Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis. Catrine Clay

der Psychiatrie, he recognised it immediately. ‘My heart suddenly began to pound. I had to stand up and draw a deep breath. My excitement was intense . . . Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found.’ Professor Wille, however, was firmly of the old school, seeing all mental illness as the result of a physical deterioration of the brain. Sooner or later Jung was bound to take issue with that, the net result being that he decided to present his doctoral dissertation to the medical faculty of the University of Zürich, not Basel. The city had the added advantage of being closer than Basel to Schaffhausen and Emma.

      There were around 400 patients at the Burghölzli asylum when Jung arrived to take up his position, but apart from Bleuler there was only one other qualified doctor, Ludwig von Muralt, the day-to-day care being carried out by unqualified helpers, male and female. This meant an extremely heavy workload for Carl, who also lived on the premises. The only time he had off was Sundays, when he was able to visit Emma, first walking fifteen minutes down the hill to the tram station which in those days did not reach as far as the Burghölzli, then taking the recently electrified tram to Zürich’s Central Station, then the steam train to Schaffhausen, speeding northwards leaving lake and alps behind and into a landscape of farmland, meadows and scattered villages, past the crashing Rhine Falls, finally pulling in to Schaffhausen railway station where he was met by coachman Braun in the green Rauschenbach carriage and conveyed up the hill to the Ölberg estate – thereby travelling from the lowest to the highest niveau of Swiss society all in the course of two hours, a journey which never failed to delight.

      And there in the grand front hall waiting expectantly for him was Emma, eager to listen, eager to learn, eager to help. She had started taking Latin lessons in order to read Carl’s medical texts, and maths lessons to discipline her mind, and she was practising her handwriting to help Carl with the daily reports which Bleuler was most particular about, regardless of how many hours it took to write them up. Boring for Carl, but thrilling for Emma. As to her general knowledge: as with Carl, the natural sciences were her enthusiasm; so too her interest in the Legend of the Holy Grail, which had likewise been Carl’s for many years. Emma meant to help Carl with his work, if only in small ways, and Carl was only too happy to oblige.

      In many ways Emma was preparing to be ‘the good wife’ in similar vein to those recommended to young ladies by the weekly magazines. ‘The ideal wife,’ wrote Rudolf von Tavel in the monthly Wissen und Leben, ‘should live and act entirely in her husband’s spirit. She must support him in his task, softening him, warming him, and praising him in golden terms, convincing her children of the same, so that the way of life in the family is the right one, fostering the right social attitudes for the upholding of the Vaterland.’ Rosa Dahinden-Pfyl agreed, writing in Die Kunst mit Männern Glücklich zu Sein (The Art of Being Happy with a Man): ‘The happiness and lasting power of married love relies largely on the good and clever ways of the woman.’ She should never complain about the husband’s coldness towards her, whether real or imagined. She should take a gentle interest in everything which concerns him, always showing her appreciation, and make his home comfortable, never tiring him with needless chatter. She should avoid becoming bitter about his weaknesses, and never meddle in his business affairs. To remain attractive to him she should always be sweet-tempered, dress nicely and with good taste; in fact, always take care of her appearance but also her health, her character and her soul. ‘Should her physical charms fade, she should retain her husband’s interest by her sympathy, her learning, her heart and spirit, but never by showing a knowledge greater than his.’

      Had Emma married her haut-bourgeois beau this would surely have been her whole life, and nothing more. But not with Carl. His own childhood had nothing bourgeois about it and his own character was not suited to fitting in with convention. His requirements of Emma would be infinitely more complex and challenging than any handbook on marriage could encompass. But all that came later. For the time being it was simply exhilarating for Emma to be with someone who brought her books and scientific articles to read and was happy to discuss his plans and ideas with her.

      Carl and Emma easily fell into the roles of teacher and student. Carl had already completed five years of medical studies and embarked on the work and profession that would occupy him for the rest of his life. At this time he was working on his doctoral dissertation, ‘On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena’, investigating the uncharted world of the unconscious through the evidence he had gathered during Helly’s seances at Bottminger Mill. Herr Professor Freud in Vienna had just published a book called The Interpretation of Dreams, which investigated the unconscious from a different angle, the hidden meaning of dreams, which had often filled the pages of literature but had never yet been scientifically investigated, and Carl had been deputed by Bleuler to read it and present his findings to the Burghölzli staff at one of their evening meetings. As if he didn’t already have enough paperwork to do. But this was different. This was the new world, just waiting to be discovered.

      To Emma, Carl was worldly and sophisticated and, as his friend Albert Oeri described, he was a mesmerising talker. So Emma might have been surprised to discover that her fiancé had absolutely no experience of women. ‘He didn’t think much of fraternity dances, romancing the housemaids, and similar gallantries,’ recalled Oeri, making Carl sound like a bit of a prig. He did bring Luggi, Helly’s older sister, to some dances, but Oeri only remembered one occasion when Carl was really smitten, at another fraternity dance, with a young woman from French-speaking Switzerland, at which point he began to behave very oddly indeed. In fact, if Oeri had not been such a reliable witness, one would wonder at the veracity of the story. ‘One morning soon after,’ Oeri wrote, ‘he entered a shop, asked for and received two wedding rings, put twenty centimes on the counter, and started for the door.’ Presumably the twenty centimes were by way of a deposit. When the owner objected, Carl gave back the rings, took his money and left the shop ‘cursing the owner, who, just because Carl happened to possess absolutely nothing but twenty centimes, dared to interfere with his engagement’.

      With anyone else you might think this was some kind of student prank, but not with Carl, hovering precariously between two personalities and having no idea how to handle such a situation. Afterwards ‘Carl was very depressed,’ said Oeri. ‘He never tackled the matter again, and so the Steam-Roller remained unaffianced for quite a number of years.’ Until he met Emma, in fact, and persuaded her to marry him.

      But Emma had a secret of her own. When she was twelve her father started to lose his sight. Soon he could no longer read for himself, and Emma, the studious one, was deputed to sit and read out loud to him: newspapers, magazines, books, business matters brought over from the factory and foundry nearby, so she became quite knowledgeable in financial matters and the handling of accounts. Later, as his condition worsened, plans for the redevelopment of the Ölberg estate were made for him in Braille. It was hard for Emma, not least because her father was a difficult, sarcastic man – a trait which got worse with age and the advance of his illness. Harder still was the fact that the cause of his blindness had to be kept secret, such was the shame and stigma attached to it: Herr Rauschenbach had syphilis. According to the family, he had caught the disease after a business trip to Budapest, presumably from a prostitute. Bertha had decided not to go with him on that occasion because she felt the two little girls were too young to be left alone with the children’s maid. Had she gone, everything might have been different. It was a tragedy for the family, and photographs of Emma during her teens show a shy, round-faced, podgy girl, surely feeling the stress of the family secret. She was trying her best to help her mother with this awful burden as her father became more and more bitter and desperate, shut away from the world in his room upstairs. It robbed Emma of her sunny nature, making her too serious for her age.

      Albert Oeri remembered visiting the Jung household not long before Pastor Jung died and described how Carl, aged twenty, carried his father ‘who had once been so strong and erect’ around from room to room ‘like a heap of bones in an anatomy class’. Emma sat at her father’s side reading to him as he went blind, bitter and half mad. There was not much to choose between them.

      By the end of the nineteenth century doctors were finally on the verge of finding a cure for syphilis, but not soon enough for Herr Rauschenbach. By 1905 Fritz Schaudinn and Erich