With this, the Burghölzli doctors had made an “unprecedented and extraordinary” discovery. Independent of Freud—and doing something entirely unlike letting a neurotic ramble on a couch—they had succeeded in producing concrete proof of unconscious processes at work, in “normal” people no less than in the mentally ill. They immediately recognized that their results had confirmed Freud, and before long the word association test was being incorporated into psychoanalysis, as doctors improvised stimulus-words to pursue certain lines of thought or used the complexes they found as starting points for therapy. The method had tremendous potential in criminology. Jung and Riklin had created the modern psychological test.
What erupted next at the Burghölzli was nothing less than an orgy of testing, with doctors stopwatching, dream-interpreting, and psychoanalyzing their patients, their wives, their children, one another, themselves. They jumped on every sign of the unconscious they could find: every slip of the tongue or pen, lapse of memory, absentmindedly hummed tune. For years. “That was how we got to know one another,” Bleuler wrote. His oldest child, Manfred (born in 1903), and Jung’s oldest, Agathe (born a year later), both recalled feeling under total psychoanalytic observation as children. Publications on the word association experiment included anonymized results from Bleuler, Bleuler’s wife, her mother and sister, and Jung himself.
Bleuler was thrilled by Freud’s discoveries and immediately wanted to use them to help the deeply psychotic, not merely private patients suffering from sexual complexes. Before long, he found the results compelling enough that he reached out to Freud. He took the occasion of a 1904 book review to speak out as forcefully as he could, saying that Freud’s Studies on Hysteria and Interpretation of Dreams had “opened up a new world”—a powerful endorsement from one of the leading psychiatrists in Europe. Then he wrote to Freud personally: “Dear Honored Colleague! We here in the Burghölzli are fervent admirers of the Freudian theories in psychology and pathology.” As part of the rampaging self-analysis at the Burghölzli, he even mailed Freud several of his own dreams, asking for tips on how to interpret them.
The news of Bleuler’s fervent admiration was one of the most heartening letters Freud would ever get, and the first sign Freud saw of his theory’s acceptance in academic circles. It may have been what inspired him to end his multiyear hiatus from writing and produce the three great works he would publish in 1905 (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria). Freud crowed to his friends: “An absolutely stunning acknowledgment of my point of view….Just think: an official Full Professor of Psychiatry and my † † † Hysteria and Dream studies, always invoked with disgust and loathing up until now!” (Three crosses were chalked on the front doors of peasant houses to ward off danger and evil—Freud used them in his letters to ironically indicate horrifying, devilish things.) He wrote to Bleuler: “I am confident we will soon conquer psychiatry.”
That “we” skimmed over something Freud knew perfectly well: Bleuler, at the pinnacle of professional psychiatry in Zurich, was far more important for Freudian ideas than vice versa. By making the Burghölzli the first university psychiatric clinic in the world to use psychoanalytic treatment methods, Bleuler and his assistants were the ones who brought Freud into professional medicine. Zurich, where Rorschach was studying, had replaced Vienna as the epicenter of the Freudian revolution.
By 1906, the Burghölzli was fully embroiled in the controversies around Freud’s ideas—what Freud called the “two warring worlds” of academic psychiatry and psychoanalysis. With the Jung-Riklin word association studies offering apparently ironclad proof of Freud’s theories, the anti-Freudians attacked. Gustav Aschaffenburg, the German psychiatrist who had taught Riklin how to perform the word association tests, delivered a fierce denunciation of Freud at a psychiatric convention and then published it.
Bleuler had spoken up for Freud in 1904, two years earlier, but since then he had dared to ask some tough questions. Freud’s theory seemed extreme, Bleuler wrote—was everything rooted in sexuality? Where was the evidence Freud’s earlier work was so rich in? Surely Freud wasn’t unscientifically generalizing about human nature from a single case? Bleuler found it productive to have one’s views challenged; not so Freud, who dismissed all of Bleuler’s reasonable doubts as resistance to the great truth and turned his attention to Bleuler’s younger colleague.
