A rose between two thorns

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).