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

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local school for girls from every kind of background, rich and poor alike. She had not wanted to go to Paris; she had wanted to continue her education and go to university to study the natural sciences, a subject which had fascinated her since childhood, but it was not considered the right path for young Swiss women like Emma, and her father would not hear of it. Instead she went to Paris to perfect her French and acquaint herself with La Civilisation Française. Serious young woman that she was, Emma spent hour upon hour in the museums and began to learn Old French and Provençal in order to read the legend of the Holy Grail in the original – the twelfth-century romance about Perceval, a knight in the Arthurian legends, that would fascinate her for the rest of her life. By the time Carl Jung came to pay a visit she was informally engaged to the son of one of her father’s wealthy Schaffhausen business colleagues, and her future lay predictably before her.

      Emma’s childhood home, the Haus zum Rosengarten (the House of the Rose Garden), was an elegant seventeenth-century mansion situated on the banks of the Rhine. It had been bought by Emma’s grandfather Johannes Rauschenbach with the fortune he made from his factory producing agricultural machinery, exported worldwide, and the iron foundry next to it, both within walking distance of the house. Later he augmented his fortune by buying the Internazionale Uhren Fabrik (the International Watch Company, IWC), an American firm producing the first machine-made fob and wrist watches. Emma’s grandfather died young in 1881 and her father Jean, aged twenty-five, took over the running of both factories and moved into the house, still lived in by his mother, with his young wife Bertha. Their daughters, Emma and Marguerite, were both born there: Emma on 30 March 1882, and Marguerite fifteen months later.

      Emma recalled her childhood as being idyllic, combining untroubled happiness and privilege in equal parts. Her nickname was ‘Sunny’ and her life at that time gave her no reason to feel otherwise. The house itself, large, square, solid, was separated from the banks of the Rhine by a formal rose garden, laid out by her uncle Evariste Mertens, a landscape designer, and which gave the house its name. Schaffhausen itself was a prosperous town of fine Renaissance buildings with stuccoed and frescoed façades adorned with high-minded words exhorting the good burghers to lead virtuous lives. In the back streets and away from the grandeur stood the many factories, small industries and workshops which were the foundation of its wealth, a tribute to the Swiss tradition of hard work, and to the benefits of hydroelectricity, derived from the power of the massive Rhine Falls nearby. ‘Standing in the window,’ recalled Gertrud Henne, Emma and Marguerite’s cousin who came to the house to play with the sisters, ‘I liked to watch the big “Transmissions”: pillars standing in the Rhine with giant wheels that conducted hydropower via cables to the various factories along the Rhine.’ Anyone with ambition might make themselves a fortune in those heady early industrial days in Schaffhausen, and Johannes Rauschenbach, who started with nothing more than a machine repair shop, then a pin factory supplying the local cotton industry, and finally the world-renowned agricultural machinery factory, became the wealthiest of them all, and one of the richest men in Switzerland.

      When Jean Rauschenbach took over the business, with factories at home and abroad, Emma’s mother and grandmother took over the running of the house. Grossmutter Barbara lived in rooms upstairs and liked to sit in a fauteuil by the window overlooking the Rhine, reading her Gazette with her lorgnon, wearing a large bonnet with ribbons and surrounded by her collection of dolls, kept in a large old wall bed, and which the girls were sometimes allowed to play with. Having started life modestly, Grossmutter Barbara never fully accustomed herself to the great wealth the family came to enjoy. ‘If only you’d remained a mechanic,’ she used to tell her husband.

      The two sisters were very different but they were close and remained so all their lives. Emma could spend hours on her own, reading, writing, thinking. Marguerite was less the thinker, more the sporty, outward-going type, and moodier. Both sisters played the piano well, but Marguerite liked to sing too, and play-act, and she swam in the Rhine in all weathers, right into old age. They shared a private tutor before moving up to the local school for girls, and their upbringing was conventional Swiss haut bourgeois, instilling the values of a Protestant work ethic, social conformity, and feminine grace and good manners, so they knew how to behave when Herr Direktor Rauschenbach and his wife gave one of their grand receptions required of the foremost family of Schaffhausen.

