ABSTRACT

From 1880 to 1920, Boston was the center of psychotherapeutic de-velopments in the English-speaking world (Burnham, 1958, 1967; Hale, 1971; Gifford, 1978); and as recent investigation of this important period in Boston history has shown, long before Freud, there flourished a uniquely American dynamic psychology of the subconscious (Taylor, 1982a, 1982b, 1983, 1985a)—one that for various reasons embraced Jung earlier than Freud and, on a number of important points, resembled Jung's version of psychoanalysis more closely than Freuds. In fact, an examination of Jung's association with the psychotherapeutic practitioners of Boston allows us, I believe, to address a particularly vexing problem in the history of psychology and psychiatry, namely, the persistence of the stereotype that Jung was “nothing but” Freuds disciple. Indeed, I shall claim that the wider context of Jung's associations, before, during, and after his exchange with Freud, shows a consistency that allows Jung the privilege of being assessed in his own right, for the most part independent of any subservient historical debt to Freudian theory.