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

1

A Visit to Vienna

On Saturday 2 March 1907 Carl and Emma Jung arrived in Vienna for a five-day visit. They stayed at the Grand, the city’s most fashionable hotel, just a few minutes’ walk from the Opera and the famous Ringstrasse. Accompanying them was Ludwig Binswanger, an assistant at the Burghölzli lunatic asylum in Zürich, where Carl Jung worked as a doctor and first assistant to the director Eugen Bleuler. At ten the next morning the threesome waited to be collected by Sigmund Freud, who had invited them to Sunday luncheon at his family home, a short walk away at 19 Berggasse. None had met the Herr Professor before, though Jung and Freud had been corresponding for over a year.

Emma Jung was twenty-four, attractive – her wavy brown hair pinned up under a large hat – and very wealthy. But although her outfit was expensive, with its long skirts and furs against the March cold, it was not showy, because Emma herself was not showy. Carl was strikingly good-looking in a Teutonic sort of way – light brown hair, small moustache, dark eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles, over six foot tall and powerfully built, with an imposing presence: a brilliant and ambitious young man just beginning to make his mark on the new and as yet not very scientific field of ‘Psychoanalysis’, of which Professor Freud, twenty years his senior, was already the acknowledged master. Anyone observing Emma and Carl Jung seated on the plush velvet canapé in the elegant foyer of the Grand Hotel – with its chandeliers, ornate galleries, steam-powered elevator and liveried footmen and porters – would have seen a couple perfectly fitted to their surroundings: rich, handsome, young, and, by all appearances, happy.

But appearances can be deceptive. Some time before the Jungs left their home town of Zürich for Vienna, Emma had considered delivering her husband an ultimatum: either change his ways or she would divorce him – a shocking and rare thing at the beginning of the twentieth century, and one utterly alien to the retiring character of Emma Jung. She felt lost in the labyrinth of her marriage to Carl, beset with problems. Life could not go on the way it was.

By 1907 the Jungs had been married for four years and had two young daughters – Agathe, aged three, and Gretli, almost two – who were being cared for back in Zürich by the children’s maid, helped by Carl’s mother and his unmarried sister Trudi. Four years might not be long, but it was long enough for Emma to discover the extent and complexity of her situation, though not long enough to know what to do about it. The problem was twofold: Carl’s outward manner, so confident he could come across as arrogant, concealed a very different and infinitely more complicated interior, one which constantly eluded Emma, however hard she tried to understand it. The second problem was no easier to solve: Carl was always flirting with other women, and they with him, provoking in Emma emotions she had never even known she possessed: storms of jealousy and fury followed by terrible feelings of self-doubt and recrimination. On top of all this Carl was extremely ambitious, working day and night at the asylum like a man possessed, driven by a conviction that he had a special understanding of the insane, because in many ways he was so like them. One way or another, it left almost no time for family life. Emma would spend hour upon hour in the Jungs’ apartment on the second floor of the Burghölzli asylum waiting for her husband to return.

There were further complicating factors. Emma came from a well-known family of wealthy industrialists, the Rauschenbachs of Schaffhausen, making her one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland. Carl on the other hand was the son of a poor pastor of the Swiss Protestant Reformed Church. In fact, he was in debt when he first met Emma to the tune of 3,000 Swiss francs, which at a time when a working man might earn thirty francs a week was a very large sum indeed. It was a humiliation for Carl, this poverty, because the Jung family was respected in his home town of Basel and most of them were not poor at all. But his father, for reasons best known to himself, chose to work in remote parishes which barely offered a living. So they were the poor relations and Carl hated it. On marrying Emma he inherited all his wife’s money and possessions, and became not only debt-free but a man of independent means in his own right, and able to support his impoverished mother and sister. Uncertain whether the young, ambitious Herr Doktor Jung was not just a plain old-fashioned fortune-hunter, Emma’s family allotted her an additional monthly allowance of her own. In the event of a divorce everything each partner brought to the marriage reverted to them – a useful tool when delivering an ultimatum.

This is how things stood between the couple waiting for Herr Professor Freud in the foyer of the Grand Hotel in March 1907. One thing, however, was clear: Emma loved Carl fiercely and was prepared to fight to the bitter end to keep him. Carl, for his part, may or may not have married his wife for her money. But it certainly was not his only reason. The deeper reasons, true to his character, were infinitely more complicated.

The Jungs’ spring break was a useful distraction, travelling to three countries over a period of three weeks, just the two of them, and staying at the very best hotels. Their tour would take them to Budapest, then Fiume and Abbazia in northern Italy, but their first stop was Vienna, where Carl had already made arrangements. ‘I shall be in Vienna next Saturday evening, and hope I may call upon you on Sunday morning at 10 o’clock,’ Carl had written to the Hochverehrter – highly esteemed – Professor Freud on 26 February. ‘My wife has relieved me of all obligations while I am in Vienna,’ he added, and ‘I shall take leave, before my departure, to let you know at what hotel I am staying, so that you could if necessary send word there. Most truly yours, Dr Jung.’

