Carl Jung and Max Wertheimer on a priority issue

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Volume 28, January 1992

CARL JUNG AND MAX WERTHEIMER ON A PRIORITY ISSUE’ MICHAEL WERTHEIMER, D. BRETT KING, MARK A. PECKLER,

SCOTT RANEY AND RODDY W. SCHAEF

Carl Jung is often cited as the first to use the word association method for the diagnosis of complexes. But was he really the first to do so? The treatment of this issue is examined in several history of psychology and personality texts and other sources. It turns out that Max Wertheimer also performed early studies of the word association method as a technique for the detection of criminal guilt. Published and archival resources make it possible to resolve the occasionally acrimonious controversy between Carl Jung and Wertheimer concerning priority in this use of the method.

For decades, authors of standard history of psychology textbooks have credited Carl Jung (1875-1961) with the development of the word association method for the diagnosis of complexes.* Discussions of Jung’s innovative research on word association in the study of complexes can also be found in many personality textbook^.^ Further, several authors of treatises on the history of psychoanalysis and of Jung biographies enthusiastically give him priority in using word association as a means of diagnosing complexe~.~ Indeed, John C. Burnham cited 1904 as a benchmark date in the history of European psychoanalysis because it was the year in which “Jung and Riklin introduce the association test and the complex.”’

Some authors also mention Jung’s application of the word association method to the detection of guilt.6 In his book On the Witness Stand, Hugo Munsterberg devoted the majority of his chapter on “The Detection of Crime” to word association tests, “a kind of investigation which began in Germany and has since been developed here and abroad.’” More directly, Gardner Murphy summarized a famous case in which Jung used the method to identify a thief:

The theory was very simple. A group of accused persons may all be frightened during the period of police examination but . . . only the guilty know exactly what to be frightened at. On the occasion of a theft at one of the Zurich hospitals, words representing the objects within a stolen purse, mixed in with words of indifferent affective value, were presented serially to the various suspects. In the case of only one individual there was repeated evidence that words referring to the specific contents of the purse elicited a type of response which other ‘indifferent’ words in the test did not elicit. Dramatically, t@ culprit, a nurse, confessed as soon as she became aware of the results of the test.

This case was first presented to American psychologists in an invited lecture in German that Carl Jung gave in Worcester, Massachusetts, during the September, 1909 vigenten- nial celebration of the founding of Clark University-the same ceremonies at which Sigmund Freud delivered lectures on psychoanaly~is.~

MICHAEL WERTHEIMER, Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is apast president of the Division of the History of Psychology of the American Psychological Associa- tion ond aulhor of A Brief History of Psychology.

D. BRETT KING, a postdoctoral research associate is currently working with Wertheimer. MARK A. PECKLER, RODDY W. SCHAEF, and SCOTT RANEY are Wertheimer’s students.

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46 WERTHEIMER, KING, PECKLER, RANEY AND SCHAEF

The consensus seems clear: while Sir Francis Galton may have invented the word association method, and while Wundt and his students did extensive research with it, the credit must go to Jung for using the method to reveal complexes and to detect criminal guilt.

BUT WAS JUNG THE FIRST TO USE THE METHOD? Although Howard Warren does mention Jung’s use of the word association method

to detect intense “feeling-tone,” he credits Max Wertheimer (1 880-1943) with the first experiments using the word association method for the diagnosis of specific situations (now commonly referred to as a “guilty knowledge test”).” Likewise, Robert Wood- worth credits Wertheimer, not Jung, with introducing the method in 1905 for detection of guilt, but suggests that the two applications of it, detection of complexes and or criminal guilt, are basically the same; yet on the next page he also credits Jung and Franz Riklin for using it in 1904 to detect complexes.” To add to the confusion, other authors neglect Wertheimer in their discussions of the use of the word association method for the detection of criminal guilt.” What precisely were the roles of Jung and Wertheimer in the use of the word association procedures for detection of emotionally tinged complexes - whether in identifying a neurotic problem or identifying a culprit?

WERTHEIMER AND JUNG BOTH CLAIMED PRIORITY Jung and Wertheimer wrangled in print about this issue, each claiming priority,

and each writing icily about the other. While the matter was finally resolved, both privately and in print, this altercation early in these two men’s careers may so have tar- nished their relationship that they never did engage in productive collaborative work, even though their interests, at least during the first decade of the present century, over- lapped to some degree.I3 The vituperation of their exchanges in print may have been due to both men feeling attacked at the core of their professional identities: at stake was the foundation on which each of them was building what was to become a success- ful career. Use of the word association technique for the detection of “complexes” was the focus of Wertheimer’s doctoral di~sertation,’~ as well as of several papers he published both before and soon after his thesis.15 The same topic was the focus of Jung’s habilitation thesis, which he submitted to permit him to teach at Ziirich.16 During the next decade and a half, Jung engaged in extensive further use of the method, far more than did Wertheimer, who soon became involved in studies of aphasia, and who, less than a decade after his dissertation, was to be deeply immersed in the Gestalt movement: Wertheimer’s habilitation thesis on the phi phenomenon became the pivotal study around which the new Gestalt school evolved. l7

