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

Carl privately with his research and reports, and she continued to go to the library in Zürich and research the Legend of the Holy Grail, but it still left her with many hours alone. There were just two people nearby who she could visit regularly – a duty or a pleasure, depending on how you looked at it: Carl’s mother and his sister Trudi, because once it became clear that Jung was staying in Zürich he swiftly moved them out of the Bottminger Mill and into an apartment in nearby Zollikon. He did not have much time to see them himself so the visits naturally fell to Emma, the wife and daughter-in-law. It can’t have been easy: most of the time her mother-in-law was normal and good company, but she still heard voices, had visions, and made sudden prophetic announcements. Her second personality always hovered in the background, and you never knew when it might emerge.

      Soon Emma found a role to play at the Burghölzli after all, because Eugen Bleuler believed women and wives should be included as much as possible in the daily life of the institution – another of his progressive ideas, quite alien to other lunatic asylums where all women other than the female Wärters were kept well away. Emma was encouraged to join in, participate in social events, and sit at the same tables as the patients as long as there was no danger. There were also regular evening discussion ‘circles’ to which all doctors and their wives were invited. And if a patient was in the rehabilitation phase of their treatment and they were allowed out of the asylum grounds, it was as likely to be Frau Jung or Frau Direktor Bleuler as much as it was one of the Wärters who accompanied them on walks, or even on a short shopping trip. ‘The years at Burghölzli were the years of my apprenticeship,’ Jung acknowledged later. But in a smaller way they were Emma’s too. ‘Dominating my interests and research was the burning question, “What actually takes place inside the mentally ill?”’ Jung wrote. Now, almost by osmosis, it came to interest Emma too.

      The other plus for Emma at the Burghölzli was Hedwig, who was a remarkable woman and an early feminist. Eugen Bleuler was already forty-four when he married her in 1901; Hedwig was then a history teacher, twenty-four years old, clever, elegant, charming. They met at one of Bleuler’s lectures at Zürich University, and wed within the year. Hedwig’s ambition had been to become a lecturer herself but it was not possible in Switzerland at that time, it being the preserve of men. And once she was pregnant she could not continue her studies anyway, so her life centred round her role as Frau Direktor Bleuler, and she made very good use of it, supporting her husband in every way she could. Their apartment was large enough to accommodate two maids, had bedrooms enough for their growing family, and a large, sunny room for Bleuler’s schizophrenic sister Pauline. There was a library and a stairway which led directly down to the wards, so Bleuler could be there at any time of day or night if there was a crisis. Hedwig’s special interests were the abstinence movement and women’s position in a modern society. Years later she travelled throughout Switzerland lecturing on both, but whilst the children were growing up she limited herself to helping her husband at the Burghölzli and editing his lectures and published papers. It was a happy marriage but she always regretted having to give up her own career. ‘The woman is always the one who has to make the sacrifices,’ she said. Another clever woman, then, who had to find her intellectual satisfaction through her husband’s work.

      Once back full time at the Burghölzli, Jung was soon dominating the place with his energy and booming laugh. He was happy to spend hours with a patient listening to their strange utterances, finding meaning in their madness. While he was liked by many, some of his colleagues found his presence irritating, accusing him of throwing his weight around, doing just what he wanted and not bothering with the dull administrative work. The Wärters, who did all the day-to-day caring and were only allowed home one afternoon a week, claimed the doctors spent more time on their research than on routine ward rounds, especially Herr Doktor Jung. But Bleuler let him get away with it. Auguste Forel, the former director who still liked to wander about the institution, was soon asking: ‘Who’s running this place, Bleuler or Jung?’

      The reason was simple: Bleuler did not want to lose Jung. So he allowed Jung and his ‘esteemed colleague Herr Doktor Riklin’ to spend hours pursuing their word association tests in a laboratory at the back of the main building, near both the laundry and the dairy, wafts of steam emanating from the one and the moos of cows from the other. Riklin was the junior partner in the venture but he had worked on word association tests before, in Germany with Gustav Aschaffenburg who followed Dr Wundt, who in turn referred back to the first tests conducted by Galton in England in the 1880s, each contributing to the growing body of evidence about the unconscious. All over Europe doctors in asylums were experimenting on their patients, and Jung’s papers on the word association tests are filled with references to others already embarked on the same track. The difference was that Jung and Riklin’s methodology was far more systematic, more scientific. They published their findings in the Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie, and Bleuler wrote the introduction when the book was published in 1905 as Studies in Word Association.

      The method was described as ‘the uttering of the first word which “occurs” to the subject after hearing the stimulus-word’, and suggested that it would help in the diagnoses and classification of dementia praecox, epilepsy, various forms of imbecility, some forms of paranoia, and the diseases grouped under hysteria, neurasthenia and psychasthenia, ‘not to speak of manic depression with its well-known flight of ideas’. Jung and Riklin went about it systematically and scientifically, by using a much larger pool of guinea pigs and by increasing the number of stimulus words from 100 to 400 – nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and numerals, using the Swiss dialect form when necessary – and timing the reactions with the greatest possible accuracy using the ‘one-fifth-second stop watch’, the very latest model from the Rauschenbach factory in Schaffhausen. The reaction times varied considerably, sometimes taking up to 6 seconds. Galton had found that the average time was 1.3 seconds. Jung with his modern stopwatch found it was 1.8 seconds, women subjects taking slightly longer. To distract the conscious mind a metronome was used. Other researchers used whistles, trumpets or darkened rooms. At times the tests were done when the subject was ‘in a state of obvious fatigue’, and once ‘in a state of morning drowsiness’ (Jung himself). One important innovative decision of Jung’s was to test ‘normal’ as well as ‘abnormal’ people, and the groups were divided into male and female, ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’. Everything had to be written up, by hand, night after night. Emma was kept busy, and she was happy to do it.

      In those early years of psychoanalysis it was common and considered perfectly acceptable to use friends and relatives as well as patients as subjects for scientific research. Jung and Riklin’s first test was on ‘Normal Subjects’: thirty-eight persons in all, nine men and fourteen women of whom were classified as ‘educated’. The rest were mostly male and female Wärters at the Burghölzli, who, Jung declared, were not so much ‘uneducated’ as ‘half-educated’. The tests were often repeated so that in the end they had 12,400 associations and timings on which to base their conclusions. There were statistics and tables and graphs, and a complicated list of different types of reaction, including those which showed evidence of ‘repression’, a term made familiar in the writings of Sigmund Freud. As with Freud, there was often enough of a description of the person to make an enticing story. Thus ‘Uneducated Woman, Subject No. 1: she is of country origin and became an asylum nurse at the age of seventeen, after having brooded at home for over a year over the unhappy ending of a love affair’. This subject would not or could not understand the stimulus words ‘hate, love, remorse, rattle glass, hammer ears . . . because they intimately touched the complex which she was trying to repress’. The term ‘complex’ was coined by Jung and Riklin to denote ‘personal matter . . . with an emotional tone’. It could be spotted by a significantly longer reaction time and the peculiarly forced nature of the reaction.

      Then there were clang associations – that is, based upon sound rather than on concepts: simple, thoughtless, sound similarities – and interesting ‘preservation’ ones, first noted by Aschaffenburg, where ‘the current association revealed nothing, but the succeeding one bears an abnormal character’. There was also the egocentric reaction: grandmother/me; dancing/I don’t like; wrong/I was not, and so on. ‘If we ask patients directly as to the cause of their illness we always receive incorrect, or at least imperfect information,’ explains Jung.