Rage and Anxiety in the Split between Freud and Jung

This article focuses on the period of the historic rupture between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, approximately the period from 1909 to 1913. It examines the relevance of rage and anxiety in the process of escalating conflict culminating in a definitive separation. Their estrangement led to a theoretical parting of the ways, signified by the divergence between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. This study begins from the understanding that, for both Freud and Jung, private life experiences, personal relationships and conflicts, and their emotional responses were deeply intertwined with the processes of theorising and writing. The rift and final split were accompanied by large amounts of rage and anxiety on both sides, which continued to have emotional reverberations on the two famous psychologists for the rest of their lives. This paper will look at how the emotional pressures generated by the feud influenced the theoretical work on the emotional life they produced during this period: Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) and “The History of the Psycho-analytic Movement” (1914), and Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1912)