An Anthropos complex, the over-identification with being human and grasping at legacy as immortality, was involved in the Freud/Jung relationship/split.
Purusa, a god/pure mind, was sacrificed/dismembered by the other gods to create the material world, including humans (Rig Veda 10.90). “Man is both the victim that the gods sacrificed and the divinity to whom the sacrifice was dedicated — that is, he is both the subject and the object of the sacrifice” (Doniger, p. 177). Anthropos means the collective soul rather than the individual person but when we over-identify with being an individual human/soul, we become obsessed with creating a legacy (a pithy tweet, an artwork, a psychological theory), hoarding the sacrifice. Creating hurts; We slice off a piece of ourselves as an offering to the world. Once created, it is no longer a part of us, but something with its own life and destiny to fulfill. The Anthropos complex leads to grasping at our creations, believing they are still ours, extensions of us. This tentativeness to release the creation from our legacy leads to an incompleteness which remains a primal wound because it limits its, and our, growth.
Freud/Jung spoke about their ideas as “precious stones” (Bair, p. 210), “unconditional devotion” (Freud, p. 32), and things to always be looked after (Bair, p. 211) showing they struggled to let go of their creations. Equally their tendency to personally attack each other as a means of critiquing/defending the ideas indicates the inability to separate creator from creation (Shamdasani, p. 52). When Jung writes part two of Transformations Bair says it was traumatic because, “he thought it must have corresponded to how the archetypes spoke” (p. 224), and “he was compelled to write it down as he heard it spoken to him” (p. 225). The break comes after Jung experiences this de-anthropomorphizing of himself, and begins learning, as the Veda reminds us, of the one-ness of all created things, “All creatures are one-fourth of him, three-fourths eternal life in heaven” (Rig Veda 10.90).
Bair, D. (2003). Jung: A biography. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.
Doniger, Wendy. (2009). The Hindus: an alternative history. New York: Penguin Press
Freud, S., Jung, C. G., & McGuire, W. (Ed.). (1974). The Freud/Jung letters: The correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (R. Manheim & R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Shamdasani, S. (2003). Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490095
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