Reading the Figures

The Lineage told this history in sentences. The schism figure tells part of the same history in dots and lines — the same primary-source reading, rendered as a map instead of a narrative. Neither is complete alone: the prose carries the argument and the quotations; the figure carries the shape of where the two men agreed, where they broke, and where the registry looked and found nothing. This page is the key to the second version.

What follows describes a grading system built for one purpose: to be honest about how much correspondence a structured reading of Freud's and Jung's own words actually supports — including the answer, more often than not, that it supports less than a reader might hope.

The registry behind the figure holds two hundred six concepts connected by three hundred forty-two recorded relationships. Two hundred four of those concepts carry a graded mapping record — a schema-governed comparison against something outside Freud's and Jung's own texts. Every such comparison receives one of four grades. The figure's colors and chips are a rendering of these four words; nothing else is being measured.

That fourth grade deserves a pause. No-mapping is not a blank the registry hasn't gotten to. It is a finding, reached the same way the other three are, and it makes up more of the registry's results than the other three grades put together.

The counts below are comparisons, not concepts — one concept can be checked against several targets, so the totals run higher than the number of underlying concepts. Each row is one of the four things the registry checks Freud's and Jung's concepts against (figures current as of the 2026-08-02 registry snapshot; percentages rounded):

Read the last row first. Of eight hundred sixty-seven graded comparisons, six came back direct, two hundred sixty-one came back a structural analogy, one hundred forty-nine came back merely decorative, and four hundred fifty-one — more than half — came back no mapping at all. The altered-state row is the starkest: of two hundred seven comparisons, one hundred sixty found nothing, and the single direct grade on the whole axis belongs to hypnosis — not to any psychedelic, but to the altered state Freud's own earliest case histories actually used. That axis covers access states generally, which is why a hypnosis grade can sit on it at all. A grading system that always finds what it's looking for isn't checking anything. The weight on the negative side is the evidence that this one checks — not proof that the positive grades are right, but reason to think they were arrived at rather than assumed.

Any comparison that earns one of the two strongest grades — direct or structural analogy — has to carry something else alongside it: an objection to the very mapping just proposed, reconstructed from the author's own writing. Not a caveat tacked on for balance. A specific, sourced counter-claim, cited to a passage in the same author, recorded before the mapping is allowed to stand. Neither man is alive to object, so the objection is the registry's reconstruction — the strongest one it could source, which is not the same as the strongest one he would have made.

The reason doesn't need jargon: it's easy, reading generously, to make dead men agree with you. Historical figures can't object in person, which leaves any framework that quotes them at risk of ventriloquism — using their words to say what it wanted to say regardless. Requiring the objection is the registry's defense against that. A strong claim that can't survive the best argument the registry can source against it doesn't get to travel alone.

One line runs under this entire project, the figure included: claims about how truth is reached — epistemology — are not claims about what exists — ontology. This framework stays on the first side. It argues about access: what a mind can reach, under what conditions, through what instrument. It does not argue about furniture: what the universe is ultimately made of.

Some of Freud's and Jung's own sentences reach for the second kind of claim even when the registry is only borrowing them to support the first. When a mapping risks that crossing, the registry marks it — eleven of the eight hundred sixty-seven comparisons graded so far carry the flag. Each carries a short note explaining how the reading stays on the access side of the line despite the source's more sweeping language. The mark isn't an admission that something went wrong. It's a record that the line was checked exactly where holding it is hardest.

A grading system this exacting still can't do several things a reasonable reader might expect of it. It does not:

• Certify a mapping as true. A grade records a documented textual relationship — not a verdict that the resemblance is important, final, or beyond challenge.
• Give clinical guidance. Nothing in this figure or its registry diagnoses or treats anything: this is history and epistemology, not a protocol.
• Claim completeness. Nineteen of twenty-nine source units have been read in full; ten remain, several of them later Jung texts where new divergence has turned up before.
• Replace the-lineage. The figure supplements that page's argument; it doesn't carry one of its own. Read the history first — the figure is for seeing its shape afterward.

The schism figure lays concepts out in two vertical lanes — Freud's on the left, Jung's on the right — each concept a single dot colored by thinker and stacked top to bottom in rough chronological order (position marks sequence, not a to-scale year). The lines between lanes carry the actual claims. Three distinct styles mark the three kinds of divergence: diverges-from (an outright break, with an arrow showing direction and a year tag dating when it became explicit), mutually-contradicts (direct, symmetric rivals — holding one blocks the other), and parallel-development (structurally similar ground reached without either man's route running through the other's work). Dashed means the connection rests on the registry's inference rather than a direct statement in the source; solid means it's documented on the page.

Click or tab to any dot or line and a detail panel opens beside the figure. For a concept: its description — withheld for twelve of the figure's thirty-two concepts, material the registry classifies as sensitive-sexual, though the topology, labels, and grades still render — and its grades across the four axes, with links to every schism edge touching that concept. For a line: which relationship is being claimed, what the registry says about it, and the primary sources behind it. Escape, or the panel's close button, returns focus to the figure.

Nineteen of twenty-nine source units have been read so far. Ten remain — most of them later Jung, still in copyright. Copyright is no bar to reading them; it bars this project from holding their full text in its corpus, which is how every unit here is read, so they wait for a route that respects that. The figure reflects the registry as it stood on the date printed on it, not a finished result. Topology moves when new units are read: during the enrichment reads alone, the number of schism edges tripled, from six to eighteen. Expect this figure to look different later. That's the instrument working, not failing — a static map of a subject two men spent decades revising would be the less honest artifact, not the more finished one.