In April 1908, Carl Jung arrived in Salzburg as Freud's closest ally and most likely successor. The congress they co-launched at Hotel Bristol that spring was the first time the psychoanalytic movement showed itself to the world as an organized force. It was also, in retrospect, the beginning of the end of their partnership.
The Story
On 27 April 1908, forty-two psychiatrists, analysts, and scholars gathered at Hotel Bristol in Salzburg for the First International Psychoanalytic Congress. Jung had organized it: drafting invitations, coordinating attendance, and positioning the meeting as a genuine scientific event rather than a private Viennese circle. Sigmund Freud spoke for nearly four hours without notes, presenting the Rat Man case. The audience included Alfred Adler, Ernest Jones, Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi, and Eugen Bleuler's Zurich group.
Jung left the congress as editor of the new Jahrbuch fur Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen, a role that gave him co-equal standing with Freud across the movement's publications. Two years later, at the 1910 Nuremberg congress, he was elected the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. No other figure did more to turn psychoanalysis from a Viennese cult into an international discipline.
But Salzburg also carried the first fault lines. Jung's disputes with Karl Abraham over priority, and Freud's way of managing those disputes, began the slow drift toward separation. Jung resigned from the IPA in April 1914. The collective unconscious, archetypes, psychological types, and individuation: all of it grew out of ideas that were already pulling away from Freud's framework at the time of that Salzburg congress.
Salzburg 1908 is where both the alliance and its eventual break were already visible, if you knew where to look.