What are the facts in the case? Wertheimer’s publications on the use of the word association method for detection of complexes connected with criminal guilt appeared in the Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik in 1904 and 1906, in the Archiv fur die gesamte Psychologie in 1905 and 1906, and in the Zeitschrift fur angewandte Psychologie in 1907.18 Jung’s publications on the method for detecting complexes appeared in the Journal fur Psychologie und Neurologie in 1904 and 1905, in a series of five articles, the first few of which were co-authored with Franz Riklin, that were issued as a separate in 1906, in the Zentralblatt fur Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie in 1905, in the Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik in 1906, in the Zeitschrift fur angewandte Psychologie in 1908, and elsewhere.” Both started publishing in the field in 1904, and there was some overlap in the journals in which their articles appeared: both had papers on the method in the Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik and in the Zeitschrift fur angewandte Psychologie.

CARL JUNG 47

The 1904 paper by Wertheimer and Julius Klein proposed the word association method for detecting emotional “complexes” related to criminal guilt. 2o Wertheimer’s 1904 doctoral dissertation, which was published in 1905, reported a series of experiments with simulated crimes, experiments which Wertheimer carried out at Wurzburg with the support of Oswald Kiilpe and Karl Marbe. The 1904 paper by Jung and Riklin reports studies, instigated by Eugen Bleuler, of the associations of normal subjects, in order to provide a base line for the study of pathological associations by psychiatric patients;21 Jung’s 1905 article on the reaction-time ratio in the association experiment was published both in the Journal fur Psychologie und Neurologie and separately as his habilitation thesis.”

In the 1 November 1905 issue of the Zentralblatt fur Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie appeared a brief paper by Jung in which he endeavors to set the record straight. In R. F. C . Hull’s translation, the article begins as follows:

As readers of the Zentralblatt may be aware, the ‘psychological diagnosis of facts’ has recently been the object of some discussion. The essence of psychological diagnosis consists in bringing to light, by means of associations, the complex of ideas relating to a crime. In our work on ‘The Associations of Normal Subjects,’ Riklin and I put forward the concept of the ‘feeling-toned complex’ and described its effects on the associations; these effects were examined in greater detail in my inaugural paper on ‘Reaction-Time in the Association Experiment.’ The discovery of feeling-toned complexes in the associations of insane persons has been of great help to us in our diagnostic work for the past two years, as is apparent from a number of publications by Riklin and myself.

After the publication of my studies in word-association, an article by Werth- eimer and Klein appeared in Volume XV of the Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik, on the psychological diagnosis of facts. The authors discuss, in the main, the possibility of finding, through the associations, the feeling-toned complex relating to a crime committed in the past. As Messrs. Wertheimer and Klein are erroneously described as the ‘discoverers’ of this idea, I would like to clarify the situation by taking this opportunity to remark that, so far as the experiment is concerned, the honor of the title of discoverer belongs to Galton or Wundt. The concept of feeling-toned complexes, however, and the determination of their specific effects on association, derive from the Zurich Clinic, and more particularly from the ‘Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien’ published in the Journal fur Psychologie und Neurologie, 1904-5. If Wertheimer and Klein had had a little more respect for the workers before them in this field, and had cited the source from which they appropriated their seemingly original ideas, they could have spared themselves sundry unpleasant discussion . . . . Wertheimer’s merit is confined at present to having emphasized a special instance of the feeling-toned complex - crime - and the possibility of discovering it from the associations. I am privately informed that experiments in this direction are in progress, though as yet they do not seem to have advanced much beyond the laboratory stage.

Readers may be interested to know that today I succeeded for the first time in testing out, on a delinquent, our method of discovering complexes, and with excellent results. 23

The remaining page of Jung’s note reports how he used the word association method to establish that a young man had made successive small thefts of cash from his distraught guardian.

An article by Jung two months earlier in the same Zentralblatt also refers briefly to the work of Wertheimer and others. As translated by Stein and Riviere, Jung wrote:

In principle the complex-characteristics are the same for normal and pathological associations. Furthermore, to lay bare the complex is of far-reaching significance in applying our experiments to the field of criminal psychology. Hans Gross and


his pupils have shown this, stimulated by our experiments. The complex in this case is the fact of a crime; the stimulus-words are the designations of things associated with the mental picture of the crime.24

And the Wertheimer and Klein article is one of five Jung cites in a footnote to the next to the last sentence of this quotation, providing references to the work of “Hans Gross and his pupils.”

Yet another 1905 paper by Jung refers to the Wertheimer and Klein study. Stein and Riviere provide the following translation:

The latest application of our experiment was suggested by Wertheimer and Klein, two pupils of the well-known criminal psychologist Hans Gross. This is its application to the delinquent - the exploration of the complex underlying a crime. Just as any subject who submits to the experiment unconsciously gives himself away, as we have shown, so the criminal, who has knowledge of certain facts, is bound to do the same. This, it is hoped, will make it possible to prove by experiment whether or not a person has any knowledge of certain facts. As everyone will appreciate, this question is of enormous practical importance. While the paper by Wertheimer and Klein mentioned above made only general suggestions about this, Wertheimer has dealt in another paper with relevant experiments carried out in Kiilpe’s laboratory at W i i r z b ~ r g . ~ ~

Here Jung refers to Wertheimer’s published doctoral dissertation, and proceeds to describe Wertheimer’s procedures in some detail.

