A Scandal In Salzburg: Or Freud's Surreptitious Role In The 1908 Abraham–Jung Dispute

What is it about?

Freud's ambition was to discover the ‘caput Nili’ in neuropsychology and it was this discourse of anxiety which informed Freud's early dialogues with the Zurich School at the Burghölzli as he tried to persuade Bleuler and Jung, experts in dementia praecox (paranoia), to replace their toxic theory with his psychosexual theory. Although Karl Abraham adopted Freud's libido theory, Freud's campaign to persuade Jung backfired on the eve of the First International Psychoanalytical Congress in Salzburg (1908). Freud then denied Jung's theoretical apostasy by reconfiguring it as an Abraham–Jung plagiarism dispute about priority and then insisted that both men collude with his narration. The paper argues that Freud's narrative tyranny, his ‘cover-story', recycled by Jones, has effectively occluded the significance of Salzburg from the psychoanalytic discourse.

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