Uneasy meeting of minds

Psychology has been to the 20th century what archaeology was to the 19th: the open sesame to understanding how human beings came to be as we know them today. Nearly a century after they developed their 'digging' tools, two Central European doctors - Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung - remain the two best known of these mental excavators.

The concurrent release of two biographies is a useful chance to explore the ties, and more particularly the rift, between the two masters, who severed all contact with each other in 1913. Striking similarities between them emerge from a reading of these two books.

The theories each developed and espoused, based on early professional experience with the mentally ill, underscored a shocking new idea - that the key to psychological aberration could open up the dark vault of repressed sexuality. Both were proponents of, and claimants to, absolute truth; both attracted fanatical followings; both became fiercely sensitive to criticism and jealous of their place in history; and both introduced technical terms since absorbed into ordinary usage.

Neither emerges unscathed from these clinical analyses with halo intact. Richard Noll's work is closer to demonology, and his previous writings on Jung have earned him the hostility of the Swiss-German's spiritual followers.

Those who are interested in these two modern sages as people will revel in the exposition of their insecurities, frailties and even occasional mental instability. Jung, Noll reports, kept a pistol by his bed at one stage to blow his brains out if he ever felt he had entirely lost his sanity.

Paul Ferris gives us ample evidence of Freud the bourgeois humbug whose precious analytic method he privately admitted was a path to professional affluence founded on contempt for patients, many of whom he considered incurable.