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

pallidum, and by 1910 Dr Paul Ehrlich, director of the Royal Prussian Institute of Experimental Therapy in Frankfurt, developed the first modestly effective treatment, Salvarsan, though it was not until the discovery of penicillin in the 1940s that a cure was certain. In the 1890s the treatment still relied on the use of mercury, which could alleviate the condition if caught early enough though the side effects were extremely unpleasant, and it was not a cure. Syphilis, highly infectious and primarily transmitted through sexual contact, had stalked Europe for centuries, causing fear and dread and giving rise to a great deal of moralising about the virtues of marriage. The symptoms were horrible, the first signs being rashes and pustules over the body and face, then open suppurating lesions in the skin, disfiguring tumours and terrible pain, only alleviated by regular doses of morphine. Some of the most tragic cases were those of unsuspecting wives infected by their husbands, in turn infecting the unborn child. Wet nurses were vulnerable, either catching it from the child, or, already infected themselves, passing it on to the child instead. To make matters worse for families like the Rauschenbachs, society was hypocritical about syphilis. Everyone knew about the disease but it was not talked about, except in the medical pamphlets read in the privacy of a doctor’s surgery: ‘The woman must submit to her husband – consequently, whereas he catches it when he wants, she also catches it when he wants! The woman is ignorant . . . particularly in matters of this sort. So she is generally unaware of where and how she might catch it, and when she has caught it she is for a long time unaware of what she has got.’ Another pamphlet concentrated on women of the lower classes, unwittingly revealing a further hypocrisy of the times: whilst the bourgeois woman was seen as the victim, the working-class woman, not her seducer, or client if she was a prostitute, was to blame: ‘The woman must be told . . . Every factory girl, peasant and maid must be told that if she abandons herself to the seducer then not only does she run the risk of having to bring up the child which might result from her transgression, but also that of catching the disease whose consequences can make her suffer for the rest of her life.’

      In Vienna, Sigmund Freud was investigating the psychological effects of syphilis on the next generation, finding that many of his cases of hysteria and obsessional neurosis, such as his patients ‘Dora’ and ‘Rat Man’, had fathers who had been treated for syphilis in their youth. It is possible that Bertha Rauschenbach was keen on Carl Jung as a suitor for Emma not only because she could see how well suited they were, but because Carl had just completed his medical studies and could help with the treatment of her husband’s illness, in secret, in the privacy of their own home. And she was no doubt relieved to realise how little experience her future son-in-law had had with women.

      Meanwhile Carl was working at the Burghölzli, putting his father, who had died ‘just in time’ as his mother said, behind him. But he could not leave Personality No. 2 behind. Years later his friend and colleague Ludwig von Muralt, the other doctor at the Burghölzli when Carl arrived, told him that the way he behaved during those first months was so odd people thought he might be ‘psychologically abnormal’. Jung himself described experiencing feelings of such inferiority and tension at the time that it was only by ‘the utmost concentration on the essential’ that he managed not to ‘explode’. The problem was partly that Bleuler and Von Muralt seemed to be so confident in their roles, whereas he was completely at sea in this strange new world of the institution, and partly because he felt deeply humiliated by his poverty. He had only one pair of trousers and two shirts to his name and he had to send all his meagre wages back to his mother and sister, still living on charity at the Bottminger Mill. The humiliation was accompanied by a general feeling of social inferiority, heightened by the fact that Von Muralt came from one of the oldest and wealthiest families of Zürich.

      They were the same feelings which had often plagued Carl in the past and his solution was the same: to withdraw into himself and become what he called a ‘hermit’, locking himself away from the world. When he was not working, he read all fifty volumes of the journal Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, cover to cover. He said he wanted to know ‘how the human mind reacted to the sight of its own destruction’. He might have used his own father as an illustration. Or himself during those first months of 1901 after Emma had refused his hand in marriage, perhaps the real reason why he was so distressed, when his confident Personality No. 1 disappeared into thin air along with all his hopes and dreams, and he was close to a mental and emotional breakdown, as he had been in the past and would be again in the future.

      The crisis was extreme. But then, quite suddenly, at the end of six months, he recovered. In fact, he swung completely the other way, the inferior wretch replaced almost overnight by the loud, opinionated, energetic Steam-Roller of old. Once betrothed and sure of Emma’s love, Carl was able to take life at the Burghölzli at full tilt, with the kind of energy which left others breathless. No one could fail to notice it, but no one knew the reason why, because no one knew where he went every Sunday on his day off.

      Not knowing of Carl’s extreme crisis of confidence, Emma remained dazzled by his love, hardly able to believe it was true. She worried that she was a boring companion as she recounted small details about her mundane week – the riding, the walks by the Rhine, the family visits, her father’s deteriorating health, the musical evenings which her mother liked to host at Ölberg. The best moments were when they discussed the books she’d been reading, which gave her week its shape and purpose, enabling her to be ‘herself’ in a way which would otherwise have eluded her. To her joy Carl was delighted by her progress, always encouraging her to do more. And to her relief she soon discovered he was not in the least interested in having a bourgeois wife who thought of nothing but home and children and life within the narrow confines of Swiss society. Every day she waited for the postman, struggling up the hill to Ölberg on his bicycle, bearing another letter from Carl addressed to ‘Mein liebster Schatz!’ – my darling treasure – long letters, filled with Burghölzli news, ideas and suggestions for further reading, and telling her how much he loved her. And every Sunday, as Carl got to know Emma better, he found that beneath the shyness and seriousness there hid another Emma: one with a lively sense of humour, who could laugh and laugh. And who better to make her laugh than Carl?

      The Burghölzli at the turn of the twentieth century under the directorship of Bleuler was a remarkable institution rapidly gaining an international reputation. At a time when most asylums simply removed the insane from society, locking them up, often for whole lifetimes, the Burghölzli offered treatment of various kinds and tried, as far as possible, to show the patients consideration and respect. Jung himself describes the situation:

      In the medical world at the time psychiatry was quite generally held in contempt. No one really knew anything about it, and there was no psychology which regarded man as a whole and included his pathological variations in the total picture. The Director was locked up in the same institution with his patients, and the institution was equally cut off, isolated on the outskirts of the city like an ancient lazaretto with its lepers. No one liked looking in that direction. The doctors knew almost as little as the layman and therefore shared his feelings. Mental disease was a hopeless and fatal affair which cast its shadow over psychiatry as well . . .

      Soon after Jung joined the staff numbers increased to five doctors, and as far as Bleuler was concerned five was a luxury; before he took the job of director of the Burghölzli in 1898 he had spent thirteen years as director of the lunatic asylum on the island of Reichenau, where there were over 500 inmates with only one trained medical assistant.

      Eugen Bleuler was a remarkable man. Coming from Swiss peasant stock, he was the first of his family to attend university, and, much like Jung, he was drawn to this new branch of medicine because he had experience of mental illness in his own family. His sister, Pauline, was a catatonic schizophrenic and after Bleuler married in 1901 she lived with him, his wife and their eventual five children in a large apartment on the first floor of the Burghölzli. Bleuler had trained with some of the most progressive practitioners of the age, including Dr Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, where Sigmund Freud also spent time. Charcot was first and foremost a neurologist concerned with the functions and malfunctions of the brain, demonstrated with a showman’s flair to the hundreds of students who flocked to his lectures from England, Germany, Austria and America. He followed his patients’ progress throughout their lives and when they died he examined their brains under the