Emma Jung

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Emma Jung bigraphy, stories - Psychoanalyst and writer

Emma Jung : biography

30 March 1882 – 27 November 1955

Emma Jung (born Emma Rauschenbach; 30 March 1882 – 27 November 1955) was a psychoanalyst and author. She was the wife of Carl Jung, the prominent psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology.

Posthumous

After Emma’s death, Carl Jung carved a stone in her name, "She was the foundation of my house". He is also said to have cried "She was a queen! She was a queen!" ("Sie war eine Königin! Sie war eine Königin!") while mourning. Her gravestone was inscripted: "Oh vase, sign of devotion and obedience".

Early life

She came from an old Swiss-German family of wealthy industrialists; that wealth later gave her husband the financial freedom to pursue his own work and interests.

Marriage

Children

The Jungs married on 14 February 1903, seven years after they first met. Together they had five children: Agathe, Gret, Franz, Marianne, and Helene.

Marital life

In 1906, a variety of Carl Jung’s unusual dreams of the period were interpreted by Freud as portending the "failure of a marriage for money" (das Scheitern einer Geldheirat). Emma Jung took a strong interest in her husband’s work and became a noted analyst in her own right. She developed a particular interest in the Grail legend. She was a psychoanalyst before they married, although her independence of him in this field has been contested. She was also in regular correspondence of her own with Sigmund Freud.

Sometime around the birth of her fifth and last child, in 1914, her husband began a relationship with a young patient, Toni Wolff, which lasted for some decades. Deirdre Bair, in her biography of Carl Jung, describes Emma Jung as bearing up nobly as her husband insisted that Toni Wolff become part of their household, saying that Wolff was "his other wife". Wolff tried to persuade Carl Jung to divorce but this did not happen. A colleague, Sabina Spielrein, had earlier claimed to have been Carl Jung’s lover, keeping a diary to document the relationship.Spielrein told her "wanton tale to anyone within earshot of [Jung]", and it became "common gossip among medical students who were happy to interpret it as an affair, even though there was no proof". One of Jung’s biographers, Deirdre Bair, on the basis of diaries kept by other female devotees of Jung (the so-called "Zürichberg Pelzmäntel" or "fur-coat ladies").