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      Emma at school, third row, third from right.

      Both girls adored their mother, Bertha, who allowed her daughters plenty of freedom. For this the Haus zum Rosengarten was perfect, with its large cobbled courtyard, extensive outhouses, and the stables where the girls kept their horses, Lori and Ceda, looked after by Reeper, the groom, an ex-cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. If it was raining there were plenty of toys to play with inside; if it was snowing there was sledging and ice-skating; if it was one of those heatwave summers there was swimming in the Rhine, and all year round Reeper took them out riding to villages and castles and other local landmarks.

      The question of Carl and Emma’s first meeting is a moot one: was it in 1896 when he was still a student or was it three years later, when he was poised to take his first job working as a lowly assistant physician at the Burghölzli asylum and Emma had just returned from Paris? If it was in 1896, then it was at the Haus zum Rosengarten and it was an event hardly even remembered by Emma. But if it was in 1899 it was at Ölberg, the Mount of Olives, an ancient property like a small castle, square and thick-walled, with its own medieval chapel, the St Wolfgangs Kapelle, high on the slopes overlooking Schaffhausen with a drive so long and steep you could not see from one end to the other. The family had spent every summer there since the girls were small. But by 1899 Jean Rauschenbach had decided to sell the Haus zum Rosengarten and make Ölberg their family home, replacing the beautiful little castle with a Jugendstil mansion, a vast stone pile in the heavily ornate style of the time, with turrets and gables and oriels, high-ceilinged reception rooms, and a grand stairway leading up to a wide landing with bedrooms and bathrooms off.

      One entire floor was set aside for Emma and Marguerite, then in their teens, and the whole house was lit by electricity, heated by central heating, and served by a raft of servants inside and out. The architect was Ernst Jung of Winterthur, by chance one of Carl Jung’s uncles, who had already renovated the Sonnenburg property next door which belonged to Emma’s landscape architect uncle Evariste Mertens, who now proceeded to design the far grander gardens at Ölberg. According to his own account, as soon as Carl first set eyes on Emma, in the half-light, coming down the grand stairway into the hall, he decided this was the girl he would marry. If it was 1899 then Emma would have been seventeen, just back from Paris, more self-assured than before but still shy and retiring, poised on the edge of adulthood. If it was 1896, as Carl described in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, that would make Emma just fourteen.

      How an impoverished medical student came to be visiting this prominent and unimaginably wealthy family in the first place is down to Emma’s mother. Bertha was the beautiful daughter of Schenk, patron of the local Gasthof, a successful family business, providing rooms as well as excellent food – but still a Gasthof. So when Bertha married Jean, the son and heir to the Rauschenbach fortune, she married well above her station. But, rather like her mother-in-law, she never forgot her humble origins. Bertha knew the Jung family because she and Carl’s mother, Emilie Preiswerk, had attended the same school, and the Schenk Gasthof was in Uhwiesen, one of three villages in the parish of Laufen by the Rhine Falls where Carl’s father was pastor. The living at Laufen was poor: only enough to employ one maid-of-all-work, which included looking after infant Carl when his mother was not ‘well’, which was often. Bertha Schenk was one of Pastor Jung’s parishioners and she helped him out from time to time, taking the baby for walks along the Rhine in his pram. Years later Carl still remembered her as she was then: ‘the young, very pretty and charming girl with blue eyes and fair hair’ who ‘admired my father’.

      Now, encouraged by his mother, who had remained in touch with Bertha, he decided to pay Frau Rauschenbach a visit, and there saw the daughter Emma coming down the stairs. Even if Carl first clapped eyes on Emma when she was fourteen, she herself first knowingly met Carl in 1899 when she was seventeen. And the first correspondence between them dates

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