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When Jung denied the predominantly sexual nature of the libido, Freud saw it as open rebellion. By 1913 the break was final: Jung wrote Freud "that I could do no further work with him if he would not give up that dogmatic attitude." Said Freud: "We took leave from one another without feeling the need to meet again!"
The Alchemist. One of the most controversial issues about Jung—outside psychiatry—concerns Nazi Germany. Some of his writings about race have been abused by others for racist propaganda. Chiefly because he held the editorship of a German psychoanalytic journal during the Nazi regime (his co-editor at one time was a relative of Hermann Göring), Jung has sometimes been accused of Nazi sympathies. Jung's position: as a foreigner of renown, he merely took the job to safeguard what he could of German psychiatry.
Since the war, Jung has lived by the banks of Lake Zurich, treating a few patients and keeping a keen eye on the most difficult patient of all—the world at large. He has never stopped writing, revising his concepts, or enlarging the scope of his inquiries. He has explored medieval alchemy, not because he has any interest in its pseudo-chemical aspects, but because he considers it interesting psychologically: for the most part, he sees the alchemists as seekers after original religious experience outside the permissible limits of the medieval church.
The majority of Jung's patients have been women, and he has had some down-to-earth things to say about the status of woman in the modern world. She has, he thinks, lost the old ideal of marriage ("He shall be thy master"). The tradition that it is the man who generally breaks up a marriage is no longer true: "Today life makes such demands on man that the noble hidalgo Don Juan is to be seen nowhere save in the theater. More than ever, man loves his comfort . . . There is no longer a surplus of energy for window-climbing and duellos." Woman, meanwhile, will go to greater lengths than ever to find a husband, "by that quiet and obstinate wish that works . . . magically, like the fixed eye of the snake." As men and women adopt more of the roles and interests traditionally attributed to the other sex, Jung thinks a new relationship between them is developing, based on equal partnership.
Most recently, in Answer to Job (just published in England, not yet in the U.S.), he suddenly tackled the 1950 papal proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin, which he considers the greatest religious event since the Reformation. His explanation of the dogma: it was, he contends, historically and psychologically necessary, because the mass of Roman Catholic women (at least unconsciously ) demanded it, to give them a symbol of identification in heaven.
Freudian Doubts. How big is Jung's influence today? The Freudians, confident that they are the possessors of revealed psychiatric truth, have crusaded for their own dogma and