By the strict letter of their own creed, some of the least likely people in the world to hold a convention are the followers of famed Analytical Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (TIME, Feb. 14, 1955). Mostly professed introverts, they look disapprovingly on the modern world's passion for extraversion, "togetherness" and "other-directedness." But last week, 45 years after Founder Jung broke with Sigmund Freud, the Jungian school held its first international congress. The locale, inevitably, was Zurich, Jung's lifetime headquarters. There, 120 of the faithful gathered in the university's auditoriums for technical sessions on such topics as "The Problem of Dictatorship as Represented in Herman Melville's Moby Dick," and "Practical Problems of Transference and Counter-Transference."
In fact, far more practical problems than these—extending to monolithic leadership, if not dictatorship—beset the Jungians. To the true believers among them, it has never mattered that Dr. Jung and his work failed to attract a worldwide following as numerous as Freud's. (They regard the Freudians as proselyters, and proselyting as a reflection of unconscious insecurity.) But they have been so unquestioning in their acknowledgment of Jung's leadership that no one of them is emerging as a possible head man to succeed him. That a successor may soon be needed was clear last week. Carl Gustav Jung, now 83, secluded himself from all but small groups of his followers, who made pilgrimages to his retreat at Kusnacht. Jung made only token appearances at the congress' opening and closing sessions.
The Mechanical Freud. When delegates got down to trade talk, it was clear that Jungian psychology today has two factions: 1) an orthodox group in favor of strict adherence to Jung's doctrines and pursuing work only along the lines he has indicated, with emphasis on archetypes, the human race's collective unconscious, and myths; 2) a progressive element in favor of a widened approach to man's problems, including new emphasis on the importance of childhood experiences in molding the adult (an area that Jungians formerly had largely ignored because they felt it was a field in which the Freudians had gone too far). Though Archiater Jung refused to commit himself publicly, best evidence was that he favored the more progressive wing, feared that his movement would die if it became too introverted and parochial. Quipped one delegate: "We made real progress—we didn't stick to Jungian terms and talk only about archetypes. I believe someone even mentioned the word penis."
Whatever their factional differences, the Jungians (many M.D. psychiatrists, but with a liberal sprinkling of intensively trained lay analysts) were united in their opposition to many major trends in the modern world of materialism, scientism, technology. Said New York's Heinz Westman: "The Freudian approach to analysis is mechanistic. Jungians not only believe in but have proof of the creative faculties of the soul, which can cure its own ills."