the main complex which emerged from the test was Emma’s fear of the pain of childbirth. Association 43, despise/mépriser, reminds us how well Emma spoke French, but this, it turns out, was not the point. The reaction took 1.8 seconds. Why so, Jung wondered? ‘Despise is accompanied by an unpleasant emotional tone. Immediately after the reaction it came to her that she had had a passing fear that her pregnancy might in different ways decrease her attractiveness in the eyes of her husband. She immediately afterwards thought of a married couple who were at first happy and then separated – the married couple in Zola’s novel Vérité [Truth]. Hence the French form of the reaction.’ Poor Emma.
In his summing up of ‘Subject No. I’, Jung commented:
In reality our experiment shows beautifully, the conscious self is merely the marionette dancing on the stage to a hidden automatic impulse . . . In our subject we find a series of intimate secrets given away by the associations . . . We find her strongest actual complex to be bound up with thoughts about her pregnancy, her rather anxious expectancy, and love of her husband with jealous fears. This is a complex of an erotic kind which has just become acute; that is why it is so much to the front. No less than 18% of the associations can certainly be referred to it. In addition there are a few complexes of considerably less intensity: loss of her former position, a few deficiencies which she regards as unpleasant (singing, swimming, cooking) and finally an erotic complex which occurred many years back in her youth and which only shows itself in one association (out of regard for the subject of the experiment I must, unfortunately, omit a report on this).
Jung ended the German text of Studies in Word-Association giving ‘special thanks to Frau Emma Jung for her active assistance with the repeated revision of the voluminous material’.
5
Agathe Regina was born at Emma’s family home in Schaffhausen on 26 December 1904, a Christmas child. Emma was twenty-two, had been married for a year and ten months, and now she was a mother. Overnight, it seemed, her life had changed again, this time for ever.
It was common for mothers of Emma’s social class to use a wet nurse to still their babies. But Emma breastfed hers herself. She did not want to hand her baby over to a stranger and deprive herself and the child of this pleasure, as Carl later described it to Freud. Nevertheless, a first baby is a strange and unknown experience. Emma had plenty of help with ‘Agathli’ – little Agathe – whilst she was still at Ölberg with her mother and sister Marguerite, but when she moved back to Zürich and the Burghölzli, keen not to be away from her husband for too long, she largely looked after the baby herself. Feeding took many hours. Waking through the night disturbed sleep. Changing the thick towelling nappies was onerous, though it was the maid’s job to soak them in a pail before washing them by hand, then through the wringer, then hanging them out on a wooden horse by the tiled stove to dry. It was a winter with deep snow, white pitched roofs with icicles hanging from the eves and the window sills, and no hope of using the washing line in the garden. There were coughs and colds and nappy rashes to deal with, and the terrible responsibility of a new life. For a young mother who had shown such anxiety about the pain of giving birth and the fear that having a baby might affect the feelings her husband had for her, Emma was having to grow up very fast indeed.
In addition, Emma had just started what she had longed to do since leaving school: furthering her education. Though it was done circuitously, by helping her husband with his work, it was certainly an education. And she was still going down to Zürich Central Library to pursue her own research into the Grail legend. But now Carl and Emma slipped back into more conventional roles: she as wife and mother; he as husband, breadwinner and authoritative head of house. Carl did not subscribe to ‘Das Weib sei dem Mann untertan’, ‘The woman shall be subservient to the man’, as a popular book, The Way to the Altar, quoting the Bible, reminded, but once Agathe was born things changed in the Jung household. Carl was conventional when it came to parenthood: he saw children largely as the responsibility of the mother. Now his sister Trudi came to help with the secretarial work and Emma found herself more and more on the sidelines. If she hoped it was merely temporary until she found her feet, it didn’t work out that way: within six months she was pregnant again. Anna Margaretha, known as Gretli, and later Gret, was born on 8 February 1906.
Emma’s story was typical enough of the times. Many women were frightened of getting pregnant, either because they already had too large a family or because they were not married, which was worse. There was no safe method of birth control, and a reliance on coitus interruptus had limited success. In 1909 Richard Richter, a German doctor, would develop an early form of an interuterine device using the gut of the silkworm, but it was not marketed until the 1920s, by which time Marie Stopes had opened the first birth control clinic in England, and there were similar initiatives in America and France and Germany. The Catholic Church, however, forbade any form of contraception and the Protestant Church did not look on it with favour either, believing that it was the duty of Christian marriage to ‘increase and multiply and fill the earth’. It all came too late for Emma and Carl anyway.
Sigmund Freud could have told them. His letters to his doctor friend Wilhelm Fliess are full of pleas that he come up with a reliable form of contraception. Every month he and Martha worried she might be pregnant again. Fliess looked into the ‘rhythm method’, making calculations and trying to work out a safe period during Martha’s monthly cycle; he even tried to come up with a similar cycle for Freud himself. Evidently it was not successful: Martha became pregnant six times in ten years. For the first three months of her sixth pregnancy she insisted it was the start of the menopause, not another pregnancy. She couldn’t face it. She had never wanted more than four children. Once the baby, Anna, was born, Martha went to her mother’s in Wandsbek for several weeks of recuperation and there developed ‘a writing paralysis’: she found she literally could not form the words to write Sigmund a letter. Her face was puffy and her teeth hurt. She was only thirty-four and she was exhausted. After that they stopped having sex, that side of their marriage becoming ‘amortised’, as Freud later confided to Emma.
In March 1905 Emma Jung’s father Jean Rauschenbach died. Marguerite and Ernst Homberger, who had married a year earlier, now moved in with Bertha whilst they built a house of their own. Ernst took over the running of the Rauschenbach business from Bertha and Jean’s sister, though the two women had managed it all splendidly during the last years of Jean Rauschenbach’s decline. But custom had it that if there was a man in the family there was no need for the women to carry on working. Ernst, a quiet, ambitious, tough man twenty years his wife’s senior, ran the business for the rest of his working life.
The immediate reaction to Herr Rauschenbach’s death was relief as well as sorrow, his last years being so terrible, shut away from the world. ‘A poor rich man finally closed his eyes last night, but their light had already gone out a long time ago,’ stated the obituary in the Schaffhausen Tagesblatt
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