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

Carl had been conducting a good deal of research into the unconscious himself, especially the ‘Word Association’ tests he carried out in his laboratory at the Burghölzli on both ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ subjects – using a galvanometer to measure the patients’ reactions by applying a weak electric current to the subject which measured the fluctuations in the skin with each association, the reaction recorded on a graph. He had also read Freud’s most famous work The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, which boldly stated: ‘In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state.’ So the two men were in agreement about the powers of the unconscious. What Carl Jung could not agree with, however, even before he met Freud in person, was the central role played by childhood sexual trauma. ‘It seems to me,’ he wrote to Freud on 5 October 1906, six months before his visit to Vienna, ‘that though the genesis of hysteria is predominantly, it is not exclusively, sexual.’ He thought this might be because ‘I: my material is totally different from yours [working mostly with uneducated insane patients], II: my upbringing, my milieu, and my scientific premises are in any case utterly different from your own, III: my experience compared to yours is extremely small.’ Freud, superior in age and experience, was happy to bide his time. Sooner or later the crown prince would see the light. He could not know that Jung had personal as well as professional reasons for believing what he did.

As Freud had mentioned in his letter to Jung, on Wednesdays there was always a meeting at 19 Berggasse of his Viennese colleagues, including Alfred Adler, Rudolf Reitler, Max Kahane and Wilhelm Stekel – later joined by Paul Federn and Eduard Hitschmann and occasionally Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank. On that particular Wednesday in March 1907, Binswanger, attending with Carl Jung, remembered there were only five or six others present.

They assembled in Freud’s consulting room as usual – a room filled with cigar, pipe and cigarette smoke, dimly lit with gas lamps and surrounded by Freud’s growing collection of antique and oriental art – with wine brought to them by Martha Freud. The atmosphere was relaxed, with no etiquette and plenty of humour. Binswanger was amazed how Freud could dominate the evening so completely after a long day’s work. The subject was exclusively psychoanalysis: the interpretation of dreams, neuroses, paranoias, childhood sexuality and so on – Freud offering detailed examples from his cases, then listening carefully, answering questions with gestures of the hand, sometimes holding one of his smaller antiques, and always the cigar. His manner was simple and filled with charm, Binswanger recalled, but you could never forget you were in the presence of greatness.

Jung took part in the discussion, but less loudly than usual. The evening left him perplexed. ‘I felt so foreign before this Jewish intellectual society. That was something completely new to me. I had never experienced that before,’ he told his friend Kurt Eissler some years later. ‘I found it very difficult to adjust, to adopt the right tone.’ Their conversation had ‘a certain cynicism’, he said, and it made him feel ‘like a country bumpkin’. When Freud joked: ‘You wouldn’t be an anti-Semite now, would you?’ Jung took it seriously, answering: ‘No, no. Anti-Semitism is out of the question,’ which must have amused Freud quite a bit.

At the end of the evening the Herr Professor turned to his Swiss guests and said: ‘Now you’ve seen the whole Bande, the whole gang.’ That shocked Binswanger; it seemed so dismissive. Something else shocked him too. Earlier in the week he, Freud and Carl Jung had been analysing one another’s dreams. In later life he recalled Freud’s interpretation of Jung’s dream, though not the dream itself: apparently Jung had a hidden wish to dethrone Herr Professor Freud and place the ‘Crown of Psycho-Analysis’ on his own head. It was that Jewish–Viennese humour again. Binswanger’s own dream was of arriving at 19 Berggasse to find it was the old, not the newly renovated entrance, with two ancient gas lamps hanging outside. That, announced Freud, revealed Binswanger’s wish to marry Mathilde, his eldest daughter – and then his deciding against it because the place was too shabby. But it was said with a laugh, and even Binswanger got the joke.

When the five-day visit was up the Jungs took their leave with many heartfelt thanks, and travelled on to Budapest by the Continental Express sleeper, in the comfort of a first-class carriage. Binswanger stayed behind for another week with Freud, establishing a friendship that would last a lifetime. On the train, looking out at the passing hamlets and farms and the Alps beyond, Emma had no idea how deeply her husband had been affected by his encounter with Freud. And if she had, she could hardly have guessed the reason why.

The idea of visiting Budapest originally came from Emma’s wish to see the city where her father had established a branch of the Rauschenbach family business in agricultural machinery. She wanted to go to the premises and perhaps meet some of the employees her father had known when he was there back in the 1880s. But if Emma hoped for some time sightseeing with Carl she was mistaken. He showed little interest in it, preferring to spend his time with a colleague, Philip Stein, discussing medical cases and his own recent experiments in word association, so Emma was forced to do most of her sightseeing on her own.

Worse was to come when they arrived in Abbazia, a fashionable resort on the Adriatic coast. A woman staying at their hotel struck up a conversation with them at dinner on their first evening. She was attractive, intelligent, Jewish – a lady of independent means with progressive opinions and quite fascinated by the new and daring science of psychoanalysis. And even more fascinated by the charismatic and handsome Herr Doktor, as most women were. And Carl, in the wake of his infatuation with Freud and all things Jewish, was a willing partner. Every evening he and the woman retreated to a sofa in the corner of the drawing room to discuss psychoanalysis. If Emma joined them the woman talked down to her as the mere wife. Emma, jealous and humiliated, complained to Carl, but he told her there was nothing to it – their discussions were purely professional. It took him two years before he could admit the truth: that this was another of his ‘infatuations’.

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