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

Now, encouraged by his mother, who had remained in touch with Bertha, he decided to pay Frau Rauschenbach a visit, and there saw the daughter Emma coming down the stairs. Even if Carl first clapped eyes on Emma when she was fourteen, she herself first knowingly met Carl in 1899 when she was seventeen. And the first correspondence between them dates from this year, when Emma returned from Paris. It was a one-way sort, that is, mostly from Carl, starting with picture postcards addressed formally to ‘Sehr 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 slept in his father’s room. He remembered his father carrying him in his arms, trying to get him to sleep, pacing up and down, singing his old fraternity student songs. When Carl’s mother finally came back home his parents no longer shared a bedroom. Frightening things emanated from her room, indefinite figures, floating, headless, luminous. Carl had ‘vague fears’ and heard strange things in the night, all mixed up with the muted roar of the Rhine Falls nearby. He could not breathe and thought he would suffocate. ‘I see this as a psychogenic factor,’ he later told Aniela Jaffé; ‘the atmosphere of the house was beginning to be unbearable.’ He went on sleeping in his father’s room throughout childhood. In fact, until he was eighteen and preparing to go to Basel University.

‘I had never come across such an asocial monster before,’ recalled Albert Oeri, one of Carl’s few playmates during those early years. Albert had been brought to the parsonage by his father, an old student friend of Pastor Jung’s, to play with Carl. ‘But nothing could be done. Carl sat in the middle of the room, occupied himself with a little bowling game, and didn’t pay the slightest attention to me.’ Carl was not used to playing with other children, not even the village children who were anyway mostly out in the fields helping their parents with haymaking or herding the cows. When the Jung family moved to Klein-Hüningen, Albert’s family still sometimes visited on a Sunday afternoon. By now a different Carl had made an appearance: extrovert Carl, boisterous Carl, the one who did not like weaklings, especially one of his cousins whom he teased mercilessly. ‘He asked this boy to sit down on a bench in the entrance way,’ recalled Oeri. ‘When the boy complied, Carl burst into whoops of wild Red Indian laughter, an art he retained all his life. The sole reason for his satisfaction was that an old souse had been sitting on the bench a short time before and Carl hoped that his sissy cousin would thus stink of a little schnapps.’ But the moment he had done it he regretted it. Introvert Carl did not want to hurt anyone.

Under the loud whooping lurked the other Carl, the one with secrets to hide. The first of these was a dream he had when he was four, one so significant and so terrible he never told anyone about it until he was sixty-five: ‘A dream which was to preoccupy me all my life.’ He was in a meadow when he discovered a dark hole which he had never seen before, stone-lined, with a stone stairway leading far down. Fearfully he descended. At the bottom there was a doorway with a round arch and a heavy green curtain, brocade, leading through to a rectangular chamber with an arched ceiling, again of stone. A blood-red carpet ran from the entrance to a low platform on which stood a golden throne and on this throne stood something which he first took to be a tree trunk, twelve to fifteen feet high and two feet thick: a huge thing, reaching almost to the ceiling and made, he then realised, of skin and naked flesh. On the top was a rounded head with no face or hair, only a single eye. An aura of brightness wafted above it. Carl was paralysed with terror, believing it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm towards him. At that moment he heard his mother calling from above: ‘Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!’ and he woke sweating and scared to death. ‘This dream haunted me for years.’ Much later he realised it was an anatomically accurate phallus.

When the family moved to the old parsonage at Klein-Hüningen, Pastor Jung became chaplain at the local lunatic asylum as an additional role and Carl started going to school. Academic work was easy for him, but not the social side – he was not used to other children and they were not used to a child as strange as him. In time he learned to join in but he always felt it alienated him from his true self. At home he played alone for hours, hating to be watched, building high towers with wooden bricks, making drawings of battles and sieges, lighting fires in the garden. When he was ten he did something which was totally incomprehensible to him, even then: he had a ruler in his pencil case, of yellow unvarnished wood, and out of it he carved ‘a little manikin about 2" long, with a frock coat, top hat, and shiny black boots. I coloured him black with ink, sawed him off the ruler, and put him in the pencil case, where I made him a little bed. I even made a coat for him out of a bit of wool.’

