Carl Jung to his Daughter on the death of Emma Jung
To Marianne Niehus-Jung
Dear Marianne, Bollingen, 17 July 1956
Warmest thanks for your lovely letter, which was a great joy.
I am glad you weren’t bored with me.
It was also a joy to be together with you for a while.
It is true that one cannot fully realize something that is not yet there, for one does not know what the pattern is which a still living person fills out.
Mama’s death has left a gap for me that cannot be filled.
So it is good if you have something you want to carry out, and can turn to when the emptiness spreads about you too menacingly.
The stone I am working on (like the one I carved in the winter) gives me inner stability with its hardness and permanence, and its meaning governs my thoughts.
I will gladly read the MSS.
I hope there’s no hurry.
The building is to start tomorrow if the permit arrives.
But I still have no news.
Will you be coming to Bollingen sometime?
Ruth sends best greetings,
Affectionately,
Your Father ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 316-317.
Notes:
- This was a stone in memory of his wife; it was set up at Bollingen.
The stone he carved in the winter of 195 5/56 consisted of three stone tablets with the names of his ancestors.
They were placed in the courtyard of the Tower (Memories, p. 232/220).
- In Memories (p. 225/213) Jung reports how after his wife’s death he felt compelled to add an upper story to the central section of the Tower, as a representation of his ego-personality: “Now it signified an extension of consciousness achieved in old age. With that the building was complete.”
Dedicated to the Soul: The Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung Jung
A richly illustrated collection of never-before-seen writings and drawings from the notebooks, portfolios, and personal papers of C. G. Jung’s wife and collaborator
Emma Jung (1882–1955) was the life and work partner of one of the great intellectual figures of the twentieth century, yet she kept most of her creative and personal life private. Dedicated to the Soul brings together previously unpublished materials from Jung’s private archive, introducing her voice into the literature of the early psychoanalytical movement and revealing a vibrant inner life and a glowing presence that until now was known only to her family and a handful of patients, students, and friends.
This fully annotated collection features journal entries, dream accounts, drawings, paintings, and lectures. It sheds new light on Jung as an early collaborator in the creation of analytical psychology who may have originated the concept of the animus, one of C. G. Jung’s central constructs. It paints a riveting portrait of a dynamic woman who, determined to break free of the conventional world of her upbringing, fearlessly interrogated her social environment and developed her own systems of meaning.
With introductory essays that chart Jung’s personal, intellectual, and psychological development, Dedicated to the Soul brings the creative work of this boldly imaginative and irreverent spirit to a wider audience and offers new perspectives on the role of women in the early history of analytical psychology.
Carl Jung and Emma Jung
Carl Jung on “Emma Jung” – YouTube
Carl Jung on “Emma Jung” – Anthology
A marriage is more likely to succeed if the woman follows her own star and remains conscious of her wholeness than if she constantly concerns herself with her husband’s star and his wholeness. ~ Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.
I shall always be grateful to Toni for doing for my husband what I or anyone else could not have done at a most critical time.” ~Emma Jung; Laurens Van Der Post Jung: The Story of our Time; Page 177.
Thus on New Year’s Eve I had a great dream about my wife, which I will tell you sometime. It seems that individuation is a ruthlessly important task to which everything else should take second place. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.
I was particularly interested in the dream which, in mid-August 1955, anticipated the death of my wife. It probably expresses the idea of life’s perfection: the epitome of all fruits, rounded into a bullet, struck her like karma. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 310.
Oh outstanding vessel of devotion and obedience! To the ancestral spirits of my most beloved and faithful wife Emma Maria. She completed her life and after her death she was lamented. She went over to the secret of eternity in the year 1955. Her age was 73. Her husband C.G. .Jung has made and placed [this stone] in 1956.
This time the feminine element will have conspicuous representatives from Zurich: Sister Meltzer, Hinkle Eastwick (an American charmer), Frl. Dr. Spielrein (!), then a new discovery of mine, Frl. Antonia Wolff, a remarkable intellect with an excellent feeling for religion and philosophy, and last but not least my wife. ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, pp. 438-41.
After my wife’s death. . . I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am. To put it in the language of the Bollingen house, I suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so low, so hidden was myself! ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 225.
The past decade dealt me heavy blows – the death of dear friends and the even more painful loss of my wife, the end of my scientific activity and the burdens of old age, but also all sorts of honors and above all your friendship, which I value the more highly because it appears that men cannot stand me in the long run. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516.
The serious illness of my wife has consumed all my spare time. She has undergone an operation so far successfully, but it has left her in a feeble state needing careful nursing for several weeks to come. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 251.
The winter, though very cold, has dealt leniently with me. Both my wife and myself are tired, though still active, but in a very restricted way. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174.
I am glad at last that I have been able (though not through my merit ) to spare my wife what follows on the loss of a lifelong partner-the silence that has no answer. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 292-293.
Thank you for telling me about Ringbom’s book. [Graltempel und paradies, 1951] For several years now it has been in my wife’s library; she was engaged in a study of the Grail up to her death in 1955. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 481-482
For Christmas my wife gave me a really superb photograph of Freud, ca. 12 x 20 cm. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 4-8
First we had (at the end of Oct.) a regrettable accident: my wife fell in the corridor (slipping on a carpet) and broke her right arm in the shoulder a nasty fracture indeed. I had her in the hospital for 2 months. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 539-541
When we go on holiday my wife and I push a two-wheeled cart ahead of us with the luggage, which is not so sad but uncommonly amusing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 303
He [Jung] told me his wife had started to learn Latin, and also some natural science, after her fifth child went to school. Now she can read all the mediaeval Latin texts. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 62
At the same time he [Jung] showed me a small tumbler of slightly tinted (red or pink) glass, and the rim at the top was sharp all round. He said that at the moment his wife’s mother died the upper part of the glass had broken off. ~E.A. Bennet, Meeting with Jung, Page 221
If I get another perfectly normal adult malingering as a sick patient I’ll have him certified! ~Carl Jung to Emma Jung. [Vincent Brome Biography]
You see, he never took anything from me to give to Toni, but the more he gave her the more he seemed able to give me. ~Emma Jung, Jung: His Life and Work by Barbara Hannah, Page 119.
Since your visit I have been tormented by the idea that your relation with my husband is not altogether as it should be, and since it definitely ought not to be like this I want to try to do whatever is in my power. ~Emma Jung to S. Freud, Freud/Jung Letters Pages 452-3.
You were really annoyed by my letter, weren’t you? I was too, and now I am cured of my megalomania and am wondering why the devil the unconscious had to make you, of all people, the victim of this madness. ~Emma Jung to S. Freud, Freud/Jung Letters Pages 455-7.
He [Jung] struggled with himself about telling her [Emma] but he did so; she was quite undisturbed, and in a way relieved for ever since heroperation she had been preparing for death. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 147
Incidentally, America no longer has the same attraction for him [Carl] as before, and this has taken a stone from my heart. ~Emma Jung to S. Freud, Freud/Jung Letters, Page 303.
Then after a pause, Miss Wolff added this: “You know, sometimes if a man’s wife is big enough to leap over the hurdle of self-pity, she may find that her supposed rival has even helped her marriage! This ‘other woman’ can sometimes help a man live out certain aspects of himself that his wife either can’t fulfill, or else doesn’t especially want to. As a result, some of the wife’s energies are now freed for her own creative interests and development, often with the result that the marriage not only survives, but emerges even stronger than before!” ~Toni Wolff, C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances, Pages 47-51