Who knows what Freud made of Jung’s repeated use of the first-person pronoun, as though he were coming on his own, but he must have understood because when he arrived at the Grand Hotel that March morning, Freud was bearing some flowers for Frau Doktor Jung. As he presented them to her, with a formal bow, Emma saw a small dapper man with a neatly clipped moustache and beard, dressed in his winter best: a worsted overcoat in the English style; a suit, waistcoat, floppy bow tie, homburg hat, spats over boots, and a cane. His hair, inclined to be unruly, was combed down with his usual pomade supplied by the local barber he frequented every morning.

Originally the Jungs were meant to visit over Easter when Professor Freud had time to spare, but this was not possible for Carl and Emma who always spent Easter with their children. This presented a problem for Freud, who worked from eight in the morning till eight at night, apart from a break for the midday meal followed by a walk round the district for some air and a visit to the cigar shop. Unlike Carl Jung, Freud had not married into money and had to earn a living to support his large and extended family. ‘But Sundays I am free, so I must ask you to arrange your visit to Vienna in such a way as to have a Sunday available for me,’ he had written to Jung on 21 February. ‘If possible I would like to introduce you to a small circle of followers on a Wednesday evening. I further assume you will be willing to forgo the theatre on the few evenings you will be spending in Vienna, and instead to dine with me and my family and spend the rest of the evening with me. I am looking forward to your acceptance and the announcement of your arrival.’ Forgo the theatre? Jung had absolutely no intention of going. He hated the theatre. That was what Ludwig Binswanger was there for, to chaperone and entertain Emma. He himself wanted to spend every available minute with the Herr Professor.

As the four of them walked along, Freud smoking his third or fourth cigar of the day, the conversation remained on the formal level: the journey, the weather, their hotel accommodation – polite talk, just filling in. They must have made a comic sight – the two men who would become the two giants of psychoanalysis, walking side by side: Jung over six foot, Freud five foot seven, and Jung already talking his head off, loudly, as he always did.

Berggasse may have been only a short walk from the Ringstrasse, but it was far enough to leave the grandeur of the Ring district behind and enter the more modest, cobbled streets surrounding Vienna University. And it was long enough for a small misunderstanding to occur, seemingly insignificant at the time, but in hindsight very significant indeed. Freud, trying to put the visitors at their ease, joked that he was happy to be receiving them as guests to his home, but warned that it was a very modest place and had little to offer, just his alte (old woman) – nothing much else. Emma was shocked. So was Carl. What a way to talk about your wife, the mother of your children! Swiss haute bourgeoisie as they were, Freud’s self-deprecating Jewish humour was completely lost on them. Emma, usually blessed with a healthy sense of fun, was puzzled.

Frau Professor Freud was there to greet the guests from Zürich as they mounted the stone steps of 19 Berggasse, and then up the stairs to the apartment. Emma, shaking Martha Freud formally by the hand – ‘guten Tag, guten Tag’ – observed an older woman in a long-skirted, high-necked Sunday dress, stylish in its way, with a simple brooch at the neck, her dark hair pinned up neatly with combs. Behind her stood a younger woman, Martha’s unmarried younger sister Minna who lived with them – an interesting set-up which caused plenty of gossip and speculation over the years. Herr Professor Freud and his two women. Apparently Minna sometimes answered the telephone calling herself ‘Frau Professor’! Freud himself did not like the newfangled telephone and always left it to one of the women of the house to answer. In 1907 Sigmund Freud was fifty-one, Martha forty-six. They had been married for twenty-one years and had six children ranging from Mathilde twenty, Martin eighteen, Ernst sixteen, Oliver fifteen, Sophie fourteen, down to Anna, twelve. Freud called them his ‘rabble’ and his ‘rascals’ with affection and some pride.

Martha, greeting Emma Jung, observed a formal, reticent young woman, dressed with an understated style, and only a few years older than her daughter Mathilde. She already knew about the Frau Doktor’s wealth. Everyone knew. But what she could not fail to notice was that Frau Doktor Jung did not act wealthy. As the two women exchanged greetings, Jung was shaking hands in the formal Swiss way. No fancy Viennese kissing of ladies’ hands for Carl.