He also put a smooth blackish stone from the Rhine in the pencil case, painted to divide it into an upper and lower half. This was his stone. ‘All this was a great secret. Secretly I took the case to the forbidden attic at the top of the house [forbidden because the floorboards were worm-eaten and rotten] and hid it with great satisfaction on one of the beams under the roof – for no one must ever see it! I knew that not a soul would ever find it there. No one could discover my secret and destroy it.’ He used to go up there to visit the manikin, always surreptitiously, and deposit tiny scrolls in the pencil box for him, written in a secret language. Like sitting on the stone, it always made him feel better, bringing him back to his true self. This ritual lasted for about a year. Then he forgot all about it till he was thirty-five and writing Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, later translated as Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, the book which would signify his final break with Sigmund Freud.

Apart from arithmetic, which always remained a terrifying mystery to him, Carl was clever and when he was eleven he easily gained a place at the Gymnasium, the grammar school, which was situated in the precincts of Basel cathedral. The work, classics-based, was no problem – he already knew Latin which his father had taught him since the age of six, and he was already widely read, especially the Bible. If anything, boredom was the problem. But social life was another matter. Here came Carl, the poor parson’s son, walking from his village far out in the countryside, through meadows and woods and fields, in his bumpkin clothes and holes in his shoes so he had to sit for the rest of the school day in wet socks, talking in his broad yokel Basel dialect. And there came the well-dressed sons of the foremost families of Basel in horse-drawn carriages, with fine manners, plenty of pocket money, talking in refined High German or French about their holidays in the Alps, and Carl, having no holidays, felt an envy he had never felt amongst the poor farmers’ sons who had been his classmates at his local school.

Now, for the first time, he realised that his family was poor, and when any of his classmates invited him to their grand houses he felt ‘as timid and craven as a stray dog’. His feelings of inferiority, fatefully accompanied by equally powerful feelings of superiority, were exposed to the world: ‘My shoes are filthy, so are my hands; I have no handkerchief and my neck is black with dirt.’ His first year was completely ruined, he said, because he had the ‘disagreeable, rather uncanny feeling’ that he had ‘repulsive traits’ which caused the teachers and pupils to shun him, and it is true – many pupils did shun him, even at times Albert Oeri who was in the same class, because Carl was just too strange, too uncouth, too different. The only boys he spent his time with, if at all, were the sons of farmers, the poor ones who spoke the same local dialect. It did not help that he was clever, thirsty for knowledge, arrogant. On one occasion a teacher accused him of cheating because he could not believe this boy could write such an essay on his own. Carl was mortified. He had spent hours of hard work on it. Grown big by now, he got into plenty of fights and brawls. But he always felt ‘a certain physical timidity’ – a feeling that he was somehow repulsive.

In his twelfth year he had what appears to have been a breakdown. As he described it, he was standing in Basel cathedral precinct one day in early summer, waiting for a classmate before setting off on the long trek home, when another boy from the Gymnasium knocked him over and as he fell he struck his head against the kerbstone. He lay there, half-unconscious, but only half. The other half saw the advantage: if he lay there a little longer he might not have to go to school. From then on he had regular fainting fits, half real, half not, causing his parents so much worry that he was finally allowed to stay away from school for six months. ‘A picnic,’ he called it. But he also pitied his poor parents who were consulting many doctors, all in vain. No one could work out what was wrong with the boy. Finally it was decided he needed a change and he was sent off to stay with his architect uncle Ernst Jung in Winterthur. Carl loved it, spending hours at the town’s railway station watching the steam trains come and go. But when he returned home to Klein-Hüningen he found his parents more worried than ever: he might have epilepsy, he overheard, and what were they to do, with no money and a boy who could not look after himself? ‘I was thunderstruck. This was the collision with reality.’ That same day he went to his father’s library and started cramming. He had only one more fainting fit after that but did not let it master him, and soon he was back at school. ‘That was when I learned what a neurosis is.’

