and sublimation that mature people use to cope with their emotional conflicts and social dilemmas. By the coping mechanism of sublimation people find a socially acceptable way to express their immature instinctive needs. For example a man with strong aggressive instincts might become a boxer or a wrestler or a woman who wants to expose herself might become an actress and people who want to drive fast and break traffic rules might become ambulance drivers. Sublimation helps them acquire a socially acceptable lifestyle.

Freud developed a detailed theory of personality using concepts of Id, Ego and Superego, Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious mind and oral, anal, phallic and genital stages of development. If any developmental stage is disturbed then the person has symptoms of that stage in their adult life. For example people with addictions have unresolved issues of the oral stage and need to excessively smoke cigarettes, eat food or drink alcohol to satisfy their unresolved emotional needs. Freud linked different personalities with instincts and developmental stages of childhood. He also introduced the concept of Oedipus complex in which a boy is in love with his mother and hates his father as he does not want to share his mother with his father and for his psychosexual maturity has to resolve his Oedipus complex to let go of his mother to his father and find another woman to love. Freud borrowed the concept from Greek mythology. If the man does not resolve his Oedipus complex successfully then he remains attached to his mother and cannot love another woman wholeheartedly and experiences problems in his marriage and love life. In girls it is called Electra complex, the dynamics and resolution of which are more complex than boys.

Although Freud was brought up in a Jewish family he was very critical of the institution of religion. His books Moses and Monotheism and Future of an Illusion highlight his philosophy in which he compares neurosis with religion. He believed that religion was a cultural neurosis and neurosis was a personalized religion. His prediction was that as the borders of science would expand, the borders of religion would shrink in the future.

Freud was a compassionate therapist but in his personal life he was quite authoritarian. When he established the psychoanalytical institute he welcomed his colleagues and friends but he had hard time dealing with people who challenged his authority, personality and philosophy. That is why he lost friendship with many of his colleagues.

Freud died in 1936 by taking an overdose of opium as he suffered from the cancer of jaw for which he had numerous operations to control his pain. Even that cancer and pain did not stop him from smoking his cigars till the last days of his life.

After Freud’s death a number of philosophers, psychologists and psychotherapists promoted and developed his theories. His daughter Anna Freud, a child analyst, discovered some more defence mechanisms while doing therapy with children. Eric Fromm combined theories of Sigmund Freud with Karl Marx and wrote books like Escape from Freedom and The Sane Society and offered psychoanalytic interpretations to cultural behaviours that people adopt in socialistic and capitalistic societies. He built bridges between human psychology and sociology. Peter Sifneos, Habib Davanloo and many other modern psychotherapists developed a practice of Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy using the psychodynamic principles of Freud.

While there were many admirers and disciples, Freud also had a number of critics. Some anthropologists stated that Freud’s concept of Oedipus complex was a reflection of his observations of European nuclear families and did not apply to extended family and tribal system still prevalent in many parts of Asia, Middle East and Africa. Many experimental psychologists and behaviorists like Eysenck, Albert Ellis and B F Skinner criticized Freud of focusing on abstract unconscious motives rather than concrete observable behaviours. Karl Popper, the scientific philosopher, believed that a theory could only become part of science if it could be proved wrong. Since Freud’s theories of Oedipus complex and unconscious mind cannot be disproved, they might be useful and therapeutic but still remain part of psychology and philosophy not science.

Although Freud shared his theories with physicians and scientists, he surprisingly received a Goethe award for literature as in his lifetime he was appreciated by artists and writers far more than physicians and scientists. He influenced not only practices of mental health but also education, fine arts and culture.

Of all of Freud’s admirers and critics, the one that had the most complex, complicated and troubled relationship was of Carl Jung. He started as an admirer and ended as a critic. Their relationship was intense psychologically as well as philosophically, professionally as well as personally.

When Jung was a medical student he met a group who dealt with spiritual mediums. Jung used to attend those meetings and made detailed notes. Jung decided to join the discipline of psychiatry when he read a book written by Kraft-Ebbing and did his psychiatric training under a famous psychiatrist of his time Eugen Bleular. In 1902, at the age of 27, he finished his doctorate and wrote his thesis, On the Psychology and Pathology of so-called Occult Phenomenon. Jung became quite successful when he started his practice in Switzerland and started analyzing patients. Jung was introduced to Sigmund Freud when he read his masterpiece Interpretation of Dreams. When Jung did his own research on human psychology and developed word association tests, he sent his paper to Freud who was quite impressed and invited him to visit him in Vienna. The first meeting of two great minds in 1907 was so exciting and intellectually stimulating that it lasted nearly twelve hours.

