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

geehrtes Fräulein!’ – most esteemed young lady, always ending in an exclamation mark.

      It took Carl many months before he could summon up the courage to ask Emma to marry him, and when he did she refused him. ‘For various reasons I was turned down when I first proposed,’ he wrote to Freud in 1906: ‘later I was accepted, and I married.’ Various reasons, plural. One was that Emma was already engaged, albeit informally, to the son of one of her father’s business colleagues. Another: Carl’s loud and rumbustious personality was utterly overwhelming for a young woman such as Emma. Another: Carl Jung did not have a penny to his name, nor was he ever likely to have, since by then he had decided to be an Irrenarzt – a doctor of the insane – the most lowly of professions. This presented a serious social barrier and was so shocking that Emma’s father could not be told. Their engagement, when it finally occurred, was a secret one.

      What changed Emma’s mind? The short answer is probably Carl himself. It took him a while but he was utterly determined and marshalled everything he had to win her hand, starting with certain natural advantages: his good looks, his imposing presence, his challenging conversation, his intelligence, his lively humour, and what he himself called his ‘intuition’.

      Carl’s intuition told him that beneath her reticent, formal manner Emma was yearning for something less conventional, more intellectually satisfying, more adventurous – an outlet for her cleverness which she could not have if she married her haut-bourgeois beau. So he embarked on his campaign, bombarding her with letters filled with fascinating ideas and amusing self-deprecating comments. He told her about his favourite writers and philosophers, his love of mythology, his work, and he confided in her about his ambitions, his hopes and his fears. And he gave her lists of books to read for discussion next time they met. A seduction by intellect.

      Even so, Emma still refused him. Everything about Carl, his physical size, his huge personality, his brilliance, was too powerful for her. How was she to know that Carl had another self, well hidden, full of doubt and complexes and feelings of social inferiority? One refusal was enough for ‘other Carl’. ‘Father would never have asked her again,’ their son Franz confirmed years later. ‘He was crushed. He was poor, and not on the same social level as Emma, and so he thought he didn’t have a chance.’ Carl thanked Emma for her honesty and withdrew. These were his early months working at Burghölzli asylum and he became so plagued with insecurity that he hid himself behind the high walls of the institution. By his own account, he never went out for six months, causing colleagues to think he was behaving more like an inmate than a doctor. As for Emma: ‘My mother was very shy then, and introverted,’ said Franz. ‘She was afraid to move ahead, to say yes.’

      But Carl had a key ally within the Rauschenbach family. Intelligent, modern in outlook, and coming from modest beginnings herself, Emma’s mother Bertha saw nothing wrong with Carl Jung, the lowly assistant physician now employed in a lunatic asylum. Money? Emma had plenty of money. Bertha remembered the little boy she had pushed alongside the Rhine in his pram, now grown into a fine young man, and here was her daughter Emma, the clever, studious one – and what did it matter that she was engaged to another young man? It was hardly an engagement at all, nothing fixed, nothing formal.

      Emma adored her mother and without her encouragement she would probably never have found the courage to marry Carl. After some months Frau Rauschenbach contacted Carl, arranged to meet him in a restaurant in Zürich, and urged him not to be put off and try asking Emma once more. She even invited him back to Ölberg, sending her own green carriage and coachman to collect him from Schaffhausen station. And this time, in October 1901, Emma said yes. Once decided, she never wavered. He need not worry, she assured him: she knew exactly what she was doing.

      But Emma said yes to the Carl she knew: the extrovert, clever, handsome Carl with his earthy energy and loud exuberant laugh, not the ‘other’ Carl, the hidden one. Had she known the strangeness and complexity of the ‘other’ Carl – had she been able to see what lay ahead – she might have answered differently. Or not. Over the weeks till their secret engagement she caught glimpses of this ‘other’ Carl. To her surprise, it was she who had to reassure him, again and again, of her love. She thought it would be the other way round.

      ‘My situation is mirrored in my dreams,’ Carl wrote in his ‘secret diary’ in December 1898, whilst still a medical student:

      Often glorious, portentous glimpses of flowery landscapes, infinite blue seas, sunny coasts, but often too, images of unknown roads shrouded in night, of friends who take leave of me to stride towards a brighter fate, of myself alone on barren paths facing impenetrable darkness. ‘Oh fling yourself into a positive faith,’ my grandfather Jung writes. Yes, I would be glad to fling myself if I could, if that depended only on the uppermost me. But an inexplicable heavy something, a listlessness and numbness, weariness and weakness, always prevents the final step. I have already taken many steps, but I am still a long way from the final one. The greater the certainty, the more superhuman the doubts . . .

      This was and always would be the crux of the matter for Carl: he had a personality which was split: sure and unsure, optimistic and pessimistic, introverted and extroverted, sensitive and insensitive, brilliant yet obtuse; genial yet given to violent rages; cold under warm, dark under light – always split, and that split always hidden. Secret.

      Later he called them ‘Personality No. 1’ and ‘Personality No. 2’, but growing up he hardly knew the difference. At the parsonage of Klein-Hüningen near Basel, where the Jung family moved when Carl was five, there was an old wall in the garden made of large blocks of stone and in the gaps between the stones he lit small fires which had an ‘unmistakable aura of sanctity’ about them and had to burn ‘for ever’. One stone jutted out of the wall. ‘My stone,’ he called it:

      Often, when I was alone, I sat down on this stone, and then began an imaginary game that went something like this: ‘I am sitting on top of this stone and it is underneath.’ But the stone could also say ‘I’ and think: ‘I am lying here on this slope and he is sitting on top of me.’ The question then arose: ‘Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?’ This question always perplexed me, and I would stand up, wondering who was what now. The answer remained totally unclear, and my uncertainty was accompanied by a feeling of curious and fascinating darkness. But there was no doubt whatsoever that this stone stood in some secret relationship to me. I could sit on it for hours, fascinated by the puzzle it set me.

      He sat on that stone for hours, trying to work out whether it was him, or he was it. This was how Carl Jung described it to his assistant, the analyst Aniela Jaffé, when he was eighty and finally agreed to recount his life. Thinking about it then, he added:

      Thirty years later I again stood on that slope. I was a married man, had children, a house, a place in the world, and a head full of ideas and plans, and suddenly I was again the child who had kindled that fire full of secret significance and sat down on a stone without knowing whether it was I or I it. I thought suddenly of my life in Zürich, and it seemed alien to me, like news from some remote world and time. This was frightening, for the world of my childhood in which I had just become absorbed was eternal, and I had been wrenched away from it and had fallen into a time that continued to roll onwards, moving further and further away. The pull of that other world was so strong that I had to tear myself away violently from the spot in order not to lose hold of my future.

      A strange child and a strange childhood. When the young Bertha Schenk came to take the infant Carl for walks along the Rhine, Pastor Jung had often been looking after his son on his own, the mother, Emilie, being ‘away’ in some unknown place for people suffering from unknown ills. ‘Dim intimations of trouble in my parents’ marriage hovered around me,’ Carl later recalled. As a child he fell ill with fever and suffered horribly from eczema. ‘My illness, in 1878, must have been connected with a temporary separation of my parents. My mother spent several months in a hospital in Basel, and presumably her illness had something to do with the difficulty in the marriage.’ Usually the maid looked after him, but often it was his father. ‘I was deeply troubled by my mother’s being away. From then on, I always felt mistrustful when the word “love” was spoken.’ Whilst Emilie was ‘away’ Carl