Emma Jung: This has taken a stone from my heart
From Emma Jung
Dear Professor Freud, Kusnacht, 16 March 1910
Here at last you have the programme for Nuremberg, from which you will see that your lecture comes first after all.
My husband had never said anything about his speaking on the 1st day, and as the title is only “Report on America” it will not upset the plan.
I also think he will be glad not to have to speak first, as he may be arriving in Nuremberg at in the morning and will probably be rather tired.
Many thanks for your kind letter- and offer of help which I shall gladly accept if anything more difficult happens.
I can set your mind at rest by telling you that a young friend and pupil of my husband’s, Dr. Honegger, is deputizing with the patients and looking after the Nuremberg business
with me, otherwise I would be rather nervous about everything turning out all right.
Today I am expecting news of my husband’s safe arrival in New York; I do hope it comes soon.
Incidentally, America no longer has the same attraction for him as before, and this has taken a stone from my heart.
It is just enough to satisfy the desire for travel and adventure, but no more than that.
I was very sorry to hear that Frau Hollitscher has had to undergo another operation; I hope she will soon recover and that it will be a lasting success this time.
Please give her my warmest greetings and wishes.
I send greetings to you and all your dear ones,
Emma Jung ~Freud/Jung Letters, Page 303
The Encounter with Emma Rauschenbach
The central theme in the work of C. G. Jung is that of individuation, the self-development of the human being through the process of unifying the opposites.
And because every person is embodied as either man or woman, yet carries within a predisposition to be completed through the other sex, the polarity of masculine and feminine stands at the center of all human existence.
Rather than philosophizing about such things-Jung always rejected the mere philosophical discussion of a problem for its own sake-his psychoanalytical inquiries led him to assume the existence of an oppositely sexed soul-image within the person’s unconscious: the anima in the case of a man, and the animus in a woman.
In the productions of the unconscious, for example in dreams, such anima- or animus images are manifested in characteristic ways, and Jungian dream analysis makes corresponding assertions about them.
In waking consciousness the soul-image of animus or anima that everyone carries within often tends to be projected onto other persons.
Thus a woman can come to carry the projection of a man’s own unconscious inner femininity-in other words, something that comes from within him, a specific complex of his own inner functions, confronts him from without, whether by fascinating him, awakening sympathy or erotic feelings, or in the form of some dark side or inferiority, which everyone likewise carries within but projects onto others if he is not consciously aware of it.
As far as the man’s anima is concerned, even in folklore it is said that every man carries his Eve within him.
Naturally the image of the mother, as the first woman in every man’s life, is very closely bound up with this anima.
Jung repeatedly mentioned the ambivalence of his own mother and her character, speaking of an explicit mother complex that was troublesome for him to overcome.
This calls to mind especially the enigmatic No. 2, the side of her nature that was open to the supernatural.
Other feminine figures, insofar as he mentions them, appear in contrast to have played no great part in his childhood and youth, though there is no lack of peculiar first encounters with the other sex.
(He said, incidentally, that he had for a long time connected with femininity a feeling of “inherent untrustworthiness.”)
But there was one fleeting impression imparted to him-permanently-at the age of three or four, even though on the surface of it nothing spectacular had happened, which involved the Jung family’s maid.
The way the girl held little Carl on her arm as he laid his head trustingly on her shoulder engraved itself on the child’s memory:
“She had black hair and an olive complexion, and was quite different from my mother.
I can see, even now, her hairline, her throat, with its darkly pigmented skin, and her ear.
All this seemed to me very strange and yet strangely familiar.
It was as though she belonged not to my family but only to me, as though she were connected in some way with other mysterious things I could not understand.
This type of girl later became a component of my anima.
The feeling of strangeness which she conveyed, and yet of having known her always, was a characteristic of that figure which later came to symbolize for me the whole essence of womanhood.”
Around the same time, when his parents were separated for a short time, another young woman made her appearance.
She had blond hair and blue eyes and was very amiable.