Wertheimer’s rebuttal came in the form of a terse two-page note, published in the Archiv fur die gesamte Psychologie in 1906.26 He begins by quoting from Jung’s November 1905 critique; he is clearly rankled by Jung’s assertion that Wertheimer and Klein should have “had a little more respect for the workers before them in this field,” and should have “cited the source from which they appropriated their seemingly original ideas.” He also quotes Jung’s September 1905 claim that the application of “our experiments to the field of criminal psychology . . . [was] made by Hans Gross and his pupils . . . , stimulated by our experiments.”

Wertheimer next asks (our translation):

How do the facts relate to these allegations?

April 19, 1904. I. Jung and Riklin’s ‘Diagnostic association studies’ began to be published on

And Wertheimer meticulously adds a footnote to the effect that the diagnoses at issue in this work concern psychopathology. He continues:

The article on ‘Psychological diagnosis of guilt,’ by J. Klein and myself, had appeared on April 7, 1904.

The particular section of Jung and Riklin’s studies (I, 2) in which the authors first discuss matters concerning the detection of guilt was published in September, 1904, so more than a quarter of a year after our paper.

Jung’s habilitation thesis was published more than a year after our article, and even later than my further ‘Experimental investigations of guilt detection’ (Archiv fur die desamte Psychologie, vol. VI), which had been submitted as a dissertation in Wiirzburg on November 30, 1904.

11. In the same issue of the ‘Journal fur Psychologie undNeurologie’in which Part I, 2 of Jung and Riklin’s work appeared, there is a summary article (by Dr. Lipmann) which reviews our work.

111. It must be pointed out, further, that our work had already been known in a number of places for a considerable period before our article was published.

CARL JUNG 49

From October, 1903 on, we conducted related experiments at various institutes, but more than three and a half years ago, J. Klein had already performed individual experiments of this kind (together with observation of concomitant physiological phenomena), with myself as a subject, at the Prague Physiological Institute.

This reference, incidentally, places the original Wertheimer and Klein experiments as no later than the spring of 1902, because by that summer Wertheimer left Prague to study at the University of Berlin.27 Wertheimer appends a footnote to his “point number three,” in which he asserts that “We found out for the first time about the Zurich institute and Jung’s work from the issue of the ‘Journal fur Psychologie und Neurologie’ in question,” and quotes from what he called his “second work,” his doctoral dissertation, a sentence to the effect that “A larger work has just appeared by Jung and Riklin, introduced by Bleuler, which, with standard experiments on association, thoroughly treats the effects of complexes.”

The text of the incensed author continues:

IV. It is a misunderstanding to believe that anyone would have considered us as the inventors of the common association experiment. Furthermore, in our first paper . . . we said, word for word, ‘In investigations of particular psychological laws a method has already been used for years, namely, to let a subject react to spoken words and similar stimuli . . . or to report the first word that comes to mind . . . . The purpose here is, for example, the study of reaction times, of kinds of associations, [or] of changes induced by psychopathology.’

Wertheimer closes his rebuttal with the following paragraph:

Let Jung’s comment that we had too little respect for our predecessors be judged in light of the above. As far as Jung’s own extensive and thorough studies are concerned, those parts which are relevant to our work and to the field of the detection of guilt lead to confirmatory findings, which is most gratifying in the interest of the field itself.

The fresh Ph.D. and the freshly habilitated psychiatrist did not mince words in their indignant printed claims to priority.?’ But apparently they tried to resolve the matter by correspondence, some of which appears to be lost, but some of which is still extant. Jung sent a conciliatory handwritten letter to Wertheimer on 10 October 1906, which said the following (our translation):

Most honored doctor, Please accept my best thanks for your kindness in sending me your reprints, which I had already read earlier with great interest. I deeply regret that you do not have reprints of the [recently-published] reproduction experiments. I know about these experiments only from the reviews in Stern’s journal. Unfor- tunately the (so far!) inadequate correspondence between us led to our using the same name for different methods. Perhaps a modus vivendi can be found in the future.

Coming back to your last letter, I would like to remark that Prof. Gross did not express himself in a way that could be misunderstood; he wrote me the following, word for word, in response to my inquiry concerning priority: ‘I believe that this matter (determination of guilt) is also of great significance for us - if something comes of it, Burgholzli will for all time be the birthplace of the important discovery.’ It really is impossible to misunderstand this, isn’t it? I am still absolutely unable to explain how Prof. Gross came to write such a thing. I have no personal relationship with him at all that could come into question here. He owes me no favors or anything of this kind. With this news I unfortunately fell into it, which could, of course, easily have happened to anyone else. With this clarification let us con- sider the matter closed. I hope that you will forgive the way I acted.


May I ask you, at your convenience, to provide me the title and specific

With best regards, yours very faithfully, C. G. J ~ n g . ’ ~ bibliographic information for your reproduction experiments?

