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But Freud now no longer stood alone. As early as 1902, he had asked his first supporters to meet in the little waiting room of his apartment each week. The "Psychological Wednesday Society" had four charter members besides Freud-Alfred Adler, Max Kahane. Rudolf Reitler (the second man in history to perform a psychoanalysis), Wilhelm Stekel. In 1906 Freud learned with joy that the famed Burghëlzli Clinic of Zurich University had taken up his methods at the instance of Carl Gustav Jung (TIME, Feb. 14). Freud "soon decided that Jung was to be his successor, and at times called him his 'son and heir' ..."
American Mistake. In 1909 Freud was one of several notables invited to attend the 20th-anniversary celebration of Clark University in Worcester, Mass. Freud was hostile from the start. He noted that the world's finest collection of Cyprian antiquities was in New York City. He wanted to see that and Niagara, he said, and nothing more. Freud spent his first days in the New World tramping around museum collections rifled from the Old. He visited Coney Island, dined at Hammerstein's Roof Garden, and was "quietly amused" by his first movie. Freud called America "a gigantic mistake," and wrote pettishly that "tobacco ... is the only excuse I know for Columbus' misdeed."
Analyst Jones never manages to explain fully Freud's peculiar hostility toward the U.S. He lists trivia, such as 53-year-old Freud's oversensitiveness (surely immature) when a guide in Niagara's Cave of the Winds called: "Let the old fellow go first." And he notes that Freud unfairly blamed rich U.S. food for intestinal trouble that actually antedated his visit by several years, and was probably a psychosomatic remnant of his earlier neurosis. "I often said to myself," Freud once wrote, "that whoever is not master of his Konrad should not set out on travels." There is no doubt that Freud suffered while in the U.S. from both chronic appendicitis and prostatic discomfort. In connection with his prostatitis, which necessitated frequent urinating, he complained: "They escort you along miles of corridors, and ultimately you are taken to the very basement, where a marble palace awaits you—only just in time."
The Apostates. The Freudian school soon broke out in a rash of passionate factionalism equaled in intensity perhaps only by Marxism's chronic dissensions. Just as Karl Marx left his carbuncular anger to his heirs, so Freud's brilliant but obstinate, vain and hypersensitive character seems to have shaped the psychoanalytic movement. There were squabbles, rivalries, accusations. In 1910 began a series of famed apostasies of disciples who refused to accept Freud's theories unconditionally. First Adler deserted, then Stekel, and finally "Crown Prince" Carl Gustav Jung himself. Biographer Jones suggests that the dissidents were those who still felt "obliged to perpetuate the rebelliousness of childhood."