Freud's Bookcase Detonations, Vienna 1909

Spring 1909. Carl Jung was 33, a psychiatrist at the Burghölzli in Zurich. Sigmund Freud was 52, the founder of psychoanalysis and Jung's mentor. In March, Jung came to Vienna. The evening in question unfolded in Freud's own rooms, almost certainly at Berggasse 19, where he lived and worked from 1891 to 1938. Two men were present. No one else.

Jung asked Freud for his views on precognition and parapsychology. Freud brushed the questions aside with what Jung called "so shallow a positivism" that he had difficulty checking a sharp retort. Then Jung felt "a curious sensation." It was as if his diaphragm "were made of iron and were becoming red-hot." A glowing vault.

At that moment there was a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to them. Both men started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on them. Jung named it at once. "There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon." "Oh come," Freud exclaimed, "that is sheer bosh."

Jung said he was wrong, and made a prediction. In a moment there would be another such loud report. No sooner had he said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase. Freud only stared aghast. Jung never knew what gave him his certainty. "But I knew beyond all doubt that the report would come again."

Freud wrote on 16 April 1909. "I do not deny that your comments and your experiment made a powerful impression upon me." His front room, he explained, had continual creaking noises from where two heavy Egyptian steles rested. "In the second room, where we heard the crash, such noises are very rare." So Freud listened. The cracking came again, over and over, "yet never in connection with my thoughts." His readiness to believe "vanished along with the spell of your personal presence." It was the only investigation the case ever received.

Jung, writing from the Burghölzli on 2 April, had already worried that his "spookery" struck Freud as "altogether too stupid." He also felt the last evening had freed him inwardly from Freud's "paternal authority." In his memoir he wrote that the incident aroused Freud's mistrust. The two never discussed it again.

Jung dictated his account to Aniela Jaffé in the late 1950s, some fifty years on, and it appeared in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. His bookcase stood "right next to us." Freud, writing within weeks, spoke of "the second room." Len Fisher and Futility Closet both suggest Jung may have misremembered where it stood.

Freud's biographers hold that the wood of the bookcase was most likely contracting as it dried. Writing in Psychology Today in 2011, Fisher argued that Jung's burning sensation may have been an anxiety response to the creaking, with memory later reversing cause and effect. Citing Hume and Carl Sagan on extraordinary claims, he concluded Freud was probably right. Coincidence. Jung never withdrew his own reading of it. Nobody has accused either man of staging the sounds.

Nothing was reported at the time. The story surfaced through Jung's posthumous memoir and the published letters between the two men. Nandor Fodor, who coined "poltergeist psychosis," wrote on it in 1963. Colin Wilson retold it. In 2011, David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method brought the cracking bookshelves to the screen, with Michael Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud.

Two men. One bookcase. Two reports, the second one called in advance.