History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

he never tolerated serious opposition to himself within it. Alfred Adler (1870–1937), one of the first and most brilliant of its members, was treated – once he ventured to disagree – not as a critical colleague but as a heresiarch or, in a term the Marxists would popularize, as a ‘defector’. As Graf put it, ‘It was a trial and the charge was heresy. . . . Freud, as the head of a church, banished Adler; he rejected him from the official church. Within the space of a few years, I lived through the whole development of a church history.’ Thereafter the herem was often in use, notably in the case of Jung, the greatest heresiarch of all. The break with Jung was especially bitter because, as Jones put it, he was to have been ‘the Joshua to Freud’s Moses’. His ‘face beamed whenever he spoke of Jung: “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” ’ ‘When the empire I have founded is orphaned’, he wrote, ‘no one but Jung must inherit the whole thing.’230 The detection and expulsion of heretics was attended by odium theologicum. As Sachs said, Freud was ‘hard and sharp as steel, a good hater’.