On special occasions such as this Martha would cook a chicken for the midday meal, though her husband was not keen. ‘Let them live,’ he always said. ‘Let them lay eggs.’ But his wife made all the household decisions, it had been that way from the start: he earned the money, she ran the house. It suited them both and Freud never interfered and never complained. So there they sat, twelve of them, round the dinner table having their meal, served from the kitchen by the maid, with the men at one end and the women and children at the other. Emma was surprised by all the talk – the Freud children expressed themselves easily and cheerfully. ‘Our upbringing might be called liberal,’ Martin Freud later wrote, reflecting on his ‘gay and generous’ father. ‘We were never ordered to do this, or not to do that; we were never told not to ask questions.’ For their part, Martha and Minna, the two sisters, could not fail to notice that the Jungs both had strong Swiss accents, making them seem more provincial than they were. Apparently, Frau Doktor Jung had wanted to attend Zürich University to study the natural sciences but her father wouldn’t let her. Understandably. The only women who attended university were rich foreigners – Russians and the like.

Looking back, Martin Freud, as an observant eighteen-year-old, remembers Herr Doktor Jung having a ‘commanding presence’: ‘He was very tall and broad-shouldered, holding himself more like a soldier than a man of science and medicine. His head was purely Teutonic with a strong chin, a small moustache, blue eyes, and thin closely cropped hair.’ In fact, Jung’s eyes were brown not blue, but in the almost entirely Jewish environment inhabited by the Freud family the Teutonic aspect was unusual and rather interesting. Still, Martin took a dislike to Jung: ‘He never made the slightest attempt to make polite conversation with mother or us children but pursued the debate which had been interrupted by the call to luncheon. Jung on these occasions did all the talking and father with unconcealed delight did all the listening,’ he wrote, still irked by the memory. Martin was doubly surprised because normally his father strongly disapproved of visitors ignoring his family and he would deliberately change the conversation to include them, making it clear that this was not how things went in the Freud household. But not with Herr Doktor Jung, who talked throughout the meal exclusively to his father, showing no awareness of or concern for anyone else. Emma might have told them this was typical of her husband, who had gained some enemies amongst his colleagues at the Burghölzli asylum because of it, though never amongst his patients who all revered him.

After the meal there was coffee and then Emma and Binswanger took their leave, as arranged, so Carl could spend more time with Freud. The two men swiftly retired to Freud’s consulting rooms on the mezzanine floor below, which looked out over a small garden with a single chestnut tree. They talked for thirteen hours without a break. It was love at first sight, a mutual enchantment accompanied by every high hope. Freud had read this brilliant young doctor’s papers on dementia praecox – or ‘schizophrenia’ as Bleuler of the Burghölzli asylum had coined it – as well as Jung’s ‘Experiments in Word Association’, and now, to his delight, he found that the man in conversation was as brilliant and challenging as the writer on the page.

As for Carl Jung’s first impressions of Freud: ‘In my experience, up to that time, no one else could compare with him,’ he wrote later. ‘There was nothing the least trivial in his attitude. I found him extremely intelligent, shrewd, and altogether remarkable.’ Carl did not get back to the hotel until two in the morning, having to call out the night porter, by which time Emma was fast asleep.

Over the next five days a routine was established: the visitors would be picked up from the hotel every morning by one of the Freud family to be shown around the city. By the end of each day’s sightseeing everyone was exhausted, everyone except Jung, who enjoyed a rude energy throughout his life, and who would hurry along to 19 Berggasse for his late-night sessions with Freud, talking psychoanalysis, the new and shocking movement that the Herr Professor was leading with missionary zeal, and which, it soon transpired, he meant to bequeath to this brilliant young doctor from the Burghölzli asylum, naming him his ‘crown prince and heir’ with typical impulsiveness, and much to the annoyance of his Viennese colleagues.

The reasons were obvious: not only was Carl Jung brilliant, young and energetic, he was charismatic – an essential prerequisite for a leader. In addition, all the other men in the Viennese group were Jewish, whereas Jung was a Gentile, an Aryan from Switzerland. Freud knew this was the only way psychoanalysis could reach a wider, international public, transforming it into a world movement. He knew it because he had lived with anti-Semitism all his life. As much as he tried to ignore it he knew he could never overcome it. As he wrote to one of his most loyal followers, Karl Abraham, in December 1908: ‘Our Aryan comrades are really completely indispensable to us, otherwise Psycho-Analysis would succumb to anti-Semitism.’

The Vienna Emma and Carl Jung visited at the beginning of the twentieth century was a great cosmopolitan city of 2 million inhabitants, only half of whom had Heimatberechtigung, that is, were legally domiciled Viennese German-speaking Austrians. The rest came from the four corners of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Bohemians, Moravians, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Croats, all bringing different languages and embracing different religions. And Jews, many Jews. These ranged from Vienna’s poorest inhabitants living in the slums of Leopoldstadt to the new professional classes, lawyers, writers, journalists, artists and doctors like Freud, and the very richest: the fabulously wealthy merchants and bankers who lived in the nouveau riche Ring district in houses so large they were referred to as palais, often built in the neo-Renaissance style with columns, loggias and caryatids. It was these wealthy Jews who had helped finance Emperor Franz Joseph’s transformation of Vienna from the walled medieval city it once was to the capital of imperial grandeur which Emma and Carl saw all about them.

