1913 Read Online Free PDF Page A

vigour, whoswept out of the High Baroque into the Berlin of the early twentieth century, had been felled by a stroke, and his wife had looked after him at great personal sacrifice. When the ‘Life’s Work’ exhibition was being planned, everyone was afraid that Corinth’s was in fact over. But he had fought his way back to life. And back to the easel. Now the posters for his big exhibition were hanging all over the city, 9 to 4 every day, admission 1 Mark, with a picture of Corinth, amazed at himself, while Charlotte recovered from him off in the Tyrol. She’s back in time for the reception. ‘You’re looking well, Madame’, Max Liebermann says to her at the reception on 19 January at the Secession, his saddle of venison with Cumberland sauce in his right hand. My life’s work is looking good, Lovis Corinth thinks to himself as he stomps and grumbles his way through the exhibition halls. So it goes on. But – please – no more of that awful Cubism.

    Back to Freud’s, at 19 Berggasse. He’s spending these January days in his study, finishing off his book on
Totem and Taboo
. And it’s quite natural that the unconscious should be forcing its way powerfully into this book about taboo-breaking and fetishisation. But there’s one thing he doesn’t seem to be aware of: at that moment, at any rate, when his pupils, above all the Zurich psychologist C. G. Jung (b. 1875), are challenging him and hurling violent accusations at him, Freud (b. 1856) is developing his theory of parricide. So in December 1912 Jung had written to Freud: ‘I would like to make you aware that your technique of treating your pupils as patients is a mistake.’ By so doing Freud is creating ‘impudent rogues’ and ‘slavish sons’, he writes. And he continues: ‘Meanwhile you always remain comfortably on top as the father. Out of pure subservience, no one dares to tug the prophet’s beard.’
    Seldom in his life has anything hit Freud as hard as this act of parricide. During those few months, when his beard must have sprouted new grey hairs, he drafts a first reply which he doesn’t send, and which will only be found in his desk after his death. But on 3 January 1913he summons all his strength and writes to Jung in Küsnacht: ‘Your assumptions that I am treating my pupils as patients are demonstrably inaccurate.’ And then:
    Besides, your letter is unanswerable. It creates a situation that would cause difficulties in spoken communication, and is entirely insoluble through written channels. But anyone encountering abnormal behaviour who shouts that it is normal arouses suspicions that he lacks an understanding of illness. I therefore propose that we abandon our private relationship entirely. I will lose nothing, because I have long been joined to you only by the thin thread of the further development of past disappointments.
    What a letter! A father, challenged by his son, stabs furiously back. Never has Freud lost his temper so badly as during these January days. Never has she seen him so depressed as in 1913, his beloved daughter Anna will later say.
    Jung replies on 6 January: ‘I will comply with your wish to abandon the personal relationship. Besides, you will probably know better than anyone what this moment means for you.’ He writes that in ink. Then he adds by typewriter, and it looks like a tombstone for one of the great intellectual friendships of the twentieth century: ‘The rest is silence.’ It’s a fine irony that one of the most interpreted and most discussed break-ups of 1913 should begin with a vow of silence. From this moment on Jung will chafe at Freud’s methods, and Freud, conversely, at Jung’s. Before that he gives a precise definition of parricide among primitive people: they put on masks of the murdered father – then pray to their victim. You might almost call it the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

    And speaking of Enlightenment, the ten-year-old Theodor W. Adorno, nicknamed ‘Teddie’, who will later