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

in imitation of the Trocadero in Paris – listening to one of the military bands and talking about Marguerite’s fiancé, Ernst Homberger, the son of another of their father’s former business associates in Schaffhausen. One thing they did not do was visit the Panoptikum on the seamier side of the Bahnhof Bridge, with curtains drawn and dimly lit by gaslight, where men could, by looking through small panes, view a tiger hunt in the Sudan, or the ‘Rape of the Sabines’, or a wax Sarah Bernhardt in a negligee, or the ‘medical’ exhibition with lifesize models of naked women.

      Sunday was Carl’s day off. In the morning all the church bells, Protestant and Catholic, rang out across Zürich and families put on their Sunday best to attend the services, prayer books in hand, little girls with hair done up Heidi-style, boys in matelot suits. Not the Jungs, however. Carl had vowed never to set foot in a church again, other than on unavoidable occasions such as his own wedding, and he was determined not to have any of his children confirmed, remembering the debilitating boredom and depression which overcame him during the instruction given him by his father, who was all the while denying his own religious doubts, battling with his unnamed torments. Emma accepted Carl’s rejection of formal religion without much trouble, not least because by Sunday they were often on the train to Schaffhausen, to be met at the railway station by coachman Braun as usual, then up the hill to Ölberg where Emma’s mother and Marguerite and the servants waited, and Emma was back to the world she knew and loved.

      Their first years of married life were happy for them both. A studio portrait taken at that time shows the couple side by side and close, looking into the lens of the camera with confidence and ease. Emma’s wavy brown hair is done simply in a modern style – softly off the face. Her expression is shy but calm and direct, and quite determined. She is wearing a blouse in the Grecian style, high-necked, modern again. The skirt is long, simple and elegant, very unlike the elaborate outfits displayed in most of the fashion magazines. She may be standing on a box – the custom for studio photographs if the difference in height was too great – but she still looks half Carl’s size. He stands there solid, with his hand nonchalantly in his pocket – dark suit, light waistcoat, a stiff-collared white shirt and small bow tie – a confident man of the world with no trace of the pompous and rather unhappy student of earlier photographs. His gold-rimmed spectacles glint in the studio lights and it is just possible to see the gold chain of his wedding present from Emma. His small moustache is trimmed the way it will be for the rest of his life. In another take of the pose, Emma is smiling more, probably encouraged by the photographer, but Carl is just the same. He looks – there is no other way to put it – like the cat that got the cream.

      ‘I’m sitting here in the Burghölzli and for a month I’ve been playing the part of the Director, Senior Physician and First Assistant,’ Carl wrote on 22 August 1904 to Andreas Vischer, an old friend from university days. It was summer, and everyone else was away on holiday. ‘So almost every day I’m writing twenty letters, giving twenty interviews, running all over the place and getting very annoyed. I have even lost another fourteen pounds in the last year as a result of this change of life, which otherwise is not a bad thing of course. On the contrary, all that would be fine (for what do we want from life more than real work?) if the public uncertainty of existence were not so great.’ He might claim it annoyed him, but his tone is buoyant, optimistic. There was nothing Carl loved more, he admitted, than work – at least work that made sense to him: investigating the dark corners of the mind. Emma was getting used to the idea that she hardly ever saw him.

      By the end of the year it was becoming clear that Jung was not going to find another job elsewhere, certainly not in his home town of Basel, which had been his plan. Apparently his falling-out with Professor Wille had well and truly ruined his chances: the job of director at the Basel asylum, which Carl had applied for, was given to one of Wille’s German colleagues, a man named Wolff. Swinging from high spirits to low, Carl called it the ‘Basel calamity’, which had ‘wrecked for ever’ his academic career in Switzerland. Now he had to consider remaining in Zürich and at the Burghölzli. ‘I might as well sit under a millstone as under Wolff,’ he wrote to Vischer, ‘who will stay up there immovably enthroned for thirty years until he is as old as Wille. For no one in Germany is stupid enough to take Wolff seriously, as Kraepelin has appropriately said, he is not even a psychiatrist. I have been robbed of any possibility of advancement in Basel now.’

      Carl did not want to stay in Zürich nor take on a permanent post at the Burghölzli. He had no wish to do endless ward rounds, attend endless staff meetings, write up endless daily reports. He wanted to continue his research into the workings of the unconscious. He wanted to bring scientific proof to this new field and write scientific papers about his findings to be published in medical journals like the Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie. He wanted to make his name. But he had been rejected for the post in Basel and now he didn’t know what to do. His crisis confronted Emma with the other Carl again, the one who fell out with colleagues through arrogance and an unshakeable conviction in his superior intelligence, but then became cast down and plagued with doubts when things went wrong. There was no steadiness in Carl, she discovered. And yet to the outside world he appeared his usual loud, confident, charismatic self. It was as though he were two different people.

      The one thing which never left him was his vaulting ambition. ‘As usual you have hit the nail on the head with your accusation that my ambition is the agent provocateur of my fits of despair,’ Jung wrote to Freud some years later. He could admit it, but he could do little about it. Because the ambition was not just to gain worldly acclaim; it was in order to understand the complex workings of the unconscious because he suffered so much from it himself.

      Bleuler again came to the rescue. He wasn’t a crafty Swiss peasant for nothing and he wanted to keep his exceptional young colleague at the Burghölzli. So he made Jung an offer he couldn’t refuse: he could continue the word association research he had begun with his Burghölzli colleague Franz Riklin, but more systematically, in a laboratory with proper equipment, and, under Bleuler’s own supervision, write papers to be published in the medical journals. These could later be gathered into a book on this important new field of scientific research. Carl accepted. Bleuler and Jung shared an interest in the paranormal as a means of accessing the unconscious, and the Burghölzli already enjoyed an international reputation as great and controversial in its way as Freud had acquired after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Everyone in the field, it seemed, wanted to research the unconscious, whether through dreams, hypnosis, the paranormal, or word association tests. Jung needed a base from which to launch himself. Bleuler needed the best doctors specialising in diseases of the mind, both for the sake of his patients and the reputation of the Burghölzli. Where else, after all, could Carl find so many guinea pigs to experiment on? Discussing it with Emma, Carl could see there was no better solution.

      However, Carl was now tied to doing all the routine work as well – a twelve-hour day at least – and being completely teetotal, and, above all, having to move back and live on site. Nevertheless, by October 1904 Jung had exchanged the part-time for the full-time position, and he and Emma moved into an apartment in the main building of the Burghölzli, on the floor above Bleuler and his wife Hedwig and their children, bringing Emma’s maid and the beautiful furniture with them. The only concession made to Herr and Frau Doktor Jung was that Carl was allowed to miss the midday meal with patients and staff and return to the apartment to have lunch with his wife. So began Emma’s new life as the wife of an Irrenarzt, living amongst hysterics, schizophrenics, catatonics, alcoholics, addicts, chronic neurotics and suicidal depressives – people who had lost their minds for one reason or another, and who spat and screamed and paced the wards, up and down, shouting obscenities, tearing at their hair, breaking the furniture. The contrast with her former life was complete.

      Now she had to find a way of relating to the kind of people she had never expected to meet: inmates and staff alike.

      It is telling that Emma was able to do it quickly and naturally, as testified by everyone who met her. Of course they knew Herr Doktor Jung had married a wealthy wife, but it was soon noticed that the Frau Doktor did not ‘act wealthy’, dressed simply, and was friendly to everyone equally, regardless of position. She was quite reserved, it was true, but she was liked. For Emma the problem was more the question of how to fill her days.