ABSTRACT
From 1910 onwards, I had no intimate personal knowledge of the politics of psychoanalysis. I have been told that Jung looked askance at Adler and Stekel, Freud's most distinguished pupils, and that the two latter were sacrificed because of Freud's devotion to his Swiss recruit. I should have thought, rather, that the abrupt dismissal of Adler was brought about by the danger that the Zurich contingent would find Adler's non-sexual theory more to their taste than Freud's own views, which were not altogether “respectable” in the eyes of Swiss Protestants. Freud certainly had a way of treating his pupils like children with an alternation of rewards and punishments, and by keeping them out of bad company. Perhaps the Swiss were not to be allowed to see that there was some one who had a preferential explanation to that afforded by the libido; one whose doctrine of the neurotic constitution was so simple, and did not involve any appeal to sexual factors. “Why does a man become a paederast?”—“To put women in their place!” “Why is a wife bedridden with paralysis?”—“To put her husband in his place!” … The Zurichers must be safeguarded against contagion.