Thus Jung blames Hans Gross for the misconception concerning priority, and offers an unequivocal apology. Jung claims that his and Wertheimer’s methods are really different, even though they were given the same name; this idea is somewhat puzzling, since in many of his writings Jung himself pointed to their fundamental similarity.

HANS GROSS’S ROLE Gross’s implication in the affair is more puzzling. Wertheimer did attend courses

by Gross at the University of Prague, and Gross edited the journal in which the Werth- eimer and Klein paper was published in 1904.” It is likely, given these facts and Jung’s repeated reference to “Gross and his students,” that the Wertheimer and Klein studies were performed in Gross’s Prague laboratory, or at least under Gross’s supervision.

Sometime between 1904 and 1906 Gross moved from Prague to Graz, but retained the editorship of his j ~ u r n a l . ~ ’ Wertheimer must have been in correspondence with him as well as with Jung, because a brief letter from Gross to Wertheimer, dated 13 November 1906, refers to further interim events. Gross’s note (our translation) reads, in its entirety, “Honored Doctor, I am very pleased with the solution, and am very sorry if I am respon- sible for the misunderstanding. Hearty wishes for good luck in your further work, and best wishes! H. G~oss.”~’

No one knows whether Gross’s admission and apology appeased Wertheimer - they probably did not, for Wertheimer stopped working in this area about this time- nor what Gross’s reason might have been for attributing priority to Jung when he obviously was thoroughly cognizant of Wertheimer’s and Klein’s work. Jung’s letter and Gross’s note clearly absolve Jung of any malicious intent; his understanding of the situation was based upon information from Gross, information which Jung himself later recognized as misleading.

The “solution” to which Gross refers may have been a retraction that was published by Jung as a half-page note in the first volume of the new Zeitschrift fur angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung, edited by William Stern and Otto Lipmann, 1908. The note states (our translation):

As may be known, I have intimated in several places in my papers on association that Wertheimer created the idea for his detection of guilt out of my work. In the Archiv fiir die gesamte Psychologie 7 (112) Wertheimer demonstrates that his first article was published twelve days before mine. Thus independently of each other, we both arrived at the same conclusions. I therefore retract my earlier assertion as erroneous. I arrived at my erroneous conception in the following manner:

Some time after the appearance of my first papers on association, I became aware of the publication of Wertheimer and Klein. Since I was struck by the similarity between Wertheimer’s ideas and my own, I immediately made inquiries about the author, and obtained about Wertheimer, from a personal, very close, and authoritative source, unequivocal information to the effect that Wertheimer, in undertaking his work, had been influenced by my ideas. I did not believe that I could doubt the veracity of this information, since the individual concerned stood, at least at the time, in a relationship to Wertheimer which, as far as I could tell, simple precluded the possibility of erroneous i n f ~ r m a t i o n . ~ ~

It may have been professional prudence which made Jung keep the damaging informant nameless in print; it must have been Hans Gross. But why Gross told Jung

CARL JUNG 51

what he did remains a mystery. Gross must have had some reason to believe that Werth- eimer knew about Jung’s work, even though Wertheimer denied it and Jung accepted Wertheimer’s denial. We will probably never know. Wertheimer probably was furious with Gross, and most likely this rift was never healed.

JUNG CREDITED WERTHEIMER IN LATER WORK As for Jung, he remained good to his word. In a 1906 paper on “Psychoanalysis

and Association Experiments,” Jung had mentioned Wertheimer’s dissertation and the Wertheimer and Klein article in a footnote, and only hinted at priority:

As I have shown, particularly in my paper ‘The Reaction-Time Ratio in the Associa- tion Experiment,’ complexes of ideas referred to as emotionally charged are shown up in the experiment by characteristic disturbances, and their presence and quality can be inferred precisely from these disturbances. This fact is known to be the basis of the ‘psychological diagnosis of evidence’ inaugurated by Wertheimer and Klein, Hans Gross, and Alfred Gross, an apparently not unpromi;Sng method of diagnosing from the associations the complex underlying a crime.

As implied in the title, this paper represents Jung’s application of word association to psychodynamic theory, a point that impressed Freud. Indeed, the two analysts began correspondence after Jung sent a copy of this article, in a 1906 book on Diagnostic Studies in Association, to Freud.35 Freud’s interest in this application is evident in a June 1906 lecture, “Tatbestandsdiagnostik und Psychoanalyse,” which he delivered at a seminar on jurisprudence at the University of Vienna and which was published by Gross in the Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik. 36 After noting that Wundt “introduced into psychology” the word association method, Freud describes a typical association experiment and then notes that

Wertheimer and Klein, two pupils of Hans Gross, the Professor of Criminal Law in Prague, seem to have been the first to adopt this [procedure], wh$h is of such importance for your purposes, in the planning of the experiment.

