Free Sigmund Freud* by Kathleen Krull

of his father or girlfriend being tortured by rats. The only way he was able to get through the day was by performing complicated rituals. (This came to be known as obsessive-compulsive behavior.) Freud attributed the Rat Man’s problems in part to his love-hate relationship with his father. This patient, whose real name was Ernst Lanzer, completed his analysis with Freud and went on to live a more or less normal life before dying in World War I.
    Freud, as always, was a relaxed, entertaining speaker, talking without notes. When he stopped, the audience insisted he keep going . . . for another riveting two hours. He often lectured about this case—in fact, more than any other, and listeners were always awed at the skill with which he interpreted his patient’s disturbing condition. A witness said he gave “one the feeling of being let out of a dark cellar into broad daylight.”
    The conference was a hit. It led directly to publication of the first psychoanalytic journal. New Wednesday group-type societies began popping up in Berlin, Zurich, Budapest, and much farther afield—the United States.
    Freud’s fame was growing—as the head of what was becoming an international movement.

CHAPTER NINE
    America Goes Freudian
    AT PRECISELY ONE P.M. on an early March day of 1907, Carl Jung arrived at Berggasse 19 for lunch. Actually it was a thirteen-hour nonstop talkfest—and typical of his intense relationship with Freud.
    Freud, at fifty-one, was looking for an heir. Jung, at thirty-one, seemed to fit the part. A big-time admirer of Freud, Jung was a doctor on the staff of a well-known mental hospital in Switzerland. Jung worked with Eugen Bleuler, a brilliant Swiss psychiatrist famous for labeling a confusing set of symptoms—including delusions and a withdrawal from reality—as schizophrenia (he coined both the terms “schizophrenia” and “autism”). Jung was applying Freudian ideas of talk therapy to patients with this newly discovered mental disorder. Rather than shutting such patients away for life, he and Bleuler believed that they could be treated.
    Freud saw in Jung a link to greater credibility in scholarly circles outside psychoanalysis. Jung as well as Bleuler had a solid reputation in the world of traditional medicine, while Freud knew his work was still on the fringes of accepted practice. “It is absolutely essential that I should form ties in the world of general science,” he wrote. He also chafed at the prospect of psychoanalysis being labeled an “Austrian-Jewish cult.” Jung, neither Jewish nor Austrian, was exactly the man he’d been looking for, my “eldest son . . . my successor . . . crown prince.” Here—come stand on my shoulders, Freud seemed to be saying.
    The two men kept up their lengthy conversations, and in 1909 traveled together to America, still talking, talking, talking. Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, had invited Freud to give the first American lectures on psychoanalysis. Always travel-phobic, he looked for excuses to say no. (Travel frightened him; when leaving on a trip, he would say, “Good-bye—you may never see me again.”) At first he said Americans were so prudish about sex that his visit would be pointless, but when the university raised its fee he finally agreed.
    As the ship sailed into New York harbor, legend has it that Freud turned to Jung, his young protégé, and said, “If they only knew what we are bringing to them.” If the statement is true, Freud wasn’t being overly dramatic. America was home to some of the nuttier theories concerning mental illness. At this time, one popular theory held that little nests of germs clustered in the roots of teeth caused insanity. The director of a mental hospital in New Jersey had recently pulled all his own children’s teeth as a preventative measure.
    Physically and mentally, Freud was now way outside the comfort zone of his orderly life in Vienna. Perhaps that’s why he hated America, dismissing