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

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СКАЧАТЬ her week its shape and purpose, enabling her to be ‘herself’ in a way which would otherwise have eluded her. To her joy Carl was delighted by her progress, always encouraging her to do more. And to her relief she soon discovered he was not in the least interested in having a bourgeois wife who thought of nothing but home and children and life within the narrow confines of Swiss society. Every day she waited for the postman, struggling up the hill to Ölberg on his bicycle, bearing another letter from Carl addressed to ‘Mein liebster Schatz!’ – my darling treasure – long letters, filled with Burghölzli news, ideas and suggestions for further reading, and telling her how much he loved her. And every Sunday, as Carl got to know Emma better, he found that beneath the shyness and seriousness there hid another Emma: one with a lively sense of humour, who could laugh and laugh. And who better to make her laugh than Carl?

      The Burghölzli at the turn of the twentieth century under the directorship of Bleuler was a remarkable institution rapidly gaining an international reputation. At a time when most asylums simply removed the insane from society, locking them up, often for whole lifetimes, the Burghölzli offered treatment of various kinds and tried, as far as possible, to show the patients consideration and respect. Jung himself describes the situation:

      In the medical world at the time psychiatry was quite generally held in contempt. No one really knew anything about it, and there was no psychology which regarded man as a whole and included his pathological variations in the total picture. The Director was locked up in the same institution with his patients, and the institution was equally cut off, isolated on the outskirts of the city like an ancient lazaretto with its lepers. No one liked looking in that direction. The doctors knew almost as little as the layman and therefore shared his feelings. Mental disease was a hopeless and fatal affair which cast its shadow over psychiatry as well . . .

      Soon after Jung joined the staff numbers increased to five doctors, and as far as Bleuler was concerned five was a luxury; before he took the job of director of the Burghölzli in 1898 he had spent thirteen years as director of the lunatic asylum on the island of Reichenau, where there were over 500 inmates with only one trained medical assistant.

      Eugen Bleuler was a remarkable man. Coming from Swiss peasant stock, he was the first of his family to attend university, and, much like Jung, he was drawn to this new branch of medicine because he had experience of mental illness in his own family. His sister, Pauline, was a catatonic schizophrenic and after Bleuler married in 1901 she lived with him, his wife and their eventual five children in a large apartment on the first floor of the Burghölzli. Bleuler had trained with some of the most progressive practitioners of the age, including Dr Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, where Sigmund Freud also spent time. Charcot was first and foremost a neurologist concerned with the functions and malfunctions of the brain, demonstrated with a showman’s flair to the hundreds of students who flocked to his lectures from England, Germany, Austria and America. He followed his patients’ progress throughout their lives and when they died he examined their brains under the microscope, making early diagnoses of Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease and Tourette’s. But it was his patients suffering from hysteria who interested him most and brought him his greatest fame. The fashionable ‘treatments’ at the time for hysteria were ‘animal magnetism’ and hypnotism, each requiring a doctor with special ‘intuition’. In animal magnetism the doctor passed his hands over the patient to release the vital fluid or energy which had supposedly become blocked. In hypnotism the doctor took control of the mind, providing the most dramatic demonstrations as patients fell into trances and spoke in strange voices. When Eugen Bleuler continued his training under Auguste Forel at the Burghölzli in the early 1880s, hypnotism was one of the main treatments and Forel had his own ‘Hypnosestab’, a wand with a silver tip which he used with some success on obsessives and neurotics as well as hysterics. But his greatest success was with alcoholics. The Burghölzli was then, and remained when Bleuler took over from Forel, an institution which held strictly to the virtues of abstinence. Drink was one of the worst afflictions of the age and asylums were full of chronic cases who were contained whilst ‘inside’, but, without a vow of abstinence, soon reverted to old habits once they left.

      All this Carl explained to Emma in his letters, or on their Sundays in the drawing room at Ölberg, or on their afternoon walks high up in the meadows above the house, up to ‘their’ bench by the edge of the forest beyond. Later Emma confessed she only understood half of it at the time. Apparently Bleuler was continuing the progressive methods he had started to develop at Reichenau: staff lived amongst the inmates, eating with them at the same tables and socialising with them in their spare time. His theory of affektiver Rapport, listening with empathy, was the guiding principle. There was also a great emphasis put on cleanliness. Inmates were helped to wash thoroughly, in spite of a shortage of baths and bathrooms, and to keep their clothes in good order; likewise their beds, a dozen on each side of a ward, which were kept neat, the heavy feather covers hung out of the windows every morning to air and the mattresses regularly turned. The patients were kept occupied, Herr Direktor Bleuler believing that physical activity was good for the distraught mind. The kitchen gardens lay beyond the walls of the asylum extending down the slopes and provided all their vegetables and fruit, which were brought fresh to the kitchens every day. The dairy produced the milk and cheese. Hens provided the eggs. The laundry kept inmates busy washing and starching and ironing. The Hausordnung kept the building spick and span, smelling of floor polish and soap. There were workshops: woodwork and wood-chopping for the tiled stoves in winter, sack-making, silk-plucking, sewing, mending, knitting. The place was to all intents and purposes self-sufficient and the food, for an institution, was good: always a soup for the midday meal followed by meat and vegetables, with soup and bread again for the evening meal along with a piece of cheese or sausage. The patients were divided into three categories and while third-class patients did not eat as well as the first-class (private) ones, it was still a better standard than at most asylums. In the evenings there were card games, reading, concerts; sometimes the patients produced an entertainment, sometimes lectures were put on, and at the weekends there were occasional fetes and dances for those willing and able. Jung was put in charge of social events as soon as he arrived. He hated it.

      To keep things going day to day there were seventy Wärters, male and female helpers in long white aprons and starched white collars, the men in trousers, shirt and tie, the women in long dark skirts and starched white caps. Like the doctors they lived on the premises, but unlike the doctors they had no quarters of their own. They slept on the wards or in the corridors, on wooden camp beds put up for the night, the women in the women’s section, the men in the men’s. The only exception was the Wärters in charge of the ‘first-class’ patients, who would sleep in the patient’s private room. This was a great privilege because not only was there some peace and quiet but the private patient was allowed candles in the room at night, or even an oil lamp if their behaviour was good enough and they were no danger to themselves or others. It was an eighty-hour week and the pay was low: 600 Swiss francs per annum for the male Wärters, a hundred francs less for the women. But board and lodging was all found, so the rest could be saved.

      Carl’s day started at 6 a.m. and rarely finished before 8 p.m., after which he would go up to his room to write his daily reports, work on his dissertation, and compose his daily letter to Emma. There was a staff meeting every morning, after a breakfast of bread and a bowl of coffee, ward rounds morning and evening, an additional general meeting three times a week to consider every aspect of the running of the institution, and at least once a week a discussion evening, which, by the time Carl joined, was already well versed in the writings of Freud. Once into his stride there was no stopping Herr Doktor Jung, and his sheer brilliance soon singled him out. Bleuler’s affektiver Rapport was exactly the kind of treatment he himself believed in: listening acutely and with empathy to the apparent babblings of inmates with dementia praecox, or the outbursts of hysterics and the circular repetitions of obsessive neurotics. Carl was fascinated by the chronic catatonics who had been at the Burghölzli for as long as anyone could remember, including the old women incarcerated since they were young girls for having illegitimate children, who no longer knew who they’d once been.

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