Jung followed up his retraction of 1908 in another paper published in 1908 in Italian with a footnote that gives explicit credit to Wertheimer and Klein; translated by Stein and Riviere, Jung wrote, “The use of the association experiments for criminological purpose was first suggested by Wertheimer and Kle i~~.”~’ While there were occasional minor slips, such as referring to “Emotionally charged contents (‘complexes’): Jung’s association method” in 1910, or as lack of mention of Wertheimer and Klein in his 1909 Clark lectures and in a report on the doctrine of complexes and their diagnosis by association methods in 1913, Jung clearly continued to give priority to Wertheimer and Klein in later years for use of the procedure for detection of guilt.39

Thus a paper referring to a case in 1934, and published in 1937, begins:

The method of investigating crime called ‘psychological diagnosis of evidence’ was thought out and first published thirty years ago in the Archiv fur Kriminologie, vol. X V , pp. 72-113. In that paper, entitled ‘Psychological Diagnosis of Evidence: ideas on psychological experimental methods of ascertaining whether or not a person has taken part in a particular crime,’ all that is essenitl in the method and its technique was described and can be referred to there.

While Jung’s recollection of the title of the journal in which this paper had been published is slightly faulty, the intent is clear. The translators-editors of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 2, add a footnote to this paragraph of Jung’s:


The paper referred to in this headnote was by Wertheimer and Klein, “Psycholo- gische Tatbestandsdiagnostik” (1904). In Jung’s brief 1905 paper, “On the Psycholog- ical Diagnosis of Facts,” . . . he attacked Wertheimer and Klein for not crediting the work of the Zurich Clinic, ‘‘fTom which they appropriated their seemingly original ideas.” Wertheimer responded with a statement in the Archiv fur die gesamte Psychologie, . . . indicating that his first work was published prior to Jung’s. Jung then published a retraction in the Zeitschrift f i r angewandte Psychologie, . . . acknowledging that Wertheimer and he had arrived at the same conclusions independently of one another. Thirty years later, in the present publication, Jung took occasion again to give primary credit to the work of Wertheimer and Kleir~.~l Wertheimer also published an article on the use of the word association method

in the detection of guilt more than twenty years after the initial conflict (a chapter in Emil Abderhalden’s 1933 handbook, Handbuch der biologischen Arbeit~methoden~’), but did not refer to Jung’s work at all.43 And although word association tests continued to be used in some domains, papers by Harry W. Crane and by Robert M. Yerkes and Charles S. Berry detailing the inefficiency and inaccuracy of the word association method as a tool in criminal investigations may have stifled research in the area.44

Jung, too, had doubts about the utility of the word association method in criminal investigations. Although he did demonstrate that it could be effective and described it in 1906 as a “not unpromising method of diagnosing . . . crime,” in a 1905 article he did issue a “warning against undue optimism” concerning using the method to detect crime.45 In relation to criticisms of the Wertheimer and Klein method as a forensic tool, he remarked in the same paper “I feel obliged to support this objection fully. That the method lends itself to the discovery of complexes seems to me beyond doubt. When it comes, however, to applying the method to someone giving evidence, one cannot be too careful. Therefore, I . . . [forsee] great difficulties in applying the experiment in judicial p roced~res . ”~~ In 1908, he again stressed its limitations: “Let us, however, repeat that the results of the experiment will not provide absolute proof of guilt, but, at best, merely a valuable addition to circumstantial e~idence.”~’ Finally, in 1937 he made it clear that “to assess the signs of a guilty conscience must be left to the discretion of the

WHO WAS THE FIRST TO USE THE WORD ASSOCIATION METHOD TO DETECT COMPLEXES? What conclusions can be drawn from this evidence? First, it is obvious that neither

Jung nor Wertheimer neglected to give credit to those whose work they had extended. Second, in Wertheimer’s rebuttal to Jung’s accusations, although he took offense at Jung’s repeated statements that Wertheimer and Klein were using “our (Jung’s and Riklin’s) method,” it is clear that Wertheimer agreed with Jung that what he was to be credited with was the proposal to use the association method for the detection of crime-related guilt. Jung had said, “Wertheimer’s merit is confined . . . to . . . the feeling-toned complex - crime,” to which Wertheimer rebutted with his claim that Jung didn’t “discuss matters concerning psychological guilt” until September 1904. Further, in his footnote he stressed that Jung was focusing on psychopathology. In the paper being referred to, while Jung was actually working with “normal subjects,” it is obvious that he was ultimately intending the method for clinical ends.

What, then, does Jung credit himself with? It is certainly not the theory or the method. As to the theory, in 1904, he gave the credit to W ~ n d t . ~ ~ This places credit for the theoretical discovery upon Wundt. As to the method, in his initial attack, he credited Galton and Wundt. What he does credit himself with is clearly stated in his 1905 article “The Psychological Diagnosis of Evidence.” “In spite of having formulated

CARL JUNG 53

the appropriate questions, psychology has up to now been unable to prove anything of significance in the associations. It was our experiment that first succeeded in finding the approach to this goal.”50 Thus he credits himself and Riklin with presenting the experimental evidence that the word association method could be utilized to discover complexes (guilt or otherwise) in an individual. This was done in their 1904 article. And concerning the Wertheimer and Klein article published twelve days before, he states in the same paper that “. . . the Wertheimer and Klein article made only general suggestions.” In other words, according to Jung, they still had not presented the experimental evidence. It is clear from from Wertheimer’s rebuttal that he had begun to accumulate evidence as early as 1902. But since this evidence was not published, he could not be credited. Jung’s later references continue to give credit to Wertheimer only for detection of criminal guilt. And Wertheimer’s rebuttal appeared to accept this.

