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’ crush. Though it does not really bother me, I still feel it is disgusting and ridiculous because of its undeniable erotic undertone. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped. Even in Vienna the remarks of the ladies (‘enfin seuls’ etc.) sickened me, although the reason for it was not clear to me at the time. This feeling, which I have still not quite got rid of, hampers me considerably.
He goes on to explain that this has made close friendships with male colleagues ‘downright disgusting’, and ends the letter abruptly, saying: ‘I think I owe you this explanation. I would rather not have said it.’
All these secrets, and Emma knew none of them.
3
Emma and Carl were betrothed on 6 October 1901, in secret, at the family’s Ölberg estate in Schaffhausen. The only other guests apart from Emma’s mother and sister were Carl’s mother and sister and the only record of the event are a few out-of-focus snapshots, probably taken by Marguerite, in the garden, where the couple appear to be walking away from the camera as often as towards it, as though trying to avoid it. By the time of the betrothal they had been courting for eighteen months and Emma was nineteen. She looks younger, almost a schoolgirl, and Carl still has the look of the Steam-Roller about him, not yet the confident man of the world he would become. They agreed to wait until Emma was twenty-one before getting married.
Jung had been assistant physician at the Burghölzli asylum for almost a year by then, having moved to Zürich straight after his medical examinations, taking a temporary job in a doctor’s practice to fill in time before starting at the Burghölzli in December 1900. The move puzzled his colleagues and upset his mother. Why would anyone want to leave cosmopolitan Basel for dull, commercial Zürich, and how could he abandon his impoverished mother and sister like that? Part of the reason was that Carl had fallen foul of Herr Professor Wille, the first in a long line of senior men Jung would quarrel with in his working life. Ludwig Wille was the new professor of psychiatry at the University of Basel, the discipline of psychiatry itself dating no further back than the 1880s. In deciding to specialise in it, Jung embarked on the least fashionable and least remunerated branch of the medical profession, seen as another odd decision by his colleagues, given he was one of their best with the brightest of futures. They could not know that psychiatry spoke deeply to the ‘other’ Carl who had had, ever since he could remember, the kind of dreams and visions some people might deem