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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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’ СКАЧАТЬ