It was Jung, not Bleuler, who responded to Aschaffenburg in 1906—a devastating critique that did much to advance Freud’s reputation. Jung had already gone over Bleuler’s head to write to Freud, slipping into his first letter that he had “published the case that first drew Bleuler’s attention to the existence of your principles, though at that time with vigorous resistance on his part.” The opposite was closer to the truth. Jung took the opportunity of his first personal meeting with Freud in 1907 to drive another wedge between the two older men and persuade Freud that he was Freud’s man in Zurich.
Jung’s letters to Freud increasingly ranged from catty to outright backstabbing, harping on his boss’s pedantic, small-minded spirit and utter incompetence at psychoanalysis: “Bleuler’s virtues are distorted by his vices and nothing comes from the heart”; Bleuler’s lecture “was dreadfully superficial and schematic”; “the real and only reason” for Bleuler’s objections “is my defection from the abstinence crowd”; “I admire the way you put up with Bleuler. His lecture was pretty awful, don’t you think? Have you received his big book?” This was the book on schizophrenia—Bleuler’s lifework. “He has done some really bad things in it.”
If Bleuler is unjustly forgotten today, it is largely because Jung wrote him out of history—never once mentioning him by name in his memoirs, going so far as to say that the Burghölzli psychiatrists cared only about labels, with “the psychology of the mental patient playing no role whatsoever.” It was Jung, said Jung, who was driven to uncover his patients’ individual stories: Why did one patient believe one thing and the other something else, and where did these particular, specific beliefs come from? If one patient thought he was Jesus and another said, “I am the city of Naples and I must supply the world with noodles,” then what was the point of lumping them both under the label “delusional”? Jung’s accusation that Bleuler “preferred to make diagnoses by comparing symptoms and compiling statistics” over “learning each patient’s language” was a particularly low blow, given the history of Swiss dialect at the Burghölzli.
What has often been seen as a duet of attraction, repulsion, and self-interest between Freud and Jung was actually a triangle: Jung sold himself hard to Freud because he wanted to displace Bleuler; as Bleuler became less reliable, Freud’s need for Jung intensified; Jung’s bristling under Bleuler’s authority set up the power struggle with Freud to come. Bleuler comes off best in these squabbles, sometimes dithering and unimaginative but with the least ego and the most willingness to learn from others. Yet Bleuler’s star fell as Jung’s rose.
Beneath the intellectual differences was a basic class conflict: while the Bleulers lived modestly, ate meals in the hospital dining room, and shared their lives with Eugen’s catatonic sister, Jung in 1903 had married one of the richest women in Switzerland. The Jungs moved out of their apartment at the Burghölzli directly downstairs from the Bleulers’ and had private meals cooked by their servants when not out enjoying one of Zurich’s fine restaurants. Jung asked for a string of unpaid leaves to pursue his own work or travel—he could now afford them—and Bleuler approved them all, more and more grudgingly as the years went by and the obligations of running a large hospital kept him from his own work. Jung’s increasing disdain for the hardworking Bleuler was a sign of his own rising fortunes.
Both men fell out with Freud within a few years and continued to feud with each other for decades—“twenty years of active enmity” that, “while both were still at the Burghölzli, varied from the occasional veiled remark to openly hostile invective, often before shoc
ked doctors or frightened patients.” Any Zurich psychiatrist had to navigate an ever-changing minefield of “warring worlds,” where even the refusal to take sides would be felt as betrayal by both parties. This was the dilemma Bleuler now had to face. He felt that absolute authority was inimical to scientific debate and progress: “This ‘you’re either with us or against us’ is in my opinion necessary for religious communities and useful for political parties, but I consider it harmful for science,” he told Freud directly. Seeking plurality, he joined organizations set up in opposition to Freud’s closed camp. Freud disagreed, while most research scientists criticized Bleuler for having supported Freud at all.