From then on he got up at five every morning to study before setting off for school at seven. Sometimes it was 3 a.m. He felt he was himself for the first time. ‘Previously I had existed too, 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. ‘I was sure she consisted of two personalities, one innocuous and human, the other uncanny,’ he wrote. In her Personality No. 1 she was a good mother: warm, pleasant, with a good sense of humour, and a fine cook, and inclined to look up to her son as he grew older, confiding in him instead of in his father. But her Personality No. 2 was a different matter: ‘a sombre, imposing figure possessed of unassailable authority – and no bones about it’. She was also very large and overweight. Later he realised this was due to her depression and the bad state of the marriage, but as a boy he did not understand, and his deep, complicated ties were to his clever, tormented father. ‘The feeling I associated with “woman” was for a long time that of innate unreliability. “Father”, on the other hand, meant reliability and – powerlessness. This is the handicap I started off with. Later these early impressions were revised: I have trusted men friends and been disappointed by them, and I have mistrusted women and was not disappointed.’

By the time Carl enrolled in Basel University in early 1895 his father had become, in his eyes, like the Fisher King from the Grail legend ‘whose wound would not heal’, and had begun to show signs of a real wound which would not heal. He had been depressed and tormented for years but now the family doctor found serious physical symptoms which he could not diagnose, but which were nevertheless killing him. By the end of the year he was bedridden. Carl carried him from room to room like a bag of bones. Within months he was dead. ‘The following days were gloomy and painful,’ wrote Carl. ‘Little of them has remained in my memory.’

Before he died Carl’s father had applied to the canton of Basel for a stipend to help fund his son’s studies. The request was granted, but instead of being pleased Carl was mortified at having to resort to charity. He also had to borrow money from his wealthy Jung relations and he bought and sold antiques for one of his aunts to make ends meet. As to his mother, Emilie: ‘Once my mother spoke to me or to the surrounding air in her “second” voice, and remarked: “He died just in time for you.”’

At the time Carl was not sure what she meant, but his father’s death certainly freed Carl: his student years were a good time, full of energy, friendship and intellectual activity, fuelled, as he himself recognised, by a ‘vaulting ambition’. Soon he was dominating the discussions at his Zofingia fraternity, challenging the others with brilliant forays into the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and talking about things unknown: dreams, visions, and the occult. His friend, Albert Oeri, progressing with him from the Gymnasium to Basel University, remembered discussions on subjects such as: ‘The Limits of Exact Science’ and ‘Some Reflections on the Nature and Value of Speculative Research’ and ‘Some Thoughts on Psychology’, and that Carl easily succeeded in ‘intellectually dominating an unruly chorus of fifty or sixty students from different branches of learning, and luring them into highly speculative branches of thought’. He quickly acquired the nickname Walze – ‘the Steam-Roller’ – and looking at fraternity photographs of Carl at the time, anyone can see why: large and round, he has an overbearing presence and a less than charming, closed expression. His vaulting ambition and superior manner did not endear him to everyone. As to women, there weren’t any.

When his father died, Carl and his mother and his sister Trudi, nine years his junior, had to leave the parsonage. They had no money and nowhere to go so they moved in with the Preiswerk family in an old, dilapidated mill, the Bottminger Mill, in a run-down district on the outskirts of Basel. Moving into the mill brought Carl into direct contact with spiritualism and the occult because this was the branch of the family who were seers, had visions, heard voices and held seances. ‘He was appalled that the official scientific position of the day towards occult phenomena was simply to deny their existence,’ wrote Oeri, ‘rather than investigate and explain them.’ Consequently Carl decided to investigate them, regularly attending seances at the mill led by his cousin Helly, and subsequently basing his doctoral dissertation on them, entitled ‘On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena’.

