Jung was a favorite protégé of Freud until they broke off their relationship over doctrine. Jung rose quickly within the psychoanalytic world, becoming editor of a psychoanalytic journal and president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Freud favored him in part because as a non-Jew, he offered a bridge to the wider non-Jewish scientific community in Europe. Jung’s relationship with Eugen Bleuler also offered the promise of greater scientific respect for psychoanalysis, which was something Freud craved. Jung grew increasingly uncomfortable, however, with Freud’s insistence on sexuality as the sole motivating force. He agreed with Freud’s energy-based conception of psychological motivation—that normal and abnormal psychological processes were a product of energy flow—but he believed sexuality to form only a small part of human motivation.

Temperamentally, the two men differed as well. Jung had a mystical bent, nurtured perhaps through his family’s religious heritage, and a life-long interest in the occult. Freud was a fervent rationalist, believing religion to be little more than an infantile form of neurosis. It is unlikely Freud would have had much respect for the occult either, except perhaps as clinical material.