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Rorschach would naturally not have known about the intrigues revealed only in Freud’s, Jung’s, and Bleuler’s private letters. In early 1906, while Freud was transferring his allegiance from Bleuler to Jung, Rorschach was a second-year university student taking his preliminary exams and attending lectures by Jung, who later said he never met Rorschach personally. Still, Rorschach could not help being aware of the feuds among these pioneers and the issues at stake.
As a student and for the rest of his life, Rorschach both respected Freud’s ideas and preserved a certain skepticism toward them. He would continue to use psychoanalysis while remaining clear about its limitations. In a later lecture to a general audience of doctors far from Zurich, he offered authoritative explanations of how psychoanalysis worked and what it could and couldn’t do; meanwhile, he also joked that “in Vienna, they’re going to be explaining the rotation of the earth psychoanalytically before long.”
Rorschach used the word association test on patients and in criminal cases for years, even after Jung had largely left it behind, and he was inspired by Jung’s later work as well. Jung’s 1912 book Transformations and Symbols of the Libido would come to define the “Zurich School,” which extended psychoanalytic explorations to an enormous range of cultural phenomena, from Gnostic myths and religions to art and what would come to be called the collective unconscious. Jung had rejected Freud’s literalistic understanding of sex drives, seeing them instead more mythically and symbolically as the “life-energy” shared by sexuality, fire, the Sun. Rorschach, too, was “fascinated by archaic thought, myths, and the construction of mythologies,” according to Olga. “He pursued the traces of these ancient ideas in various patients, looked for analogies, and found, in the delusions of a sick Swiss farmer leading a hermit’s life, astounding allusions to the world of the Egyptian gods.”
As with Freud’s ideas, Rorschach used Jung’s without falling entirely under their sway. Jung took sides: while he recognized that there were certainly physiological causes of mental illness, he was soon pointing out that most of his patients had unimpaired brains, or at least that there was no way to connect their psychological disturbances to the brain. “For this reason,” Jung said in January 1908 in a lecture at the Zurich Town Hall, “we have entirely abandoned the anatomical approach in our Zurich Clinic and have turned to the psychological investigation of mental disease.” Whether or not Rorschach attended this particular lecture, he absorbed its message. He paid his dues in hard science, doing solid anatomical research on the pineal gland in the brain, but he agreed that the future of psychiatry lay in finding ways to interpret the mind, not merely dissect the brain.
But Rorschach was closest in spirit to the third great pioneer, who was constitutionally unable to “entirely abandon” either the interpretative or the anatomical approach. If a disease is biological, Bleuler argued, then perhaps it should be treated irrespective of what the patient’s particular delusions or “secret story” might be. Rorschach, too, would continue to believe that psychology rested on a physiological basis—in his case, the nature of perception.
Rorschach shared Bleuler’s modest social background, his human interest in sufferers of serious mental illness, and an ability, which their colleagues often lacked, to respect and learn from others even while finding one’s own path. While Freud saw women as beings with mysterious psychologies very different from “ours,” and Jung often wrote about women’s predominant interest in domesticity and tendency to use emotion over intellect, Rorschach—the high school champion of women’s rights—and Bleuler shared none of these prejudices and, more important, never built their theories around them.
They also both matter-of-factly rejected paranormal psychology. Freud and Jung—as well as William James, Pierre Janet, Théodore Flournoy, and the other preeminent psychologists of the time—frequented séances and studied spiritual mediums, not as a hobby but because that was where they hoped to get access to the “subliminal” realm soon to be called the unconscious. Rorschach, like Bleuler, understood these practices in terms we would use today. When his sister Anna had mocked their grandmother for turning to spiritualism, Hermann, in medical school, responded that “if an old person is upset and turns to spirits, she does so only because people don’t want her anymore. She tries to communicate with ghosts because she no longer has anyone alive who’s close to her. That is a situation of real, deep tragedy, and nothing to get angry about.”
