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

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СКАЧАТЬ Riklin was the junior partner in the venture but he had worked on word association tests before, in Germany with Gustav Aschaffenburg who followed Dr Wundt, who in turn referred back to the first tests conducted by Galton in England in the 1880s, each contributing to the growing body of evidence about the unconscious. All over Europe doctors in asylums were experimenting on their patients, and Jung’s papers on the word association tests are filled with references to others already embarked on the same track. The difference was that Jung and Riklin’s methodology was far more systematic, more scientific. They published their findings in the Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie, and Bleuler wrote the introduction when the book was published in 1905 as Studies in Word Association.

      The method was described as ‘the uttering of the first word which “occurs” to the subject after hearing the stimulus-word’, and suggested that it would help in the diagnoses and classification of dementia praecox, epilepsy, various forms of imbecility, some forms of paranoia, and the diseases grouped under hysteria, neurasthenia and psychasthenia, ‘not to speak of manic depression with its well-known flight of ideas’. Jung and Riklin went about it systematically and scientifically, by using a much larger pool of guinea pigs and by increasing the number of stimulus words from 100 to 400 – nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and numerals, using the Swiss dialect form when necessary – and timing the reactions with the greatest possible accuracy using the ‘one-fifth-second stop watch’, the very latest model from the Rauschenbach factory in Schaffhausen. The reaction times varied considerably, sometimes taking up to 6 seconds. Galton had found that the average time was 1.3 seconds. Jung with his modern stopwatch found it was 1.8 seconds, women subjects taking slightly longer. To distract the conscious mind a metronome was used. Other researchers used whistles, trumpets or darkened rooms. At times the tests were done when the subject was ‘in a state of obvious fatigue’, and once ‘in a state of morning drowsiness’ (Jung himself). One important innovative decision of Jung’s was to test ‘normal’ as well as ‘abnormal’ people, and the groups were divided into male and female, ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’. Everything had to be written up, by hand, night after night. Emma was kept busy, and she was happy to do it.

      In those early years of psychoanalysis it was common and considered perfectly acceptable to use friends and relatives as well as patients as subjects for scientific research. Jung and Riklin’s first test was on ‘Normal Subjects’: thirty-eight persons in all, nine men and fourteen women of whom were classified as ‘educated’. The rest were mostly male and female Wärters at the Burghölzli, who, Jung declared, were not so much ‘uneducated’ as ‘half-educated’. The tests were often repeated so that in the end they had 12,400 associations and timings on which to base their conclusions. There were statistics and tables and graphs, and a complicated list of different types of reaction, including those which showed evidence of ‘repression’, a term made familiar in the writings of Sigmund Freud. As with Freud, there was often enough of a description of the person to make an enticing story. Thus ‘Uneducated Woman, Subject No. 1: she is of country origin and became an asylum nurse at the age of seventeen, after having brooded at home for over a year over the unhappy ending of a love affair’. This subject would not or could not understand the stimulus words ‘hate, love, remorse, rattle glass, hammer ears . . . because they intimately touched the complex which she was trying to repress’. The term ‘complex’ was coined by Jung and Riklin to denote ‘personal matter . . . with an emotional tone’. It could be spotted by a significantly longer reaction time and the peculiarly forced nature of the reaction.

      Then there were clang associations – that is, based upon sound rather than on concepts: simple, thoughtless, sound similarities – and interesting ‘preservation’ ones, first noted by Aschaffenburg, where ‘the current association revealed nothing, but the succeeding one bears an abnormal character’. There was also the egocentric reaction: grandmother/me; dancing/I don’t like; wrong/I was not, and so on. ‘If we ask patients directly as to the cause of their illness we always receive incorrect, or at least imperfect information,’ explains Jung. ‘If we did receive correct information as in other (physical) illnesses, we should have known long ago about the psychogenic nature of hysteria. But it is just the point of hysteria that it represses the real cause, the psychic trauma, forgets it and replaces it by superficial “cover causes”. That is why hysterics ceaselessly tell us that their illness arose from a cold, from over-work, from real organic disorders.’ He compared their method with Freud’s ‘free association’ and reminded the reader that a ‘delicate psychological intuition in the doctor is as much a requisite as [is] technique for a Psycho-Analysis’. If this all sounds familiar now, it was not then, back in 1904.

      Emma appears as ‘Subject no. I, aged twenty-two, very intelligent’, in the ‘educated’ category. By way of introduction Jung wrote: ‘No. I is a married woman who placed herself in the readiest way at my disposal for the experiment and gave me every possible information. I report the experiment in as detailed a way as possible so that the reader may receive as complete a picture as possible. The probable mean of the experiment amounts to 1 second.’

      The first five word associations were: head/cloth, 1 second; green/grass, 0.8 seconds; water/fall, 1 sec; prick/cut, 0.8 seconds; angel/heart, 0.8 seconds. So far so good, but reaction 5 was deemed striking because ‘the subject cannot explain to herself how she comes to heart . . .’. Emma denied it was the result of any disturbance from without, and could not find any inner one either. Jung concluded it might therefore be some unconscious stimulus, very likely one of Aschaffenburg’s ‘preservation’ reactions, carried over from the previous prick/cut, which caused ‘a certain slight shade of anxiety, and image of blood’.

      ‘The subject is pregnant,’ Jung noted with scientific detachment, ‘and has now and then feelings of anxious expectancy.’

      There followed a sequence of stimulus words which were not especially memorable, except that ‘to cook’ endearingly elicited ‘to learn’, as did ‘to swim’ – because it was her sister Marguerite who was the swimmer, whereas Emma was apparently still learning. Only Carl could know why 28: lamp/green took 1.4 seconds. It followed threaten/fist, and he noted it was clearly another case of ‘preservation’ and that lamp/green denoted her home life (the colour of the lampshades). He does not say which home, Zürich or Schaffhausen, but it was most likely Schaffhausen and the fist her father’s as he became more and more ill and desperate.

      Further associations offered little which was significant for the test but tell us something of Emma’s outlook on life: evil/good; pity/have; people/faithful; law/follow; rich/poor; quiet/peaceful; moderate/drink; confidence/me; lover/faithful; change/false; duty/faithful; serpent/false. And then we come, in no particular order, to: family/father and mother/tell and dear/husband. Father is still the head of the family. Her mother is the one to whom she tells almost everything. Her husband, she loves.

      Using his intuition, and inevitably his personal knowledge of Subject No. I, Jung focused on a sequence of associations, nos 70–73: blossom/red; hit/prick; box/bed; bright/brighter. The first pair only took 0.6 seconds. ‘She explains this short reaction by saying that the first syllable of the stimulus-word Blo-ssom brought up the presentation of blood. Here we have a kind of assimilation of the stimulus-word to the highly accentuated pregnancy complex . . . It will be remembered that in the association Prick/Cut (no 4) the pregnancy complex was first encountered,’ yet:

      Box/Bed which followed Hit/Prick went quite smoothly without any tinge of emotion. But the reaction is curious. This subject has now and then paid a visit to our asylum and was alluding to the deep beds used there, the so-called ‘box-beds’. But the explanation rather surprised her, for the term ‘box-bed’ was not very familiar to her. This rather peculiar association was followed by a clang-association (Bright/Brighter) with a relatively long time . . . The supposition that the clang-reaction is connected with the previous curious reaction does not, therefore, seem quite baseless . . . assuming a clang-alteration at the suppressed pregnancy complex, the complex becomes very sensible.

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