Freud was so impressed by Jung that he called him his ‘eldest son’ as Jung was nineteen years younger than Freud, and wanted him to be his successor. Jung had a lot of respect for Freud but also had a lot of reservations. They both had a keen interest in human psychology, psychopathology and unconscious mind, but their approach was quite different. Jung was quite impressed by Freud’s concept of repression but was not convinced that it was always activated by sexual trauma. On the other hand Freud respected Jung’s research with word association tests, but was not comfortable with his keen interest in occult phenomena. Freud considered those things a part of superstitions and religion rather than science and psychology. Jung believed Freud was too pre-occupied with sexuality and Freud thought Jung was obsessed with spirituality and mythology.

Freud and Jung met the second time when Freud came to Jung’s house to see him and his wife Emma and brought a bouquet of flowers. Jung and his wife were shocked when Freud referred to his spouse Martha as ‘elderly wife’ and expressed a sense of embarrassment being married to her. When Jung and Emma visited Freud’s home, Jung experienced two surprises. The first surprise was that Freud’s wife did not know anything about Freud’s creative work and the second surprise was that Freud’s charming sister-in-law Minna knew everything about Freud’s writings and psychoanalysis. Later on when Freud’s sister-in-law met Jung, she confessed that she had been harboring guilt feelings about her relationship with Freud. Jung was quite disturbed knowing about the details of the triangle between Freud, his wife and sister-in-law and discovering that Freud and his sister-in-law had a secret romantic affair.

While Jung was upset to discover Freud’s intimate relationship with his sister-in-law, Freud was perturbed knowing that Jung had an intimate relationship with one of his Russian patients named Sabrina. Sabrina was for Jung what Anna O was for Breur. Jung had presented her case in international seminars. Jung encouraged her to go back to medical school and later on became a well-known psychoanalyst and made valuable contributions to psychoanalytical literature. As a patient she adored Jung and fell in love with him and he was so impressed by her charm and intellect that he could not resist the temptations of getting involved. Their relationship became so intense that his wife became jealous. When Jung realized his mistake he ended the relationship abruptly that created an emotional crisis for Sabrina as she was heartbroken and wrote letters to Freud sharing her intimate feelings with Jung and wanted to go through psychoanalytic treatment with Freud to resolve her feelings towards Jung.

The relationship between Jung and Freud experienced a crisis when they were both traveling to North America from Europe to receive their honorary awards. During their journey at sea they decided to share their dreams and analyze them. Jung shared his dreams and associations and Freud analyzed them but when Jung asked Freud to share his dreams and his associations Freud got nervous. Freud felt Jung was getting too personal and disrespectful by questioning his authority. Jung believed Freud was nervous because his dreams were related to his secret affair and his unresolved triangular relationship with his wife and sister-in-law. Since Freud did not know that his sister-in-law had shared her feelings with Jung, he was in the dark. Jung also did not know what Sabrina had shared with Freud in her letters. That awkward situation created an emotional gulf between Freud and Jung, a gulf that kept on increasing with time. Finally they parted their ways and Jung resigned from the psychoanalytic institute. When Jung parted he had to face isolation from many friends and colleagues. He was so troubled that he was afraid he might experience a psychosis, a nervous breakdown. The relationship that started with twelve-hour dialogue in 1907 ended in 1913 when they were both present in the same room in a conference but had nothing to say to each other. Their silence spoke volumes.

Over the years Freud developed his concept of personal unconscious while Jung developed his concept of collective unconscious mind and Sabrina exchanged letters with both secretly while residing in Russia. Jung introduced the concepts of introverts and extroverts as personality types and anima and animus as female side of males and male side of females in human psychology. Jung was also intrigued with the similarities of images and metaphors in different folktales of the world. Jung believed that all those myths of different cultures that could not be explained by the logical and rational mind were human attempts to deal with mystery of life. While Freud focused on understanding and treating neurotic conflicts Jung focused on understanding the diversity of different cultures. Jung died in 1961 and his following has grown over the decades.

In spite of their philosophical differences, contributions of Freud and Jung have been complementary and have advanced our understanding of human mind and personality. Freud had an atheistic while Jung had a spiritual philosophy.
I sometimes wonder how the history of Freudian and Jungian traditions, two major schools of human psychology, would have been different if Freud was not romantically involved with his sister-in-law and Jung was not intimately involved with his patient Sabrina, if Freud’s sister-in-law had not confessed to Jung and Sabrina had not written letters to Freud and both had not decided to share their dreams. Two modern prophets of human psychology got trapped in the labyrinths of their own unconscious minds and could not resolve their sexual conflicts. It is amazing how the unresolved conflicts of Freud and Jung affected the evolution of human psychology in 20th century.