What implications does this have for Gross’s correspondence with Jung? One can only speculate, but it seems possible that Gross was giving credit to Jung for showing that an individual complex, which might be due to guilt or any number of other pro- cesses, could be discovered by the word association method, since he had published the evidence first.

Jung’s statement that they were “using the same name for different methods” could be a response to Wertheimer’s claim that in his and Klein’s early experimentation, their observations were of “concomitant physiological phenomena.” Jung’s method clearly uses reaction time and other anomalies such as word repetition, and not physiological concomitants.

Let us return to the question of who came first in proposing the association method for revealing a complex and demonstrating that the method could be used to “prove [something] of individual significance.” From the canon of literature, one could argue that the honor should go to someone like Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, for he demonstrated its efficacy in his play within a play, The mouse-trap, in Act 3 , Scene 2 of Hamlet.

In conclusion, then, it might be appropriate to answer the question in the title of this paper, was Jung the first to diagnose “complexes” with the word association method, by acknowledging first, that Jung did extensive and highly productive work in this area; second, that Jung initially believed that he had originated the method but soon came to recognize that someone else had independently come up with the same idea and had indeed published on it a couple of weeks before Jung himself did; and finally, that Jung’s own answer to the question, therefore, once he had the relevant information, was that priority in the use of the word association method for the diagnosis of guilt must go to Max Wertheimer and Julius Klein.

NOTES 1 . Earlier versions of this paper were presented by the first author as his presidential address to the Rocky

Mountain Psychological Association, Albuquerque, NM in 1982 and also as an invited address at the Western Psychological Association convention in Sacramento, CA in the same year. 2. Solomon Diamond, ed., The Roots of Psychology: A Sourcebook in the History of Ideas (New York:

Basic Books, 1974), p. 264; Edna Heidbreder, Seven Psychologies (New York: Appleton-Century, 1933), p. 402; Robert W. Lundin, Theories and Systems of Psychology (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1991), p. 325; David J. Murray, A History of Western Psychology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988), pp. 363-364; Duane P. Schultz and Sydney Ellen Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), p. 355; Edward Bradford Titchener, A Textbook of Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1910), p. 446; and Robert I. Watson, Sr., and Rand B. Evans, The Great Psychologists: A History of Psychological Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), pp. 569-570.


3. E. Earl Baughman and George Schlager Welsh, Personality: A Behavioral Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 296; Richard S. Lazarus, Adjustment and Personality (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1961). p. 166; Salvatore R. Maddi, Personality Theories: A Comparative Analysis (Chicago, IL: Dorsey, 1989), p. 590; Christopher F. Monte, Beneath the Mask: An Introduction to Theories of Personality (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1987), pp. 232-236; Gardner Murphy and Friedrich Jensen, Approaches to Personality (New York: Coward-McCann, 1933), pp. 164- 176; Christopher Peterson, Personality (San Diego, C A Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 176; and Julian B. Rotter, “The Word Association Method,” in An Introduction to Projective Techniques and Other Devices for Understanding the Dynamics of Human Behavior, ed. H. H. Anderson and G. L. Anderson (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951), p. 279. 4. Vincent Brome, Jung (New York: Atheneum, 1978), p. 87; R. A. Clark, “Jung and Freud: A Chapter

in Psychoanalytic History,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 9 (1955): pp. 605-61 1 ; William Douglas, “Carl Gustav Jung: 1875-1961,” American Journal of Psychology 74 (1961): pp. 639-641; Reuben Fine, A History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 82; Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work (New York: Putnam, 1976), p. 80; Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Begin- nings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 8, 194-195; Ruth Munroe, Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought: An Exposition, Critique. and Attempt at Integration (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1955), pp. 539-540; and Gerhard Wehr, Jung: A Biography, Trans. David M. Weeks (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1987), p. 84.

5 . John C. Burnham, “Psychoanalysis and American Medicine 1894-1918: Medicine, Science, and Culture,” Psychological Issues 5 (no. 4) Monograph 20 (1967): 1-250, 10. Despite Burnham’s assertion, the credit for introducing the term “complex” probably belongs to Theodor Ziehen (1862- 1950), Director of the Berlin Psychiatric Clinic and an adamant critic of psychoanalysis (see Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1955), pp. 30, 113). 6. Joseph Jastrow, Freud: His Dream and Sex Theories (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1932), pp.

102-103; Leo Postman and James P. Egan, Experimental Psychology: An Introduction (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 266; Robert I. Watson, Sr., The Great Psychologists: From Aristotle to Freud (Philadelphia: L i p pincott, 1968), p. 499; and Robert I. Watson, Sr., and Rand B. Evans, The Great Psychologists: A History of Psychological Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), pp. 569-570. 7. Hugo Miinsterberg, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime (New York: Doubleday,

Page, 1908), p. 82. Nonetheless, the author only cites the work of Jung. Miinsterberg also describes two experiments he conducted with word association as a diagnsotic tool for guilt, one with a “brutal criminal” (pp. 92-102), and another with a young woman who was “anemic and neurasthenic” (pp. 102-105). 8. Gardner Murphy, Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology, Rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace,

1949), p. 322. 9. Carl Gustav Jung, “The Association Method,” American Journal of Psychology 31 (1910): 219-269.

