Emma Rauschenbach was the daughter of rich Swiss industrialists — a plump, good-natured girl, nicknamed ‘Sunny’, who married young without knowing what she was letting herself in for. Her husband, Carl Gustav Jung, was revered after his death as a guru as much as a doctor — as the mystic and visionary that Freud might have become had he not been so fixated on the role of the libido. As a husband, a father and a younger man, however, Jung appears to have been close to intolerable. He was physically large, selfish, bullying and loud of voice; he cheated at games, had a vile temper and appalling table manners; he thought men should be polygamous but that Emma should be his alone. He was also narcissistic and unbalanced, coming from a family with severe mental health problems.
Poor Emma. She pops out children at regular intervals while Jung is working at the Burghölzi Hospital in Zürich under the supervision of Eugen Bleuler, a man remembered today for his unfortunate invention of the term ‘schizophrenia’ for delusional psychotic illness (a misnomer that still allows dimwits to talk of living a ‘schizophrenic’ existence if they have a flat in town as well a country cottage). Bleuler, however, was a better doctor than wordsmith, and the Burghölzi, having no cures to offer, did its best for its patients by keeping them busy. Bleuler rated Jung very highly, his sympathy for acute patients apparently boosted by his own near-psychotic experiences.
When not on the crowded ward, Jung was pursuing an interest in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud quickly identified Jung as his heir, seeing in him energy, intellect (which Jung had in abundance) and powers of leadership. To Freud, however, the most useful thing about Jung was that he was a Gentile, and so might be capable of exporting psychoanalysis from Vienna into a wider world of research funding and rich patrons, especially in America.
The foundations of early psychoanalysis consisted of Freud misdiagnosing young Jewish women with types of neurological complaint (usually epilepsy) or organic illness (stomach cancer in one shocking case) as suffering from ‘hysteria’ caused by repressed sexual problems that could be unravelled and ‘cured’ by Freud’s patent detective process.
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