The empiricist as rebel: Jung, Freud, and the burdens of discipleship

However little they share in common, both Freudian and Jungian commentators have long agreed that Jung's theoretical development in the years following his psychoanalytic affiliation prompted an open "split" with Freud and the psychoanalytic movement. Careful examination of Jung's principal "rebel" works does not sustain this thesis, however, but rather indicates Jung's honest belief that his limited appropriation of certain psychoanalytic mechanisms and attendant theoretical modifications constituted full-fledged loyalty to psychoanalysis as he understood it. This perception receives significant support from the Freud-Jung correspondence which reveals Jung openly articulating the ground rules defining his loyalty to psychoanalysis as early as 1906, and Freud accepting, and even approving, his protégé's empirical reservations over the course of the next five years.