Several of Jung’s papers on word association were also translated into English in Carl Gustav Jung, Studies in WordAssociation, trans. M. D. Eder (New York: Russell and Russell, 1919). More recently, Jung’s Clark University address was reprinted as a “benchmark” article in the centenary issue of the American Journal of Psychology, Carl Gustav Jung, “The Association Method, Lecture 111,” American Journal of Psychology 100 (1987): 489-509. Both men, incidentally, received honorary doctorates of law from Clark University, Freud’s in psychology and Jung’s in “education and social hygiene”; Carl Gustav Jung, Ewperimental Researches, Vol. 2 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, eds. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler and William McGuire; trans. Leopold Stein and Diana Riviere (Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 439. 10. Howard C. Warren, A History of the Association Psychotogy (New York: Scribner, 1921), p. 229, 231. 11. Robert Sessions Woodworth, Experimental Psychology (New York: Holt, 1938), p. 363; and Robert Sessions Woodworth and Harold Schlosberg, Experimental Psychology Rev. ed. (New York: Holt, 1945).

12. Monte, Beneath the Mask: An Introduction to Theories of Personality; Murphy, Historical Introduc- tion to Modern Psychology; Murray, A History of Western Psychology; Postman and Egan, Experimental Psychology: An Introduction, Rotter, “The word association method,” p. 279; Schultz and Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology; Watson, The Great Psychologists: From Aristotle to Freud; and Wehr, Jung: A Biography. 13. Several scholars have speculated that Wertheimer was initially impressed with the tenets of psychodynamic theory although he clearly expressed animosity toward psychoanalysis in his later career (see S. Bernfeld, “Die Gestalttheorie,” Imago 20 (1934): 32-77; Bruno Waldvogel, “Psychoanalyse und Gestaltpsychologie: Historische und theoretische Beriihrungspunkte,” Gestalt Theory 13 (1991): 19-48). 14. Max Wertheimer, “Experimentelle Untersuchungen zur Tatbestandsdiagnostik,” Archiv fur die gesamte Psychologie 6 (1905): 59-131. 15. E.g., Max Wertheimer and Julius Klein, “Psychologische Tatbestandsdiagnostik,” Archiv fur Kriminalan- thropologie und Kriminalistik 15 (1 904): 72-1 13.

pp. 66-68.

CARL JUNG 55

16. Carl Gustav Jung, ed. Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien: Beitrage zur experimentellen Psychopathologie, Vol. 1 (Leipzig: Barth, 1906). 17. Max Wertheimer, “Experimentelle Studien iiber das Sehen von Bewegung,” Zeitschrift fur Psychologie 61 (1912): 161-265. 18. Wertheimer and Klein, “Psychologische Tatbestandsdiagnostik”; Wertheimer, “Uber die Assozia- tionsmethoden,” Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik 22 (1906): 292-319; Wertheimer, “Experimentelle Untersuchungen zur Tatbestandsdiagnostik”; Wertheimer, “Zur Tatbestandsdiagnostik: Eine Feststellung,” Archiv fur die gesamte Psychologie 7 (1906): 139-140; and Otto Lipmann and Wertheimer, “Tatbestandsdiagnostische Kombinationsversuche,” Zeitschrift fur angewandte Psychologie 1 (1907): 119-128. 19. Carl Gustav Jung, ed. Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien: Beitrage zur experimentellen Psychopathologie; Jung, “Experimentelle Beobachtungen iiber das Erinnerungsvermogen,” Zenfralblatt fur Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie 28 (1905): 653-666; Jung, ‘Die psychopathologische Bedeutung des Assoziationsexperimentes,” Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik 22 (1906): 145-162; Jung, “Zur Tatbestandsdiagnostik,” Zeitschrift fur angewandte Psychologie 1 (1908): 163; Jung, Psychiatricstudies, Vol. 1,2nd ed., of The Col- lected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, and W. McGuire; trans. R. F. C. Hull (Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); and Jung, Experimental researches, Vol. 2 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. 20. The birth and death dates for Julius Klein are unknown. 21. Jung was perhaps first introduced to the word association method through his collaborator, Franz Riklin (1878-1938), a Swiss psychiatrist who had married Jung’s cousin. In 1904, Riklin returned from Germany to Switzerland, where he had worked on the association test with Gustav Aschaffenburg. Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work (New York: Putnam, 1976), p. 151, described the initial meeting between Riklin and Jung:

[Riklin] arrived in Zurich late one evening and, to his pleasurable surprise, found that his future chief, Professor Bleuler, had come to the station to meet his new assistant. On the way to Burgholzli, Bleuler spoke enthusiastically of his First Assistant, C. G. Jung, and, late though it was, Jung was called from his apartment and the three spent some hours discussing the association experiment and planning how to put it to practical use in the hospital.

