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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ how the mind worked. The Burghölzli was known for its progressive research, and inmates demonstrating interesting symptoms were the willing, and unwilling, guinea pigs – ushered into the room or lecture theatre for the doctor to examine, question and offer a diagnosis. It was a fine apprenticeship for Carl, as he himself admitted. He had little interest in the patients who were there with TB or typhus, and he could not bear the routine work, the meetings and the administration, to which he rarely gave any proper attention. But the old lady who stood by the window all day waiting for her long-lost lover, or the schizophrenic who talked crazily about God – that was a different matter altogether. Here his Personality No. 2 came into its own, working hand in hand with No. 1. ‘It was as though two rivers had united and in one grand torrent were bearing me inexorably towards distant goals,’ he later wrote. Bleuler soon saw that Herr Doktor Jung, with his fine intuition on the one hand and his brilliant mind on the other, understood the inmates like no one else.

      Carl’s listening was made more effective by Bleuler’s insistence that everything be conducted in Swiss dialect, not the High German which doctors normally used, and which effectively meant no communication since most inmates could not understand High German, and even if they could, it caused such a social gulf between doctor and patient that the patient felt browbeaten. When speaking High German, Carl retained his broad Basel accent, something which had humiliated him at grammar school, but no longer. Now he learnt all the other regional Swiss dialects as well because at the Burghölzli it was expected that the doctor should adapt to the patient, not the other way round, an idea generally held as odd and even dangerous by the vast majority of the medical profession. Besides, without it Jung could do no useful research.

      On Sundays he retold the patients’ stories to Emma, shocking her, entertaining her, keeping her spellbound. Stories about women in the asylum held a special fascination for her, such as the woman in Carl’s section who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Jung disagreed with the diagnosis, thinking it was more like ordinary depression, so he started, à la Freud, to ask the woman about her dreams, probing her unconscious. It turned out that when she was a young girl she had fallen in love with ‘Mr X’, the son of a wealthy industrialist. She hoped they would marry, but he did not appear to care for her, so in time she wed someone else and had two children. Five years later a friend visited and told her that her marriage had come as quite a shock to Mr X. ‘That was the moment!’ as Jung wrote in his account of it. The woman became deeply depressed and one day, bathing her two small children, she let them drink the contaminated river water. Spring water was used only for drinking, not bathing, in those days. Shortly afterwards her little girl came down with typhoid fever and died. The woman’s depression became acute and finally she was sent to the Burghölzli asylum. Jung knew the narcotics for her dementia praecox were doing her no good. Should he tell her the truth or not? He pondered for days, worried that it might tip her further into madness. Then he made his decision: to confront her, telling no one else. ‘To accuse a person point-blank of murder is no small matter,’ he wrote later. ‘And it was tragic for the patient to have to listen to it and accept it. But the result was that in two weeks it proved possible to discharge her, and she was never again institutionalised.’

      Love, murder, guilt, madness. Emma had never heard stories like it. Nor had she ever considered the powerful workings of the ‘unconscious’. But she was intelligent and well read. She knew all about Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles, Lady Macbeth’s guilty sleepwalking, and Siegfried, the mythical hero. Now she was beginning to realise that this ‘unconscious’ was the key to the hidden workings of the mind and could be accessed in various ways, then used as a tool to cure the patient. By the time of their secret betrothal Emma was helping to write up Carl’s daily reports, learning all the time. If these years were the beginning of Carl Jung’s career, they were the beginning of something for Emma too.

      Meanwhile Jung was trying, between his eighty-hour week and his social duties, to finish his dissertation on the ‘So-called Occult Phenomena’. There had been a revival of interest in the occult at the end of the nineteenth century, people using Ouija boards and horoscopes, having seances, delving into magic and the ancient arts, and reporting strange paranormal occurrences. Carl was used to such things from his mother’s ‘seer’ side of the family, like the time when a knife in the drawer of their kitchen cupboard unaccountably split in two, or the times when his mother spoke with a strange, prophetic voice. But what interested Jung the doctor was the way the occult provided another route to the hidden world of the unconscious, more psychological than spiritual. Cousin Helly was probably a hysteric, he now concluded, a young girl falling into trances to get attention. In fact Helly’s mother had become so worried about the way the trances and the voices were dominating her life that she had packed her off to Marseilles to study dress-making, at which point Helly’s trances stopped, and she became a fine seamstress.

      Jung presented his dissertation to the faculty of medicine at the University of Zürich in 1901 and it was published the following year. The Preiswerk family, reading it on publication, were distressed. After a general introduction about current research on the subject, Jung concentrated on one case history: Helly Preiswerk and her seances at Bottminger Mill, referring to her, by way of thin disguise, as Miss S. W., a medium, fifteen and a half years old, Protestant – that is, instantly recognisable by anyone who knew the family. She was described as ‘a girl with poor inheritance’ and ‘of mediocre intelligence, with no special gifts, neither musical nor fond of books’. She had a second personality called Ivenes. One sister was a hysteric, the other had ‘nervous heart attacks’. The family were described as ‘people with very limited interests’ – and this of a family who had come to the rescue of his impoverished mother and sister. It showed a side of Carl which Emma would have to deal with often in the future: a callous insensitivity, driven perhaps by what he himself admitted was his ‘vaulting ambition’. But as far as the faculty of medicine at the University of Zürich was concerned, it was a perfectly good piece of research, fulfilling the aims Jung expressed in his clever conclusion: that it would contribute to ‘the progressive elucidation and assimilation of the as yet extremely controversial psychology of the unconscious’.

      The most telling thing about the dissertation is the dedication on the title page. It reads: ‘to his wife Emma Jung-Rauschenbach’. Given the dissertation was completed in 1901 and published in 1902, the dedication precedes the event of the marriage by a good year. Whatever was Carl thinking? What is the difference between ‘my wife’, which Emma was not, and ‘my betrothed’, which she was. It suggests Carl was desperate to claim Emma for himself, fully and legally, a situation which mere betrothal could not achieve. Emma was the answer to all Carl’s problems: financial – certainly – but equally his emotional and psychological ones. He needed Emma for his stability in every sense, and he knew it.

      Carl and Emma’s wedding was set for 14 February 1903, St Valentine’s Day. Buoyed up and boisterous, Carl became increasingly impatient and intolerant of the ‘unending desert of routine’ at the Burghölzli. Now he saw it as ‘a submission to the vow to believe only in what was probable, average, commonplace, barren of meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and reduce anything extraordinary to the banal’. Given Bleuler’s achievements at the asylum this was high-handed Carl at his worst. The fact is, he was fed up. He wanted to take a sabbatical, to travel, to do things he had never been able to do before. And he wanted to do it before he married Emma. Because he had no money of his own, his future mother-in-law happily offered to fund it. In July 1902 Jung submitted his resignation to Bleuler and the Zürich authorities, and by the beginning of October he was off, first to Paris, then London, for a four-month pre-wedding jaunt. Bleuler, knowing nothing of Jung’s secret betrothal to Fräulein Rauschenbach, must have been angry and non-plussed. How would Herr Doktor Jung afford it? How could he manage without a salary? And what about his poor mother and sister?

      Emma and her mother meanwhile started the lengthy process of preparing for the wedding – the dress itself, the veil, shoes, bouquet, trousseau, church service, flowers, guest list, menu for the wedding banquet, and the travel arrangements for the couple’s honeymoon. Emma’s father’s health must have caused some heartache: already parlous, СКАЧАТЬ