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

A Rich Marriage

      Emma and Carl got married twice: first the civil ceremony on 14 February, with just a few family members in attendance – Carl’s mother and sister, and Emma’s sister Marguerite but not her mother or father – followed by an evening wedding ball at the Hotel Bellevue Neuhausen overlooking the Rhine Falls. Then, two days later, a church wedding in the Steigkirche, the Protestant Reformed Church in Schaffhausen, at which both mothers were present, but not Emma’s father. The bridal couple arrived at the church in the high Rauschenbach carriage used only for weddings, decorated with winter flowers and driven by coachman Braun: Carl in his newly acquired silk top hat and tails, Emma in her white gown, veil and fur cape against the cold – luckily there was no snow that February – waving and smiling at well-wishers left and right. The service was followed by a wedding banquet at Ölberg. Later, on 1 March, there was a further festivity at the Hotel Schiff for the employees of the Rauschenbach factories and foundry.

      The wedding banquet was grand, as expected for the eldest daughter of a family of such wealth and high standing: twelve courses, starting with lobster bisque, followed by local river trout, toast and foie gras, a sorbet to precede the main course of pheasant with artichoke hearts accompanied by a variety of salads. The dessert course offered puddings, patisserie, cakes, ice creams and fruit, and each course was accompanied by a selection of wines, ending with a choice of liqueurs, sherry, port or champagne, and finally, coffee, cigars and cigarettes. The bridal couple sat side by side at a long table covered in white damask, decorated with wedding flowers, the family silver, china and glass; the servants of the house in their starched uniforms running to and fro, augmented by extra waiters from the town, each guest assigned their placement. The couple were flanked by their relations and facing the guests: Emma with her veil off her face now, her hair coiled up in the style of the times, Carl in his wedding fraque with a stiff white collar and fancy waistcoat, listening to a long list of toasts and speeches, everything as it should be, at least on the surface.

      Except that the father of the bride was not present, a fact which did not escape the guests. Nor, of course, was the father of the groom, Pastor Jung – how to put it – having died some years previously. Then there was the fact that the mother of the groom was extremely large. And the puzzle that Frau Rauschenbach apparently was not present at the civil wedding, only the church wedding two days later. Above all there was the fact that the groom was a penniless doctor, not even a regular one but an Irrenarzt, a doctor of the insane, working in a Zürich lunatic asylum, marrying Emma Rauschenbach, one of the richest and most desirable young women in Switzerland.

      Emma’s wedding present to Carl was a gold fob watch and chain from the Rauschenbach factory, a magnificent piece of Swiss craftsmanship engraved around the upper inside rim with the words ‘Fräulein Emma Rauschenbach’ and ‘Dr C. G. Jung’ around the lower, with a charming design of lilies-of-the-valley at the centre, encircling two hands joined in matrimony, the date inscribed on a ribbon below: 16 February 1903. Not the 14th, then, but the 16th. Not the day of the civil wedding but of the church wedding. For Carl the church wedding was of little concern: he had rejected formal religion a long way back, during his battles with his father. ‘The further away from church I was, the better I felt,’ he wrote of his teenage self. ‘All religion bored me to death.’ But to Emma, raised in a conventional haut-bourgeois Swiss family, it was the church wedding that counted.

      They spent the days before setting off on their honeymoon on 2 March at Ölberg. Early that morning they were borne away in the green everyday Rauschenbach carriage piled high with labelled trunks and hat boxes, Emma’s mother and sister and the full complement of servants ranged on either side of the grand entrance, waving them off down the hill – ‘Wünsch Glück! Wünsch Glück!’ – past the fountain and the vineyards and on to Schaffhausen railway station and the start of their journey – Emma in her travelling outfit and furs, Carl with his new set of tailored clothes and plenty of books.

      After a short visit to Carl’s mother and sister at the Bottminger Mill in Basel they travelled by Continental Express to Paris. The first-class carriages were arranged much like a drawing room, with heavily upholstered seats, writing tables and lamps for reading and curtains at the windows. The restaurant car was elegant, the menus all in French and the food excellent. The night was spent in lavishly adorned salons lits, with hand basin and mirror in the corner and the two bunks made up with fine bedlinen. Stewards in smart uniforms appeared at any time of day or night at the ring of a bell, and there was a quiet deference to all the proceedings. From Paris they travelled by train and boat to London, and thence down to Southampton to board the ocean liner taking them to Madeira, Las Palmas and Tenerife, always staying in the best hotels, then back via Barcelona, Genoa and Milan, arriving back at Schaffhausen on 16 April.

      For Carl it was the start of a new life of considerable luxury; for Emma it was the beginning of getting to know the man she had married. He certainly looked the part: tall, handsome, beautifully attired. But at some stage during the honeymoon there was a quarrel about money. Swiss law gave the husband, as head of household, ownership of all his wife’s possessions, and the power to make all final decisions in matters pertaining to family life, including the education of the children. Accordingly, the first thing Carl had done once they were married was to pay off his 3,000-franc debt to the Jung uncles. The amount of the debt tells you something about Carl’s incipient taste for good living, a side of his character Emma was now discovering for herself. ‘Honeymoons are tricky things,’ Jung admitted to a friend years later. ‘I was lucky. My wife was apprehensive – but all went well. We got into an argument about the rights and wrongs of distributing money between husbands and wives. Trust a Swiss bank to break into a honeymoon!’ He laughed at the memory. But Emma had seen Carl’s temper and how it could flare up out of nowhere. Ever since he was a boy Carl had flown into rages. In time Emma learnt that the rages soon passed. But for now it was distressing.

      Then there was the question of sex. Was Emma surprised to discover that her husband was still a virgin? Two years earlier his mother had commented, on one of her visits to the Burghölzli and before he became engaged to Emma, that Carl knew too few women. Almost none, in fact. Jung himself later admitted he had not had ‘an adventure before marriage, so to speak’ and until his marriage he was ‘timidly proper with women’. In one way this may have been a relief to Emma, given the terrible fate of her father. But she would not have been the only ‘apprehensive’ one, as Carl suggested. And now she knew Carl was not quite the man of the world he presented on the surface.

      Then there was also the evident difference in their personalities. Quiet and studious as a child, as an adult Emma came across as shy and reticent, sometimes hiding behind the formality of her social background. With marriage she happily took her place in the background, giving those who did not know her the impression that she was, if not the Hausfrau, then just the wife. Carl was the extroverted one, the one everyone wanted to talk to. But it was only half the story, as Emma was finding out. The ‘other’ Carl, the hidden one, was unsure, introverted, plagued by a deep sense of social inferiority, and much in need of Emma’s quiet support. Whilst Carl’s childhood had been strange and lonely, Emma’s had been safe, loving and happy, protected from the ills of the world at the Haus zum Rosengarten, overprotected perhaps. That world did not begin to break up until she was twelve, when her father first became ill with syphilis, and by then the confidence bestowed by a happy childhood was deeply embedded. She also had the confidence which came from belonging to the privileged niveau of society. It was a feeling Emma carried with her all her life, allowing her to behave in the quiet, modest manner noted by everyone who met her. A double confidence. Her new husband had neither.

      On 24 April, shortly after returning from honeymoon, the Jungs moved into a rented apartment in Zürich, on Zollikerstrasse, the road leading up to the Burghölzli asylum. Here, south of the city, the houses were solid rather than grand, the apartments spacious and the countryside within easy reach for afternoon walks. Unlike the eastern slopes of Zürich, which lay in the shade with damp air and bad soil, the southern slopes were on the sunny side, with good soil and little fog. Carl had taken up Bleuler’s offer of a temporary