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

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СКАЧАТЬ on a permanent post at the Burghölzli. He had no wish to do endless ward rounds, attend endless staff meetings, write up endless daily reports. He wanted to continue his research into the workings of the unconscious. He wanted to bring scientific proof to this new field and write scientific papers about his findings to be published in medical journals like the Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie. He wanted to make his name. But he had been rejected for the post in Basel and now he didn’t know what to do. His crisis confronted Emma with the other Carl again, the one who fell out with colleagues through arrogance and an unshakeable conviction in his superior intelligence, but then became cast down and plagued with doubts when things went wrong. There was no steadiness in Carl, she discovered. And yet to the outside world he appeared his usual loud, confident, charismatic self. It was as though he were two different people.

      The one thing which never left him was his vaulting ambition. ‘As usual you have hit the nail on the head with your accusation that my ambition is the agent provocateur of my fits of despair,’ Jung wrote to Freud some years later. He could admit it, but he could do little about it. Because the ambition was not just to gain worldly acclaim; it was in order to understand the complex workings of the unconscious because he suffered so much from it himself.

      Bleuler again came to the rescue. He wasn’t a crafty Swiss peasant for nothing and he wanted to keep his exceptional young colleague at the Burghölzli. So he made Jung an offer he couldn’t refuse: he could continue the word association research he had begun with his Burghölzli colleague Franz Riklin, but more systematically, in a laboratory with proper equipment, and, under Bleuler’s own supervision, write papers to be published in the medical journals. These could later be gathered into a book on this important new field of scientific research. Carl accepted. Bleuler and Jung shared an interest in the paranormal as a means of accessing the unconscious, and the Burghölzli already enjoyed an international reputation as great and controversial in its way as Freud had acquired after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Everyone in the field, it seemed, wanted to research the unconscious, whether through dreams, hypnosis, the paranormal, or word association tests. Jung needed a base from which to launch himself. Bleuler needed the best doctors specialising in diseases of the mind, both for the sake of his patients and the reputation of the Burghölzli. Where else, after all, could Carl find so many guinea pigs to experiment on? Discussing it with Emma, Carl could see there was no better solution.

      However, Carl was now tied to doing all the routine work as well – a twelve-hour day at least – and being completely teetotal, and, above all, having to move back and live on site. Nevertheless, by October 1904 Jung had exchanged the part-time for the full-time position, and he and Emma moved into an apartment in the main building of the Burghölzli, on the floor above Bleuler and his wife Hedwig and their children, bringing Emma’s maid and the beautiful furniture with them. The only concession made to Herr and Frau Doktor Jung was that Carl was allowed to miss the midday meal with patients and staff and return to the apartment to have lunch with his wife. So began Emma’s new life as the wife of an Irrenarzt, living amongst hysterics, schizophrenics, catatonics, alcoholics, addicts, chronic neurotics and suicidal depressives – people who had lost their minds for one reason or another, and who spat and screamed and paced the wards, up and down, shouting obscenities, tearing at their hair, breaking the furniture. The contrast with her former life was complete.

      Now she had to find a way of relating to the kind of people she had never expected to meet: inmates and staff alike.

      It is telling that Emma was able to do it quickly and naturally, as testified by everyone who met her. Of course they knew Herr Doktor Jung had married a wealthy wife, but it was soon noticed that the Frau Doktor did not ‘act wealthy’, dressed simply, and was friendly to everyone equally, regardless of position. She was quite reserved, it was true, but she was liked. For Emma the problem was more the question of how to fill her days. The maid did the cooking and the cleaning, and, unlike Hedwig Bleuler as the wife of the Herr Direktor, she did not have a formal role in the institution. She still helped Carl privately with his research and reports, and she continued to go to the library in Zürich and research the Legend of the Holy Grail, but it still left her with many hours alone. There were just two people nearby who she could visit regularly – a duty or a pleasure, depending on how you looked at it: Carl’s mother and his sister Trudi, because once it became clear that Jung was staying in Zürich he swiftly moved them out of the Bottminger Mill and into an apartment in nearby Zollikon. He did not have much time to see them himself so the visits naturally fell to Emma, the wife and daughter-in-law. It can’t have been easy: most of the time her mother-in-law was normal and good company, but she still heard voices, had visions, and made sudden prophetic announcements. Her second personality always hovered in the background, and you never knew when it might emerge.

      Soon Emma found a role to play at the Burghölzli after all, because Eugen Bleuler believed women and wives should be included as much as possible in the daily life of the institution – another of his progressive ideas, quite alien to other lunatic asylums where all women other than the female Wärters were kept well away. Emma was encouraged to join in, participate in social events, and sit at the same tables as the patients as long as there was no danger. There were also regular evening discussion ‘circles’ to which all doctors and their wives were invited. And if a patient was in the rehabilitation phase of their treatment and they were allowed out of the asylum grounds, it was as likely to be Frau Jung or Frau Direktor Bleuler as much as it was one of the Wärters who accompanied them on walks, or even on a short shopping trip. ‘The years at Burghölzli were the years of my apprenticeship,’ Jung acknowledged later. But in a smaller way they were Emma’s too. ‘Dominating my interests and research was the burning question, “What actually takes place inside the mentally ill?”’ Jung wrote. Now, almost by osmosis, it came to interest Emma too.

      The other plus for Emma at the Burghölzli was Hedwig, who was a remarkable woman and an early feminist. Eugen Bleuler was already forty-four when he married her in 1901; Hedwig was then a history teacher, twenty-four years old, clever, elegant, charming. They met at one of Bleuler’s lectures at Zürich University, and wed within the year. Hedwig’s ambition had been to become a lecturer herself but it was not possible in Switzerland at that time, it being the preserve of men. And once she was pregnant she could not continue her studies anyway, so her life centred round her role as Frau Direktor Bleuler, and she made very good use of it, supporting her husband in every way she could. Their apartment was large enough to accommodate two maids, had bedrooms enough for their growing family, and a large, sunny room for Bleuler’s schizophrenic sister Pauline. There was a library and a stairway which led directly down to the wards, so Bleuler could be there at any time of day or night if there was a crisis. Hedwig’s special interests were the abstinence movement and women’s position in a modern society. Years later she travelled throughout Switzerland lecturing on both, but whilst the children were growing up she limited herself to helping her husband at the Burghölzli and editing his lectures and published papers. It was a happy marriage but she always regretted having to give up her own career. ‘The woman is always the one who has to make the sacrifices,’ she said. Another clever woman, then, who had to find her intellectual satisfaction through her husband’s work.

      Once back full time at the Burghölzli, Jung was soon dominating the place with his energy and booming laugh. He was happy to spend hours with a patient listening to their strange utterances, finding meaning in their madness. While he was liked by many, some of his colleagues found his presence irritating, accusing him of throwing his weight around, doing just what he wanted and not bothering with the dull administrative work. The Wärters, who did all the day-to-day caring and were only allowed home one afternoon a week, claimed the doctors spent more time on their research than on routine ward rounds, especially Herr Doktor Jung. But Bleuler let him get away with it. Auguste Forel, the former director who still liked to wander about the institution, was soon asking: ‘Who’s running this place, Bleuler or Jung?’

      The reason was simple: Bleuler did not want to lose Jung. So he allowed Jung and his ‘esteemed colleague Herr Doktor Riklin’ to spend hours СКАЧАТЬ