younger sister Minna who lived with them – an interesting set-up which caused plenty of gossip and speculation over the years. Herr Professor Freud and his two women. Apparently Minna sometimes answered the telephone calling herself ‘Frau Professor’! Freud himself did not like the newfangled telephone and always left it to one of the women of the house to answer. In 1907 Sigmund Freud was fifty-one, Martha forty-six. They had been married for twenty-one years and had six children ranging from Mathilde twenty, Martin eighteen, Ernst sixteen, Oliver fifteen, Sophie fourteen, down to Anna, twelve. Freud called them his ‘rabble’ and his ‘rascals’ with affection and some pride.
Martha, greeting Emma Jung, observed a formal, reticent young woman, dressed with an understated style, and only a few years older than her daughter Mathilde. She already knew about the Frau Doktor’s wealth. Everyone knew. But what she could not fail to notice was that Frau Doktor Jung did not act wealthy. As the two women exchanged greetings, Jung was shaking hands in the formal Swiss way. No fancy Viennese kissing of ladies’ hands for Carl.
On special occasions such as this Martha would cook a chicken for the midday meal, though her husband was not keen. ‘Let them live,’ he always said. ‘Let them lay eggs.’ But his wife made all the household decisions, it had been that way from the start: he earned the money, she ran the house. It suited them both and Freud never interfered and never complained. So there they sat, twelve of them, round the dinner table having their meal, served from the kitchen by the maid, with the men at one end and the women and children at the other. Emma was surprised by all the talk – the Freud children expressed themselves easily and cheerfully. ‘Our upbringing might be called liberal,’ Martin Freud later wrote, reflecting on his ‘gay and generous’ father. ‘We were never ordered to do this, or not to do that; we were never told not to ask questions.’ For their part, Martha and Minna, the two sisters, could not fail to notice that the Jungs both had strong Swiss accents, making them seem more provincial than they were. Apparently, Frau Doktor Jung had wanted to attend Zürich University to study the natural sciences but her father wouldn’t let her. Understandably. The only women who attended university were rich foreigners – Russians and the like.
Looking back, Martin Freud, as an observant eighteen-year-old, remembers Herr Doktor Jung having a ‘commanding presence’: ‘He was very tall and broad-shouldered, holding himself more like a soldier than a man of science and medicine. His head was purely Teutonic with a strong chin, a small moustache, blue eyes, and thin closely cropped hair.’ In fact, Jung’s eyes were brown not blue, but in the almost entirely Jewish environment inhabited by the Freud family the Teutonic aspect was unusual and rather interesting. Still, Martin took a dislike to Jung: ‘He never made the slightest attempt to make polite conversation with mother or us children but pursued the debate which had been interrupted by the call to luncheon. Jung on these occasions did all the talking and father with unconcealed delight did all the listening,’ he wrote, still irked by the memory. Martin was doubly surprised because normally his father strongly disapproved of visitors ignoring his family and he would deliberately change the conversation to include them, making it clear that this was not how things went in the Freud household. But not with Herr Doktor Jung, who talked throughout the meal exclusively to his father, showing no awareness of or concern for anyone else. Emma might have told them this was typical of her husband, who had gained some enemies amongst his colleagues at the Burghölzli asylum because of it, though never amongst his patients who all revered him.
After the meal there was coffee and then Emma and Binswanger took their leave, as arranged, so Carl could spend more time with Freud. The two men swiftly retired to Freud’s consulting rooms on the mezzanine floor below, which looked out over a small garden with a single chestnut tree. They talked for thirteen hours without a break. It was love at first sight, a mutual enchantment accompanied by every high hope. Freud had read this brilliant young doctor’s papers on dementia praecox – or ‘schizophrenia’ as Bleuler of the Burghölzli asylum had coined it – as well as Jung’s ‘Experiments in Word Association’, and now, to his delight, he found that the man in conversation was as brilliant and challenging as the writer on the page.
As for Carl Jung’s first impressions of Freud: ‘In my experience, up to that time, no one else could compare with him,’ he wrote later. ‘There was nothing the least trivial in his attitude. I found him extremely intelligent, shrewd, and altogether remarkable.’ Carl did not get back to the hotel until two in the morning, having to call out the night porter, by which time Emma was fast asleep.
Over the next five days a routine was established: the visitors would be picked up from the hotel every morning by one of the Freud family to be shown around the city. By the end of each day’s sightseeing everyone was exhausted, everyone except Jung, who enjoyed a rude energy throughout his life, and who would hurry along to 19 Berggasse for his late-night sessions with Freud, talking psychoanalysis, the new and shocking movement that the Herr Professor was leading with missionary zeal, and which, it soon transpired, he meant to bequeath to this brilliant young doctor from the Burghölzli asylum, naming him his ‘crown prince and heir’ with typical impulsiveness, and much to the annoyance of his Viennese colleagues.
The reasons were obvious: not only was Carl Jung brilliant, young and energetic, he was charismatic – an essential prerequisite for a leader. In addition, all the other men in the Viennese group were Jewish, whereas Jung was a Gentile, an Aryan from Switzerland. Freud knew this was the only way psychoanalysis could reach a wider, international public, transforming it into a world movement. He knew it because he had lived with anti-Semitism all his life. As much as he tried to ignore it he knew he could never overcome it. As he wrote to one of his most loyal followers, Karl Abraham, in December 1908: ‘Our Aryan comrades are really completely indispensable to us, otherwise Psycho-Analysis would succumb to anti-Semitism.’
The Vienna Emma and Carl Jung visited at the beginning of the twentieth century was a great cosmopolitan city of 2 million inhabitants, only half of whom had Heimatberechtigung, that is, were legally domiciled Viennese German-speaking Austrians. The rest came from the four corners of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Bohemians, Moravians, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Croats, all bringing different languages and embracing different religions. And Jews, many Jews. These ranged from Vienna’s poorest inhabitants living in the slums of Leopoldstadt to the new professional classes, lawyers, writers, journalists, artists and doctors like Freud, and the very richest: the fabulously wealthy merchants and bankers who lived in the nouveau riche Ring district in houses so large they were referred to as palais, often built in the neo-Renaissance style with columns, loggias and caryatids. It was these wealthy Jews who had helped finance Emperor Franz Joseph’s transformation of Vienna from the walled medieval city it once was to the capital of imperial grandeur which Emma and Carl saw all about them.
The sheer scale of it all was staggering. The grand boulevard of the Ring offered a dramatic setting for the Rathaus and Reichsrat, the city hall and parliament, as well as the Opera, the Burgtheater, the churches of St Stephen and the Votivkirche, the stock exchange, and, leading to the Heldenplatz, a vast columned piazza in front of Kaiser Franz Joseph’s Hofburg palace adorned with two massive equestrian statues, one of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the other of Archduke Charles of Austria. Then there were the museums – the one dedicated to natural history being of particular interest to Emma – and the many parks where you could wander up statue-lined avenues, sit by fountains or listen to one of the military bands playing Viennese waltzes and marches or melodies from the latest operetta. Everywhere you looked there were uniforms, army officers of the empire in red or pale blue, with sashes, epaulettes, gold braid, plumed helmets, swords, sabres, and highly polished boots. Every official appeared to have a uniform too, even the tram drivers, and little boys were often dressed in miniature military uniforms for their Sunday best.
The Hungarian court put on frequent displays of imperial pomp and power, such as the City Regiment’s daily march. On one occasion when Martin Freud was with Carl and Emma in the Ring district, Emperor Franz Joseph’s coach drove past, resplendent in red and gold with liveried coachmen and postilion. The Jungs had never seen such a thing and
