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

But it is just the point of hysteria that it represses the real cause, the psychic trauma, forgets it and replaces it by superficial “cover causes”. That is why hysterics ceaselessly tell us that their illness arose from a cold, from over-work, from real organic disorders.’ He compared their method with Freud’s ‘free association’ and reminded the reader that a ‘delicate psychological intuition in the doctor is as much a requisite as [is] technique for a Psycho-Analysis’. If this all sounds familiar now, it was not then, back in 1904.

      Emma appears as ‘Subject no. I, aged twenty-two, very intelligent’, in the ‘educated’ category. By way of introduction Jung wrote: ‘No. I is a married woman who placed herself in the readiest way at my disposal for the experiment and gave me every possible information. I report the experiment in as detailed a way as possible so that the reader may receive as complete a picture as possible. The probable mean of the experiment amounts to 1 second.’

      The first five word associations were: head/cloth, 1 second; green/grass, 0.8 seconds; water/fall, 1 sec; prick/cut, 0.8 seconds; angel/heart, 0.8 seconds. So far so good, but reaction 5 was deemed striking because ‘the subject cannot explain to herself how she comes to heart . . .’. Emma denied it was the result of any disturbance from without, and could not find any inner one either. Jung concluded it might therefore be some unconscious stimulus, very likely one of Aschaffenburg’s ‘preservation’ reactions, carried over from the previous prick/cut, which caused ‘a certain slight shade of anxiety, and image of blood’.

      ‘The subject is pregnant,’ Jung noted with scientific detachment, ‘and has now and then feelings of anxious expectancy.’

      There followed a sequence of stimulus words which were not especially memorable, except that ‘to cook’ endearingly elicited ‘to learn’, as did ‘to swim’ – because it was her sister Marguerite who was the swimmer, whereas Emma was apparently still learning. Only Carl could know why 28: lamp/green took 1.4 seconds. It followed threaten/fist, and he noted it was clearly another case of ‘preservation’ and that lamp/green denoted her home life (the colour of the lampshades). He does not say which home, Zürich or Schaffhausen, but it was most likely Schaffhausen and the fist her father’s as he became more and more ill and desperate.

      Further associations offered little which was significant for the test but tell us something of Emma’s outlook on life: evil/good; pity/have; people/faithful; law/follow; rich/poor; quiet/peaceful; moderate/drink; confidence/me; lover/faithful; change/false; duty/faithful; serpent/false. And then we come, in no particular order, to: family/father and mother/tell and dear/husband. Father is still the head of the family. Her mother is the one to whom she tells almost everything. Her husband, she loves.

      Using his intuition, and inevitably his personal knowledge of Subject No. I, Jung focused on a sequence of associations, nos 70–73: blossom/red; hit/prick; box/bed; bright/brighter. The first pair only took 0.6 seconds. ‘She explains this short reaction by saying that the first syllable of the stimulus-word Blo-ssom brought up the presentation of blood. Here we have a kind of assimilation of the stimulus-word to the highly accentuated pregnancy complex . . . It will be remembered that in the association Prick/Cut (no 4) the pregnancy complex was first encountered,’ yet:

      Box/Bed which followed Hit/Prick went quite smoothly without any tinge of emotion. But the reaction is curious. This subject has now and then paid a visit to our asylum and was alluding to the deep beds used there, the so-called ‘box-beds’. But the explanation rather surprised her, for the term ‘box-bed’ was not very familiar to her. This rather peculiar association was followed by a clang-association (Bright/Brighter) with a relatively long time . . . The supposition that the clang-reaction is connected with the previous curious reaction does not, therefore, seem quite baseless . . . assuming a clang-alteration at the suppressed pregnancy complex, the complex becomes very sensible.

      By Association 83 we come to injure/avoid. The German for ‘injure’ is schaden. As Jung explains, the word is very like and easily confused with scheiden – divorce. Luckily, apart from these, there were plenty of happy associations too.

      So the main complex which emerged from the test was Emma’s fear of the pain of childbirth. Association 43, despise/mépriser, reminds us how well Emma spoke French, but this, it turns out, was not the point. The reaction took 1.8 seconds. Why so, Jung wondered? ‘Despise is accompanied by an unpleasant emotional tone. Immediately after the reaction it came to her that she had had a passing fear that her pregnancy might in different ways decrease her attractiveness in the eyes of her husband. She immediately afterwards thought of a married couple who were at first happy and then separated – the married couple in Zola’s novel Vérité [Truth]. Hence the French form of the reaction.’ Poor Emma.

      In his summing up of ‘Subject No. I’, Jung commented:

      In reality our experiment shows beautifully, the conscious self is merely the marionette dancing on the stage to a hidden automatic impulse . . . In our subject we find a series of intimate secrets given away by the associations . . . We find her strongest actual complex to be bound up with thoughts about her pregnancy, her rather anxious expectancy, and love of her husband with jealous fears. This is a complex of an erotic kind which has just become acute; that is why it is so much to the front. No less than 18% of the associations can certainly be referred to it. In addition there are a few complexes of considerably less intensity: loss of her former position, a few deficiencies which she regards as unpleasant (singing, swimming, cooking) and finally an erotic complex which occurred many years back in her youth and which only shows itself in one association (out of regard for the subject of the experiment I must, unfortunately, omit a report on this).

      Jung ended the German text of Studies in Word-Association giving ‘special thanks to Frau Emma Jung for her active assistance with the repeated revision of the voluminous material’.

      5

Tricky Times

      Agathe Regina was born at Emma’s family home in Schaffhausen on 26 December 1904, a Christmas child. Emma was twenty-two, had been married for a year and ten months, and now she was a mother. Overnight, it seemed, her life had changed again, this time for ever.

      It was common for mothers of Emma’s social class to use a wet nurse to still their babies. But Emma breastfed hers herself. She did not want to hand her baby over to a stranger and deprive herself and the child of this pleasure, as Carl later described it to Freud. Nevertheless, a first baby is a strange and unknown experience. Emma had plenty of help with ‘Agathli’ – little Agathe – whilst she was still at Ölberg with her mother and sister Marguerite, but when she moved back to Zürich and the Burghölzli, keen not to be away from her husband for too long, she largely looked after the baby herself. Feeding took many hours. Waking through the night disturbed sleep. Changing the thick towelling nappies was onerous, though it was the maid’s job to soak them in a pail before washing them by hand, then through the wringer, then hanging them out on a wooden horse by the tiled stove to dry. It was a winter with deep snow, white pitched roofs with icicles hanging from the eves and the window sills, and no hope of using the washing line in the garden. There were coughs and colds and nappy rashes to deal with, and the terrible responsibility of a new life. For a young mother who had shown such anxiety about the pain of giving birth and the fear that having a baby might affect the feelings her husband had for her, Emma was having to grow up very fast indeed.

      In addition, Emma had just started what she had longed to do since leaving school: furthering her education. Though it was done circuitously, by helping her husband with his work, it was certainly an education. And she was still going down to Zürich Central Library to pursue her own research into the Grail legend. But now Carl and Emma slipped back into more conventional roles: she as wife and mother; he as husband, breadwinner and authoritative head of house. Carl did not subscribe to ‘Das Weib sei dem Mann untertan’, ‘The woman shall be subservient to the man’, as a popular book, The Way to the Altar, quoting the Bible, reminded, but once Agathe was born things changed in the Jung household. Carl was conventional