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Although Jung refers to the importance of the personal equation in the making, and still more in the presentation and interpretation, of observations, he does not seem, apart from the two statements cited, to have paid much attention to his social background--there was, presumably, no need for him to do so. From Freud's writings, on the other hand, it is clear that the Jewish problem was often in his thoughts. In addition to the personal references he writes in more general terms of Judaism as made up of '"many dark emotional forces, all the more potent for being so hard to grasp in words, as well as the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the intimacy that comes from the same psychic structure"' --though his only suggestion as to its influence on his actual work is that non-acceptance at the University gave him early familiarity with the fate of being in the opposition and laid the foundation for an independent outlook.
Roback, among the earlier analysts and commentators, suggested that the habit of causal analysis is especially congenial to the Jewish mind, and that some aspects of Freud's work--the stress laid on male and female and the exploitation of all sorts of symbols to suit a particular conjecture--have their counterparts in Cabbalistic writings. Suttie, a few years later, referred to the influence of the materialistic and aggressive character of modern society in leading the Freudians to assume that the root motive of human life is the advantage of the individual, and as we saw in discussing the Oedipus complex, described Freud's own antecedents as lying in 'perhaps the most patriarchal of all cultures'. At about the same time Crichton Miller declared, 'there is great significance in the fact that Freud is a Jew and Jung a Teuton', but such expansion of this idea as he gave was couched in rather vague and racialistic terms. More recently Erich Fromm has drawn attention to a connection between psychoanalysis and the life of the urban middle class in Western Europe, and the same influences are discussed by David Riesman in more detail. The Cabbalistic theme has been taken up again by David Bakan. For the Jungian school, once more, less material is available, but a piece of indirect social history exists in an account by Baynes of his own adaptation of Jungian psychology to the needs of English patients. From these and other sources a reconstruction can be made of the two ways of life suggested--the Jungians having been identified with those sections of the European middle class which traditionally since medieval times have occupied positions in Church, school and University, and the Freudians with Jewish people in particular and with those sections which have been engaged more fully than the traditionalist groups in capitalist enterprise. The Jungian or traditionalist background will be taken first, as being, in Western Europe, the older of the two. . .
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