So this was the man Emma met, or became reacquainted with, in 1899 on her return from Paris, aged seventeen. He was twenty-four, just starting work at the Burghölzli asylum, a complex man with many secrets. In fact there was one further secret Emma did not know about the ‘other’ Carl. It was one he himself no longer ‘knew’, having repressed it deep in his unconscious where it safely remained until that wizard of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud, uncovered it during one of those long, intense evenings the two men shared in March 1907.

It threw Carl right off balance, as Emma cannot have failed to notice. Especially in the way he behaved with the Jewish woman they met in the hotel in Abbazia. He did not admit it to Emma then, or for many years. At the time he did not even admit it to himself – not until the crisis had become so unmanageable that he could no longer avoid it: Carl had been sexually abused when he was a boy and the only way he could deal with it was to repress the memory. But in October 1907, a good seven months after the discussions with Freud had forced the memories to the surface, and after his life had been thrown into further confusion, he had to confront it. His answers to Freud’s letters had been more and more delayed, and finally Freud, usually so tolerant and indulgent of his crown prince, voiced his objections and Carl came clean. ‘Your last two letters contain references to my laziness in writing. I certainly owe you an explanation,’ he wrote on 28 October, first blaming his workload but then admitting that it was actually what Freud had termed his ‘self-preservation complex’ which often bedevilled his pen, preventing him from writing:

Actually – and I confess this to you with a struggle – I have a boundless admiration for you both as a man and a researcher, and I bear you no conscious grudge. So the self-preservation complex does not come from there; it is rather that my veneration for you has something of the character of a ‘religious’ crush. Though it does not really bother me, I still feel it is disgusting and ridiculous because of its undeniable erotic undertone. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped. Even in Vienna the remarks of the ladies (‘enfin seuls’ etc.) sickened me, although the reason for it was not clear to me at the time. This feeling, which I have still not quite got rid of, hampers me considerably.

He goes on to explain that this has made close friendships with male colleagues ‘downright disgusting’, and ends the letter abruptly, saying: ‘I think I owe you this explanation. I would rather not have said it.’

All these secrets, and Emma knew none of them.

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A Secret Betrothal (#u0b200f64-3483-5f2b-ab53-508ff0c931b2)

Emma and Carl were betrothed on 6 October 1901, in secret, at the family’s Ölberg estate in Schaffhausen. The only other guests apart from Emma’s mother and sister were Carl’s mother and sister and the only record of the event are a few out-of-focus snapshots, probably taken by Marguerite, in the garden, where the couple appear to be walking away from the camera as often as towards it, as though trying to avoid it. By the time of the betrothal they had been courting for eighteen months and Emma was nineteen. She looks younger, almost a schoolgirl, and Carl still has the look of the Steam-Roller about him, not yet the confident man of the world he would become. They agreed to wait until Emma was twenty-one before getting married.

Jung had been assistant physician at the Burghölzli asylum for almost a year by then, having moved to Zürich straight after his medical examinations, taking a temporary job in a doctor’s practice to fill in time before starting at the Burghölzli in December 1900. The move puzzled his colleagues and upset his mother. Why would anyone want to leave cosmopolitan Basel for dull, commercial Zürich, and how could he abandon his impoverished mother and sister like that? Part of the reason was that Carl had fallen foul of Herr Professor Wille, the first in a long line of senior men Jung would quarrel with in his working life. Ludwig Wille was the new professor of psychiatry at the University of Basel, the discipline of psychiatry itself dating no further back than the 1880s. In deciding to specialise in it, Jung embarked on the least fashionable and least remunerated branch of the medical profession, seen as another odd decision by his colleagues, given he was one of their best with the brightest of futures. They could not know that psychiatry spoke deeply to the ‘other’ Carl who had had, ever since he could remember, the kind of dreams and visions some people might deem insane. When he read Krafft-Ebing’s 1890 work on ‘diseases of the personality’ in the Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, he recognised it immediately. ‘My heart suddenly began to pound. I had to stand up and draw a deep breath. My excitement was intense . . . Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found.’ Professor Wille, however, was firmly of the old school, seeing all mental illness as the result of a physical deterioration of the brain. Sooner or later Jung was bound to take issue with that, the net result being that he decided to present his doctoral dissertation to the medical faculty of the University of Zürich, not Basel. The city had the added advantage of being closer than Basel to Schaffhausen and Emma.