Shortly thereafter, Jung established a laboratory for experimental psychopathology at Burgholzli and enlisted the aid of Riklin, Ludwig Binswanger, and Alphons Maeder. Riklin went on to a distinguished career, serving as secretary for the International Psycho-Analytic Association in 1910, the same year that Jung served as president of the Association. In addition, he edited the Correspondenzblatt der Internationalen Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung. Riklin was one of the few analysts who supported Jung following his break with Freud. 22. Jung, Experimental researches, Vol. 2 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. p. 587. 23. Jung, Psychiatric studies, Vol. I , 2nd ed., of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, pp. 219-220. 24. Jung, Experimental researches, Vol. 2 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. p. 273. 25. Ibid., pp. 328-329. 26. Wertheimer, “Zur Tatbestandsdiagnostik: Eine Feststellung,” pp. 139-140. 27. Michael Wertheimer, “Max Wertheimer, Gestalt prophet,” Gestalt Theory (Darmstadt) 2 (1980): 3-17. Max Wertheimer had studied law for two years at Charles University before switching to psychology. Julius Klein was a fellow law student who later managed Wertheimer’s legal affairs in Czechoslovakia after the latter migrated to America in 1933. 28. In a related episode, Jung had some difficulty acknowledging Freud‘s influence on the word association method. Linda Donn, Freud and Jung: Years of Friendship, Years of Loss (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), pp. 65-66. 29. Letter from Carl Jung to Max Wertheimer, 10 October 1906. In Box 1, Carton 1 , Folder 1 of the Max Wertheimer papers in the Archives and Manuscripts Division of the New York Public Library. 30. Wertheimer, “Max Wertheimer, Gestalt prophet,” p. 9. 31. Aside from his editorial duties for the Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik, Hans Gustav Adolf Gross (1847-1915) had published several major works on criminology (e.g., Hans G. A. Gross, Criminalpsychologie [Graz: Leuschner and Leuschner, 18981; and Hans G. A. Gross, Encyclopadie der Kriminalistik [Ldpzig: Vogel, 19011). 32. Letter from Hans Gross to Max Wertheimer, 13 November 1906. In Box 1 , Carton 1 , Folder 1 of the Max Wertheimer papers in the Archives and Manuscripts Division of the New York Public Library. 33. Jung, “Zur Tatbestandsdiagnostik.” 34. Jung, Experimental researches, Vol. 2 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, p. 290. 35. Donn, Freud and Jung: Years of Friendship, Years of Loss, pp. 66-67; and Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, pp. 30-31.


36. This paper is also noteworthy because it marks Freud’s first published reference to the work of Jung and of Alfred Adler (James Strachey, “Editor’s Note,” vol. 9 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey [London: Hogarth, 19621, p. 99). 37. Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of the Facts in Legal Proceedings,” Vol. 9 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1962), p. 106. The “experiment” mentioned in Freud‘s quote probably refers to research conducted by “Loffler, the Professor of Jurisprudence, [at the University of Vienna, whose] students were studying recent work, initiated by Hans Gross’s pupils, Wertheimer and Klein, on the possibility of detecting criminals by the use of the association experiments. Jung had himself published a little book on the subject earlier that year, and it was no doubt that which stimulated Freud’s interest in the matter” (Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. vol. 2, p. 338). 38. Jung, Experimental researches, Vol. 2 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, p. 587. 39. Ibid., pp, 597, 598-604. 40. Ibid., p. 605. 41. Ibid. 42. Max Wertheimer, “Tatbestandsdiagnostik,” in Handbuch der biologischen Arbeitsrnethoden, ed. Emil Abderhaden (Berlin and Vienna: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1933), pp. 1105-1 11 1. 43. Wertheimer was still respected during the 1930s as an authority on the detection of guilt. Wladimir Eliasberg, a New York psychiatrist who received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Munich, wrote Wertheimer in 1938 about the Tatbestandsdiagnostik research. Eliasberg enclosed a reprint of his 1938 article on the “Sociology of Testimony” in an Italian journal (Archivio Generale di Neurologia, Psichiatria e Psi- coanalkii). Letter from Wladimir Eliasberg to Max Wertheimer, 14 July 1938. In the Max Wertheimer Archives at the University of Colorado at Boulder. 44. Harry W. Crane, “A study in association reaction and reaction results,” Psychological Monographs 80 (1915): and Robert M. Yerkes and Charles S. Berry, “The association reaction method of mental diagnosis,” American Journal of Psychology 20 (1909): 22-57. 45. Jung, Experimental researches, Vol. 2 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, p. 290, p. 352. 46. Ibid., p. 330. Jung’s statement is closely related to Freud‘s reluctance to generalize the findings from word association to legal proceedings (see Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of the Facts in Legal Proceedings,” p. 114). In a 1914 paper “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” Freud harshly criticized both the association method and the study of complexes (see Sigmund Freud, “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” Vol. 14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey [London: Hogarth, 19621, pp. 28-29). 47. Ibid., p. 591. 48. Ibid., p. 614. 49. Ibid., p. 35. 50. Ibid., p. 322.

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