And again the setting remained in the autobiographer’s memory-a stroll beneath golden maple and chestnut trees on a blue autumn day “along the Rhine below the Falls, near Worth castle.
The sun is shining through the foliage, and yellow leaves lie on the ground.”
And, Jung added, twenty-one years later he would meet this woman again; she was his future mother-in-law, Bertha Rauschenbach-Schenk.
Many years later, Jung, as a student at the Gymnasium, was visiting his father, who was on leave in Sachseln, where the Swiss saint Brother Klaus (Niklaus van Fltie) 3 had lived.
The youth had visited Klaus’s hermitage, where he was deeply moved by the genius loci, the peculiar atmosphere of the place.
He was just about to come back down from the hill to the valley, when suddenly there appeared the slender figure of a young lady, a friendly farm girl in native costume.
The two made their way down together.
Carl was unable to conceal his awkwardness in conversation; at the Gymnasium in Basel there were only boys, and the few girls he had ever met were his cousins.
The boy sensed the “impenetrable wall” that stood between them.
“Sad at heart, I retreated into myself. . . . Outwardly this encounter was completely meaningless.
But, seen from within, it was so weighty that it not only occupied my thoughts for days but has remained forever in my memory, like a shrine by the wayside.
At that time I was still in that childlike state where life consists of single, unrelated experiences.
For who could discover the threads of fate which led from Brother Klaus to the pretty girl?”
One day the time came to fasten upon, or perhaps pick up again, one very specific life-thread, to seize upon one out of the manifold facets of the feminine soul-image, the unique face of his own anima.
The occasion itself was once again quite ordinary.
Jung, still a student in Basel in about his second semester, was visiting a friend from Schaffhausen, quite near the place where he himself had spent his earliest childhood years.
When his mother heard of this plan, she made a suggestion:
“If you visit that friend in Schaffhausen, you go and see Mrs. [Bertha] Rauschenbach, too-we knew her as a young woman.”
He was supposed to convey greetings, and Carl, age twenty-one, looked forward to a reacquaintance after two decades.
But when he entered the Rauschenbachs’ home, he saw on the stairway a girl of about fourteen, in pigtails.
And like a flash it was clear to him:
This is my wife!
Working on his memoirs with his secretary Aniela Jaffe, he added in his old age:
“I was deeply shaken by this, for I had really only seen her for a brief instant, but I knew immediately with absolute certainty that she would be my wife.”
A friend in whom he confided laughed at him, especially as Jung had to admit that he had so far not exchanged a single word with the girl. Emma, the daughter of the Rauschenbach family, came from an extremely well-placed middle-class home. Her father was a well-to-do manufacturer in Schaffhausen.
What chance was there for a destitute student who was incurring a debt of several thousand francs just getting through his studies?
But Jung was certain of his quick intuition, and was comparable in this crucial situation with Sigmund Freud, who once stated his personal practice as follows to the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik:
“When I had to make a decision that was not too important, I always found it advantageous to weigh all the pros and cons.
In vitally important matters, however, such as the choice of a partner or an occupation, the decision has to come from the unconscious, from somewhere within us. In the most important decisions of our personal life we must, I think, let ourselves be guided by the deep inner needs of our being.”
As we know, Jung’s decision to go into psychiatry was also arrived at spontaneously.
Some six years after this first meeting, Carl Jung proposed to Emma Rauschenbach.
After all, he was now officially a doctor with a position at a respected clinic.
At first, though, she turned him down.
The same thing had happened to his grandfather Carl Gustav, and only with the second attempt was he successful.
Gerhard Adler, one of the few able to get a look at the two lovers’ correspondence, which was still retained in the family archive, testified to the romantic beauty and sentimental charm that was expressed in their love letters.
When Jung went to study with Janet in Paris in the fall of 1902, he was already engaged.
Immediately after his return-only a short trip to London was planned-the wedding took place on 14 February 1903.
Emma Emma Emma Emma
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