The sheer scale of it all was staggering. The grand boulevard of the Ring offered a dramatic setting for the Rathaus and Reichsrat, the city hall and parliament, as well as the Opera, the Burgtheater, the churches of St Stephen and the Votivkirche, the stock exchange, and, leading to the Heldenplatz, a vast columned piazza in front of Kaiser Franz Joseph’s Hofburg palace adorned with two massive equestrian statues, one of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the other of Archduke Charles of Austria. Then there were the museums – the one dedicated to natural history being of particular interest to Emma – and the many parks where you could wander up statue-lined avenues, sit by fountains or listen to one of the military bands playing Viennese waltzes and marches or melodies from the latest operetta. Everywhere you looked there were uniforms, army officers of the empire in red or pale blue, with sashes, epaulettes, gold braid, plumed helmets, swords, sabres, and highly polished boots. Every official appeared to have a uniform too, even the tram drivers, and little boys were often dressed in miniature military uniforms for their Sunday best.

The Hungarian court put on frequent displays of imperial pomp and power, such as the City Regiment’s daily march. On one occasion when Martin Freud was with Carl and Emma in the Ring district, Emperor Franz Joseph’s coach drove past, resplendent in red and gold with liveried coachmen and postilion. The Jungs had never seen such a thing and Martin was amazed to see the Herr Doktor, usually so superior, pushing to the front of the crowd, ‘like a small boy’ thrilled to catch a glimpse of the emperor with his companion, the former actress Katharine Schratt, seated at his side. For the Jungs, from small, republican Switzerland, it was the stuff of fairy tales. Whether visiting the famed Schiffmann’s department store, illuminated with the latest forms of electric lighting, or Demel’s, where the cakes and the Sachertorte were the best in the world, or joining the daily Corso along the Kärntner Ring, where Viennese society paraded in the latest fashions, everything dazzled. The Baedeker travel guide put it nicely: ‘With limited time, a week would suffice for a superficial overview of everything worth seeing.’

In the evenings after Carl had left for 19 Berggasse, Emma rested in the hotel before venturing out into the city – to the Burg Theatre or the Opera or to one of the famous Viennese operettas, perhaps with Binswanger, perhaps with one of the Freud ladies. Or she might stay in the hotel and dine in their Salle de Diner and later sit in one of their more intimate salons to read before retiring to her bedroom. She was surrounded by opulence, the Grand being the very first of the fashionable hotels of Vienna, built in the 1870s, with 300 bedrooms, half of which had ensuite bathrooms – a luxury as yet unheard of in Zürich. It had central heating and electric lighting, its own telegraph office in the foyer from which guests could send telegrams and make telephone calls with the assistance of well-trained telegraphists, and a private fiacre carriage service to take them anywhere they wished. So Emma could not have been better cared for whilst her husband was with Professor Freud. But she might have been happier if Carl had whiled away some of those evening hours with her.

Aside from psychoanalysis and the campaign to conquer the world, Freud and Jung talked about themselves – a natural transition since psychoanalysis dealt with neuroses and psychoses and all manner of obsessive behaviours, most of which appeared to have their roots in childhood, including their own. The subject they discussed most was sex: specifically, Freud’s theory that sexual trauma in childhood was the root cause of later neuroses and hysteria. It might be sexual abuse by a stranger or a family friend, or by a family member in which case it was incest. Freud had many examples from his own patients who came to him in the first instance because they were unaccountably paralysed, or suffering from chronic anxiety, depression, physical pain, sleeplessness, paranoias. Time and again it transpired that they were repressing early sexual experiences, though by 1907 Freud had modified his earlier view that all cases of hysteria had a sexual origin. He and his colleague and teacher Professor Breuer had published their Studies on Hysteria in 1895, by which time some doctors were diagnosing their female hysterics with sexual dysfunction and treating them with hypnosis or various forms of massage, including that of their genitals to bring about orgasm. But these were not subjects spoken about openly, except by Freud, who made sexual repression the linchpin of his work, shocking the general public and plenty of his medical colleagues in the process. His ‘cure’ was revolutionary: the ‘talking cure’ of psychoanalysis, designed to uncover the origin of the neuroses rather than merely treating them. The unconscious, Jung and Freud agreed, was the key to everything. And the key to the unconscious was the dream.