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

and Tourette’s. But it was his patients suffering from hysteria who interested him most and brought him his greatest fame. The fashionable ‘treatments’ at the time for hysteria were ‘animal magnetism’ and hypnotism, each requiring a doctor with special ‘intuition’. In animal magnetism the doctor passed his hands over the patient to release the vital fluid or energy which had supposedly become blocked. In hypnotism the doctor took control of the mind, providing the most dramatic demonstrations as patients fell into trances and spoke in strange voices. When Eugen Bleuler continued his training under Auguste Forel at the Burghölzli in the early 1880s, hypnotism was one of the main treatments and Forel had his own ‘Hypnosestab’, a wand with a silver tip which he used with some success on obsessives and neurotics as well as hysterics. But his greatest success was with alcoholics. The Burghölzli was then, and remained when Bleuler took over from Forel, an institution which held strictly to the virtues of abstinence. Drink was one of the worst afflictions of the age and asylums were full of chronic cases who were contained whilst ‘inside’, but, without a vow of abstinence, soon reverted to old habits once they left.

      All this Carl explained to Emma in his letters, or on their Sundays in the drawing room at Ölberg, or on their afternoon walks high up in the meadows above the house, up to ‘their’ bench by the edge of the forest beyond. Later Emma confessed she only understood half of it at the time. Apparently Bleuler was continuing the progressive methods he had started to develop at Reichenau: staff lived amongst the inmates, eating with them at the same tables and socialising with them in their spare time. His theory of affektiver Rapport, listening with empathy, was the guiding principle. There was also a great emphasis put on cleanliness. Inmates were helped to wash thoroughly, in spite of a shortage of baths and bathrooms, and to keep their clothes in good order; likewise their beds, a dozen on each side of a ward, which were kept neat, the heavy feather covers hung out of the windows every morning to air and the mattresses regularly turned. The patients were kept occupied, Herr Direktor Bleuler believing that physical activity was good for the distraught mind. The kitchen gardens lay beyond the walls of the asylum extending down the slopes and provided all their vegetables and fruit, which were brought fresh to the kitchens every day. The dairy produced the milk and cheese. Hens provided the eggs. The laundry kept inmates busy washing and starching and ironing. The Hausordnung kept the building spick and span, smelling of floor polish and soap. There were workshops: woodwork and wood-chopping for the tiled stoves in winter, sack-making, silk-plucking, sewing, mending, knitting. The place was to all intents and purposes self-sufficient and the food, for an institution, was good: always a soup for the midday meal followed by meat and vegetables, with soup and bread again for the evening meal along with a piece of cheese or sausage. The patients were divided into three categories and while third-class patients did not eat as well as the first-class (private) ones, it was still a better standard than at most asylums. In the evenings there were card games, reading, concerts; sometimes the patients produced an entertainment, sometimes lectures were put on, and at the weekends there were occasional fetes and dances for those willing and able. Jung was put in charge of social events as soon as he arrived. He hated it.

      To keep things going day to day there were seventy Wärters, male and female helpers in long white aprons and starched white collars, the men in trousers, shirt and tie, the women in long dark skirts and starched white caps. Like the doctors they lived on the premises, but unlike the doctors they had no quarters of their own. They slept on the wards or in the corridors, on wooden camp beds put up for the night, the women in the women’s section, the men in the men’s. The only exception was the Wärters in charge of the ‘first-class’ patients, who would sleep in the patient’s private room. This was a great privilege because not only was there some peace and quiet but the private patient was allowed candles in the room at night, or even an oil lamp if their behaviour was good enough and they were no danger to themselves or others. It was an eighty-hour week and the pay was low: 600 Swiss francs per annum for the male Wärters, a hundred francs less for the women. But board and lodging was all found, so the rest could be saved.

      Carl’s day started at 6 a.m. and rarely finished before 8 p.m., after which he would go up to his room to write his daily reports, work on his dissertation, and compose his daily letter to Emma. There was a staff meeting every morning, after a breakfast of bread and a bowl of coffee, ward rounds morning and evening, an additional general meeting three times a week to consider every aspect of the running of the institution, and at least once a week a discussion evening, which, by the time Carl joined, was already well versed in the writings of Freud. Once into his stride there was no stopping Herr Doktor Jung, and his sheer brilliance soon singled him out. Bleuler’s affektiver Rapport was exactly the kind of treatment he himself believed in: listening acutely and with empathy to the apparent babblings of inmates with dementia praecox, or the outbursts of hysterics and the circular repetitions of obsessive neurotics. Carl was fascinated by the chronic catatonics who had been at the Burghölzli for as long as anyone could remember, including the old women incarcerated since they were young girls for having illegitimate children, who no longer knew who they’d once been.

      Carl could listen to his patients for hours, taking notes, catching clues, watching how the mind worked. The Burghölzli was known for its progressive research, and inmates demonstrating interesting symptoms were the willing, and unwilling, guinea pigs – ushered into the room or lecture theatre for the doctor to examine, question and offer a diagnosis. It was a fine apprenticeship for Carl, as he himself admitted. He had little interest in the patients who were there with TB or typhus, and he could not bear the routine work, the meetings and the administration, to which he rarely gave any proper attention. But the old lady who stood by the window all day waiting for her long-lost lover, or the schizophrenic who talked crazily about God – that was a different matter altogether. Here his Personality No. 2 came into its own, working hand in hand with No. 1. ‘It was as though two rivers had united and in one grand torrent were bearing me inexorably towards distant goals,’ he later wrote. Bleuler soon saw that Herr Doktor Jung, with his fine intuition on the one hand and his brilliant mind on the other, understood the inmates like no one else.

      Carl’s listening was made more effective by Bleuler’s insistence that everything be conducted in Swiss dialect, not the High German which doctors normally used, and which effectively meant no communication since most inmates could not understand High German, and even if they could, it caused such a social gulf between doctor and patient that the patient felt browbeaten. When speaking High German, Carl retained his broad Basel accent, something which had humiliated him at grammar school, but no longer. Now he learnt all the other regional Swiss dialects as well because at the Burghölzli it was expected that the doctor should adapt to the patient, not the other way round, an idea generally held as odd and even dangerous by the vast majority of the medical profession. Besides, without it Jung could do no useful research.

      On Sundays he retold the patients’ stories to Emma, shocking her, entertaining her, keeping her spellbound. Stories about women in the asylum held a special fascination for her, such as the woman in Carl’s section who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Jung disagreed with the diagnosis, thinking it was more like ordinary depression, so he started, à la Freud, to ask the woman about her dreams, probing her unconscious. It turned out that when she was a young girl she had fallen in love with ‘Mr X’, the son of a wealthy industrialist. She hoped they would marry, but he did not appear to care for her, so in time she wed someone else and had two children. Five years later a friend visited and told her that her marriage had come as quite a shock to Mr X. ‘That was the moment!’ as Jung wrote in his account of it. The woman became deeply depressed and one day, bathing her two small children, she let them drink the contaminated river water. Spring water was used only for drinking, not bathing, in those days. Shortly afterwards her little girl came down with typhoid fever and died. The woman’s depression became acute and finally she was sent to the Burghölzli asylum. Jung knew the narcotics for her dementia praecox were doing her no good. Should he tell her the truth or not? He pondered for days, worried that it might tip her further into madness. Then he made his decision: to confront her, telling no one else. ‘To accuse a person point-blank of murder is no small matter,’ he wrote later. ‘And it was tragic for the patient to have to listen to it and accept it. But the result was that in two weeks it proved possible to discharge her, and she was