There were around 400 patients at the Burghölzli asylum when Jung arrived to take up his position, but apart from Bleuler there was only one other qualified doctor, Ludwig von Muralt, the day-to-day care being carried out by unqualified helpers, male and female. This meant an extremely heavy workload for Carl, who also lived on the premises. The only time he had off was Sundays, when he was able to visit Emma, first walking fifteen minutes down the hill to the tram station which in those days did not reach as far as the Burghölzli, then taking the recently electrified tram to Zürich’s Central Station, then the steam train to Schaffhausen, speeding northwards leaving lake and alps behind and into a landscape of farmland, meadows and scattered villages, past the crashing Rhine Falls, finally pulling in to Schaffhausen railway station where he was met by coachman Braun in the green Rauschenbach carriage and conveyed up the hill to the Ölberg estate – thereby travelling from the lowest to the highest niveau of Swiss society all in the course of two hours, a journey which never failed to delight.

And there in the grand front hall waiting expectantly for him was Emma, eager to listen, eager to learn, eager to help. She had started taking Latin lessons in order to read Carl’s medical texts, and maths lessons to discipline her mind, and she was practising her handwriting to help Carl with the daily reports which Bleuler was most particular about, regardless of how many hours it took to write them up. Boring for Carl, but thrilling for Emma. As to her general knowledge: as with Carl, the natural sciences were her enthusiasm; so too her interest in the Legend of the Holy Grail, which had likewise been Carl’s for many years. Emma meant to help Carl with his work, if only in small ways, and Carl was only too happy to oblige.

In many ways Emma was preparing to be ‘the good wife’ in similar vein to those recommended to young ladies by the weekly magazines. ‘The ideal wife,’ wrote Rudolf von Tavel in the monthly Wissen und Leben, ‘should live and act entirely in her husband’s spirit. She must support him in his task, softening him, warming him, and praising him in golden terms, convincing her children of the same, so that the way of life in the family is the right one, fostering the right social attitudes for the upholding of the Vaterland.’ Rosa Dahinden-Pfyl agreed, writing in Die Kunst mit Männern Glücklich zu Sein (The Art of Being Happy with a Man): ‘The happiness and lasting power of married love relies largely on the good and clever ways of the woman.’ She should never complain about the husband’s coldness towards her, whether real or imagined. She should take a gentle interest in everything which concerns him, always showing her appreciation, and make his home comfortable, never tiring him with needless chatter. She should avoid becoming bitter about his weaknesses, and never meddle in his business affairs. To remain attractive to him she should always be sweet-tempered, dress nicely and with good taste; in fact, always take care of her appearance but also her health, her character and her soul. ‘Should her physical charms fade, she should retain her husband’s interest by her sympathy, her learning, her heart and spirit, but never by showing a knowledge greater than his.’

Had Emma married her haut-bourgeois beau this would surely have been her whole life, and nothing more. But not with Carl. His own childhood had nothing bourgeois about it and his own character was not suited to fitting in with convention. His requirements of Emma would be infinitely more complex and challenging than any handbook on marriage could encompass. But all that came later. For the time being it was simply exhilarating for Emma to be with someone who brought her books and scientific articles to read and was happy to discuss his plans and ideas with her.