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

but everything had merely happened to me. Now I happened to myself. Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist.’ In this elevated state he went to stay with a school friend who had a house on Lake Lucerne. How lucky the boy was, thought Carl, and how lucky they were to be allowed to use the Waidling, the punt, plunging the pole into the water as they manoeuvred out of the boathouse and into the blue. But when Carl started doing some fancy tricks, showing off, the boy’s father whistled them back to shore and gave Carl a dressing down. Carl was seized with rage ‘that this fat, ignorant boor should dare to insult ME’. But just as quickly he realised it was another conflict with reality: the father was right, he was wrong. It occurred to him that he might be two different people, the unsure boy and the ‘other’, the sure and powerful one. Not only did this other Carl exist, he was an old man, wore buckled shoes and a white wig and drove about in a fly with high wheels and a box suspended on springs with leather straps: a man living in the eighteenth century. The one as real as the other.

      Around this time Carl was giving much thought to the idea of God. Not necessarily the God of his father’s Protestant Reformed Church, but ‘God the Creator’, ‘God of all Things’. One summer’s day he came out of school and was again standing in the precincts of the cathedral – blue sky, radiant sunshine, gazing in awe at the pitched roof which had recently been retiled and glittered in the bright light – and thinking ‘the world is beautiful and the church is beautiful, and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and . . . Here came a great hole in my thoughts and a choking sensation. I felt numbed, and only knew: Don’t go on thinking now! Something terrible is happening, something I do not want to think, something I dare not even approach. Why not? Because I would be committing the most frightful of sins . . .’ And on it went, all the way on the long walk home, all through that night, and the next. By the third night the feeling had become unbearable. ‘Now it is coming, now it’s serious,’ he thought. ‘I must think.’ The thinking brought him to the idea that it was God, the creator of this beautiful world, who wanted him to think, and, what’s more, to think of something inconceivably wicked. In a way it had very little to do with him, he had no choice. Adam and Eve had been perfect creatures before they sinned, ‘Therefore it was God’s intention that they should sin.’

      That thought liberated him and he gathered all his courage to think about the cathedral, the clear sky, and God sitting high above it on His golden throne, ‘and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the Cathedral asunder’. To his own amazement he felt an indescribable relief; and instead of damnation he felt grace had come down on him ‘and with it an unutterable bliss such as I had never known’.

      He never spoke about this to anyone, or about the other two secrets of the phallus dream and the manikin, until, finally, many years later, he told Emma. ‘My entire youth can be understood in terms of this secret. It induced in me an almost unbearable loneliness. My one great achievement during those years was that I resisted the temptation to talk about it with anyone.’

      His mother reminded him he had often been depressed as a boy, but by his mid-teens Carl’s depressions gradually lifted. He read voraciously: Plato, Socrates, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Goethe, all the writers he would later introduce to Emma. His school friends started calling him ‘Father Abraham’. Personality No. 1 was to the fore and he lived more in the present, active at school and out and about in Basel. But Personality No. 2 was never far away. One day, walking along the banks of the Rhine on his way home from school, he saw a sailing ship. A storm was blowing up and the mainsail was running before it. The sight propelled him into a detailed fantasy which would stay with him for the rest of his life: the river became a great lake with a high rock rising out of it, only connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway. A wooden bridge led to a gate flanked by towers opening into a little medieval town, and on the rock stood a castle: ‘This was my house.’ The rooms were panelled and simple, a fine library held everything worth knowing, and there were weapons and canons for protection as well as a garrison of fifty men at arms. The little town had several hundred inhabitants and Carl was the mayor, the justice of the peace, and general adviser. There was a small port on the landward side of the town where he kept his two-masted schooner. ‘The raison d’être of this whole arrangement was the secret of the keep, which I alone knew. The thought had come to me like a shock. For, inside the tower, extending from the battlements to the vaulted cellar, was a copper column.’ It was as thick as a man’s arm and it stood like a tree, upside down with rootlets reaching into the air. These roots drew something from the air and conducted it down the column into the cellar where there was a laboratory in which Carl made gold out of the mysterious substance.

      From this point on, Carl’s long, boring walk home from school became a short, delightful one, lost in the fantasy, making structural alterations to the buildings, holding council sessions, sentencing evil-doers, firing canons. Alternatively he might go for a sail in his schooner, and before he knew it he was standing on the parsonage doorstep. The fantasy lasted several months before he bored of it. Thereafter he started building with mud and stones in the garden of the parsonage, he studied fortifications, collected fossils, learnt about plants and read numerous scientific periodicals. Building miniature castles and towns is what he used to do as a young boy to bring him back to himself, and he would do it for the rest of his life.

      Carl passed his matriculation examinations with ease and went on to study medicine at the University of Basel. Originally he, like Emma, wanted to study the natural sciences, but he knew he needed to earn a proper living, and, deep down, he knew where he was going. After all, six of his mother’s relations were pastors, healers of the spirit, and his Grandfather Jung, arriving in Basel from Germany, was a doctor of medicine with progressive views, believing that the insane should be given treatment, not incarcerated. Grossvater Jung was a well-known and respected figure around Basel – the kind called ‘larger than life’, a democrat and a liberal, somewhat eccentric, with a pink pig for a pet – in a word, just the kind of man Carl would wish to emulate. He never knew his grandfather but he shared his name: Carl Gustav, except his own spelling was with a K. He changed it to a C once he left university, embarking on his own life.

      If Grossvater Jung was a liberal in public, at home he was authoritarian. His son, Paul Achilles Jung, Carl’s father, found he could never live up to his expectations. Though Paul was a fine scholar, studying oriental languages and Hebrew at Göttingen, writing his dissertation on the Arabic version of the ‘Song of Songs’, when it came to choosing a profession he decided to become a pastor in the Protestant Reformed Church, a modest, retiring life, with a poor living. Perhaps he was encouraged in this by his future father-in-law, Samuel Preiswerk. Paul was Preiswerk’s student and they spent many happy hours in his library going over ancient Hebrew texts. But something caused Paul Jung to always be racked with doubts. Most summers he went, alone, to stay with a Catholic priest in Sachseln. It was odd behaviour for a pastor of the Protestant Reformed Church, and no one knew why he went. In a way, Carl respected him for it.

      But his respect for his father was ebbing away. By the time of his confirmation Carl was completely alienated from the Church, bored and sceptical, arguing vehemently with his father about the hypocrisy of it all, and, worse still, his father’s own hypocrisy. He watched his father go through the motions day after day, knowing what doubts and torments he suffered privately in the dark hours of the night. ‘I was seized with the most vehement pity for my father,’ he remembered in old age. ‘An abyss had opened between him and me, and I saw no possibility of ever bridging it, for it was infinite in extent.’ He was still his ‘dear and generous father’, but Carl could do nothing for him. He searched the Bible for answers but found none. Surely the devil was God’s creature too? But of that the Bible gave no sign. It was nothing but ‘fancy drivel’. In a letter of 13 June 1955, Jung admitted the tragedy of his youth had been to see his father ‘cracking up’ before his eyes.

      Carl’s mother, Emilie, came from a long line of seers. Her own mother had two personalities: a good monk and a bad monk, and she had visions and saw ghosts. The occult was part of everyday life for many of the Preiswerks and once Carl’s mother came back home after being ‘away’, the occult became part of his everyday life too, or more often his night life when alarming ‘atmospheres’ emanated from her bedroom.