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

it. Nor had she ever considered the powerful workings of the ‘unconscious’. But she was intelligent and well read. She knew all about Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles, Lady Macbeth’s guilty sleepwalking, and Siegfried, the mythical hero. Now she was beginning to realise that this ‘unconscious’ was the key to the hidden workings of the mind and could be accessed in various ways, then used as a tool to cure the patient. By the time of their secret betrothal Emma was helping to write up Carl’s daily reports, learning all the time. If these years were the beginning of Carl Jung’s career, they were the beginning of something for Emma too.

      Meanwhile Jung was trying, between his eighty-hour week and his social duties, to finish his dissertation on the ‘So-called Occult Phenomena’. There had been a revival of interest in the occult at the end of the nineteenth century, people using Ouija boards and horoscopes, having seances, delving into magic and the ancient arts, and reporting strange paranormal occurrences. Carl was used to such things from his mother’s ‘seer’ side of the family, like the time when a knife in the drawer of their kitchen cupboard unaccountably split in two, or the times when his mother spoke with a strange, prophetic voice. But what interested Jung the doctor was the way the occult provided another route to the hidden world of the unconscious, more psychological than spiritual. Cousin Helly was probably a hysteric, he now concluded, a young girl falling into trances to get attention. In fact Helly’s mother had become so worried about the way the trances and the voices were dominating her life that she had packed her off to Marseilles to study dress-making, at which point Helly’s trances stopped, and she became a fine seamstress.

      Jung presented his dissertation to the faculty of medicine at the University of Zürich in 1901 and it was published the following year. The Preiswerk family, reading it on publication, were distressed. After a general introduction about current research on the subject, Jung concentrated on one case history: Helly Preiswerk and her seances at Bottminger Mill, referring to her, by way of thin disguise, as Miss S. W., a medium, fifteen and a half years old, Protestant – that is, instantly recognisable by anyone who knew the family. She was described as ‘a girl with poor inheritance’ and ‘of mediocre intelligence, with no special gifts, neither musical nor fond of books’. She had a second personality called Ivenes. One sister was a hysteric, the other had ‘nervous heart attacks’. The family were described as ‘people with very limited interests’ – and this of a family who had come to the rescue of his impoverished mother and sister. It showed a side of Carl which Emma would have to deal with often in the future: a callous insensitivity, driven perhaps by what he himself admitted was his ‘vaulting ambition’. But as far as the faculty of medicine at the University of Zürich was concerned, it was a perfectly good piece of research, fulfilling the aims Jung expressed in his clever conclusion: that it would contribute to ‘the progressive elucidation and assimilation of the as yet extremely controversial psychology of the unconscious’.

      The most telling thing about the dissertation is the dedication on the title page. It reads: ‘to his wife Emma Jung-Rauschenbach’. Given the dissertation was completed in 1901 and published in 1902, the dedication precedes the event of the marriage by a good year. Whatever was Carl thinking? What is the difference between ‘my wife’, which Emma was not, and ‘my betrothed’, which she was. It suggests Carl was desperate to claim Emma for himself, fully and legally, a situation which mere betrothal could not achieve. Emma was the answer to all Carl’s problems: financial – certainly – but equally his emotional and psychological ones. He needed Emma for his stability in every sense, and he knew it.

      Carl and Emma’s wedding was set for 14 February 1903, St Valentine’s Day. Buoyed up and boisterous, Carl became increasingly impatient and intolerant of the ‘unending desert of routine’ at the Burghölzli. Now he saw it as ‘a submission to the vow to believe only in what was probable, average, commonplace, barren of meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and reduce anything extraordinary to the banal’. Given Bleuler’s achievements at the asylum this was high-handed Carl at his worst. The fact is, he was fed up. He wanted to take a sabbatical, to travel, to do things he had never been able to do before. And he wanted to do it before he married Emma. Because he had no money of his own, his future mother-in-law happily offered to fund it. In July 1902 Jung submitted his resignation to Bleuler and the Zürich authorities, and by the beginning of October he was off, first to Paris, then London, for a four-month pre-wedding jaunt. Bleuler, knowing nothing of Jung’s secret betrothal to Fräulein Rauschenbach, must have been angry and non-plussed. How would Herr Doktor Jung afford it? How could he manage without a salary? And what about his poor mother and sister?

      Emma and her mother meanwhile started the lengthy process of preparing for the wedding – the dress itself, the veil, shoes, bouquet, trousseau, church service, flowers, guest list, menu for the wedding banquet, and the travel arrangements for the couple’s honeymoon. Emma’s father’s health must have caused some heartache: already parlous, it had taken a turn for the worse. He knew about his daughter’s betrothal to Carl now, but what to do about the wedding? It was a terrible dilemma for Emma who had, over the years, watched her father’s decline in horror and shame, and now he would not be able to attend the ceremony, or walk her up the aisle, or give her away.

      Before leaving the country Carl had to complete his Swiss army military service, an annual duty for all Swiss males between the ages of twenty and fifty, in his case as a lieutenant in the medical corps. But then he was off, first paying a visit to his mother and sister in Basel on his way to France. From Paris he wrote daily letters to Emma, and separately to her mother too, giving them all the news: he lived cheaply in a hotel for one franc a day and worked in Pierre Janet’s laboratory at the Salpêtrière, attending all the eminent psychologist’s lectures. He had enrolled at the Berlitz School to improve his English and started reading English newspapers, a habit he retained all his life. He went to the Louvre most days, fell in love with Holbein, the Dutch Masters and the Mona Lisa, and spent hours watching the copyists make their living selling their work to tourists like himself. He walked everywhere, through Les Halles, the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Bois de Boulogne, sitting in cafés and bistros watching the world, rich and poor, go by, and in the evenings he read French and English novels, the classic ones, never the modern. He also saw Helly and her sister Vally, both now working as seamstresses for a Paris fashion house, and he was grateful for their company, not only because he knew no one else in Paris, but because Helly was generous enough to forgive him his past sins. When the weather turned cold Bertha Rauschenbach posted off a winter coat to keep him warm. It wasn’t the only thing she sent him: when he expressed a longing to commission a copy of a Frans Hals painting of a mother and her children, the money was quickly dispatched.

      By January Carl was in London, visiting the sights and the museums and taking more English lessons. It must have been his English tutor, recently down from Oxford, who delighted Carl by taking him back to dine at his college high table with the dons in their academic gowns – a fine dinner, as he wrote to Emma, followed by cigars, liqueurs and snuff. The conversation was ‘in the style of the 18th century’ – and men only, ‘because we wanted to talk exclusively at an intellectual level’. In 1903 it was still common for men to be seen as more intellectual than women, and there were no women at high table to disagree. It was Jung’s first brush with the English ‘gentleman’ and he never forgot it, the word often appearing in his letters as a mark of the highest praise.

      In Schaffhausen, Emma received a present. It was a painting. In between all his other activities Carl took the time in Paris to travel out into the flat countryside with his easel and paints. He had always loved painting, even as a child, and in future it would go hand in hand with his writing, offering a poetic and spiritual dimension to his words. He found a spot on a far bank of the River Seine, looking across at a hamlet of pitched-roof houses, a church with a high spire, and trees all along. But the real subject of the painting was the clouds, which took up three-quarters of the canvas: light and shining below, dark and dramatic above. The inscription read: ‘Seine landscape with clouds, for my dearest fiancée at Christmas, 1902. Paris, December 1902. Painted by C. G. Jung.’

      It might have been a premonition of their marriage.

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