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

pregnant again. Anna Margaretha, known as Gretli, and later Gret, was born on 8 February 1906.

      Emma’s story was typical enough of the times. Many women were frightened of getting pregnant, either because they already had too large a family or because they were not married, which was worse. There was no safe method of birth control, and a reliance on coitus interruptus had limited success. In 1909 Richard Richter, a German doctor, would develop an early form of an interuterine device using the gut of the silkworm, but it was not marketed until the 1920s, by which time Marie Stopes had opened the first birth control clinic in England, and there were similar initiatives in America and France and Germany. The Catholic Church, however, forbade any form of contraception and the Protestant Church did not look on it with favour either, believing that it was the duty of Christian marriage to ‘increase and multiply and fill the earth’. It all came too late for Emma and Carl anyway.

      Sigmund Freud could have told them. His letters to his doctor friend Wilhelm Fliess are full of pleas that he come up with a reliable form of contraception. Every month he and Martha worried she might be pregnant again. Fliess looked into the ‘rhythm method’, making calculations and trying to work out a safe period during Martha’s monthly cycle; he even tried to come up with a similar cycle for Freud himself. Evidently it was not successful: Martha became pregnant six times in ten years. For the first three months of her sixth pregnancy she insisted it was the start of the menopause, not another pregnancy. She couldn’t face it. She had never wanted more than four children. Once the baby, Anna, was born, Martha went to her mother’s in Wandsbek for several weeks of recuperation and there developed ‘a writing paralysis’: she found she literally could not form the words to write Sigmund a letter. Her face was puffy and her teeth hurt. She was only thirty-four and she was exhausted. After that they stopped having sex, that side of their marriage becoming ‘amortised’, as Freud later confided to Emma.

      In March 1905 Emma Jung’s father Jean Rauschenbach died. Marguerite and Ernst Homberger, who had married a year earlier, now moved in with Bertha whilst they built a house of their own. Ernst took over the running of the Rauschenbach business from Bertha and Jean’s sister, though the two women had managed it all splendidly during the last years of Jean Rauschenbach’s decline. But custom had it that if there was a man in the family there was no need for the women to carry on working. Ernst, a quiet, ambitious, tough man twenty years his wife’s senior, ran the business for the rest of his working life.

      The immediate reaction to Herr Rauschenbach’s death was relief as well as sorrow, his last years being so terrible, shut away from the world. ‘A poor rich man finally closed his eyes last night, but their light had already gone out a long time ago,’ stated the obituary in the Schaffhausen Tagesblatt