Rorschach never worked at the Burghölzli himself, but because of the symbiotic nature of the University of Zurich and the Burghölzli hospital he was able to have a world-class clinician as an academic adviser. He became enough of a Bleulerian to take the pledge of abstinence from alcohol, in January 1906, and to keep it for the rest of his life. Bleuler was the exception among the university psychiatrists of his era in supporting, applying, and teaching Freud’s ideas, yet Zurich’s independence from Vienna was crucial: Rorschach was in the only place in the world where psychoanalysis was both taken seriously and open to further refinement and exploration. He studied with the inventors of the world’s first psychological test of the unconscious. It would prove to be an ideal background.
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In 1914, when Rorschach was a practicing psychiatrist, Johannes Neuwirth, a soldier in a bicycle battalion in the Swiss Army, was sent to Rorschach’s clinic for evaluation. Neuwirth had gone on a ten-day leave, paid off 2,900 francs in debts for his stepfather’s business, and on Thursday, December 3, two days before he was due to return to duty, suddenly disappeared. The police found him in a tavern six days later, bent low over a plate of food with a large beer in front of him, eating slowly and calmly. After a while, the policeman said, “Neuwirth, why didn’t you go back into service on Saturday?” Neuwirth looked up and said, hesitant and embarrassed, “I have to go now.”
He went with the policeman willingly and wanted to rejoin his troop at once—he liked serving in the army. When asked what day it was, he said “Thursday” and refused to believe it was already Wednesday the ninth; he seemed confused in general. Transferred to the hospital, Neuwirth said his bicycle had flipped in the snow on the evening of the third and he had fallen by the bridge near the train station. He remembered nothing further until the policeman spoke to him in the tavern. “It was like I was waking up from a dream. They accused me of wanting to run away, but if I’d wanted to do that, I would have done it with 2,900 francs in my pocket, not after I’d paid it all out in bills.”
After taking a lengthy history of Neuwirth’s background, physical health, and family circumstances, Rorschach used the Jung-Riklin word association experiment, Freudian free association, and hypnosis—one of Bleuler’s specialties—to help Neuwirth remember what had happened. The word association test turned up nothing that had happened in the incident itself but revealed complexes explaining why Neuwirth’s attack had taken the form it had (hostility to his stepfather, wishing that his father were still alive so that “everything would be the way it was”). Freudian free association took the patient back into a dissociated state, which demonstrated how he had acted: he immediately started hallucinating and afterward could not remember anything but the first thing he had seen. Hypnosis worked best to uncover the facts of what had happened, as Rorschach had expected it would; he had saved it for last so he could compare the resu
lts of the different methods. Under hypnosis, Neuwirth revealed that he had left the bicycle lying by the station, sat on a bench in the park, walked back to his stepfather’s business, couldn’t find his way home, had what sounded like an epileptic fit. His story was always consistent, but he remembered it all taking place on one single day.
After the hypnosis, Rorschach was able to interpret the free-associated visions and word association results to piece much of the story together. “It was especially important to me,” he summed up, “to show, using the material retrieved in the hypnosis afterward, that so-called ‘free associations’ are actually determined,” not random but rather the products of “unconscious memories.” Each technique had an important function. Rorschach concluded that a full analysis would have been the best of all, to give further details not revealed under hypnosis and to prove that all the aspects of the case, in his words, “coalesced into a unified picture.”
But there hadn’t been time for a full analysis. What he needed was a method that could work in a single session, producing “a unified picture” immediately. It would have to be structured, with specific things to respond to, like the prompts in a word association test; unstructured, like the task of saying whatever comes into one’s head; and, like hypnosis, able to get around our conscious defenses to reveal what we don’t know we know, or don’t want to know. Rorschach had three valuable techniques at his disposal, from his three main influences, but the test of the future would have to combine them all.
The Inkblots Page 6
