Acrimony Among the Acolytes

[A further footnote to this:

      Chomsky, Freud, and the problem of acolytes

to be incorporated later, d.v.]

The world is well familiar with the fallings-out of Freud with Fliess, and Jung with Freud.   But even at the next level down, among the tadpoles in the acolyte pool, there were acute horizontal dissensions.

Ernest Jones, an Englishman, lasted long enough in the graces of both Freud and Freudianism, to write what is or long was the standard -- and admiring -- biography of the man.    Perforce  he recounts the various fractures between protector and protégé, largely taking Freud’s side in each case.  But in the third and final volume, he is obliged to treat of a case involving himself.  Not, to be sure, any feelings of his own  of falling-out with Freud; but rather, a disasterous falling-out with Otto Rank -- or again rather, as Jones (the innocent, passive, baffled spectator here)sees it:  of Rank with him, for reasons connected with the “manic phase of his cyclothymia”.   And the rub of it was, Rank had Freud’s ear, and (per Jones’ account) poured anti-Jonesian innuendo into it -- nay, even as that vile hebenon was poured into the ear of Hamlet père -- spoiling their relations, to the point that Jones received from his beloved master  a letter of sharp rebuke, which he wincingly reproduces for his readers, as though displaying the scars of the cane.

Yet that is not the ultimate nub;  for “Rank had suffered much in childhood  from a strongly repressed hostility to his brother; and this usually covered a similar attitude toward a father.”  Already you sense where this is going:

For three years  I lived with the fear  lest Rank’s “brother-hostility” [i.e., towards Jones] regress to the deeper “father-hostility” [towards papa Freud].

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: The Last Phase (1957), p. 47

And in the next grim pages, he recounts how that tragedy  did in fact come about.