The women in Carl Jung's shadow

National Geographic

3 days ago

Emma and Carl Jung at an Eranos Foundation Conference. Photograph by Margarethe Fellerer via INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo
For two generations, Emma Jung—the wife of the famous Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung—was remembered inside her family mostly as a beloved mother and grandmother. Her original work documenting the deep and rigorous exploration of her own unconscious simply wasn't discussed.
'No one was any longer aware of what she actually produced,' says Thomas Fischer, great-grandson of Carl and Emma—and the former director of the Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung—who currently serves as a board member and the editor for the foundation.
Now, 150 years after Carl Jung's birth, Emma and several of his other female collaborators are finally stepping into the spotlight and being recognized as brilliant thinkers of their own who helped shape some of Jung's most famous theories, including individuation and the archetypes.
Like Sigmund Freud, Jung—the founding father of analytical psychology—believed in the importance of the unconscious and dream analysis. (The two men enjoyed a close personal and professional relationship early in Jung's career, and Freud considered the younger man his successor until the two had a falling out.) Jung, however, broadened the concept to a theory he called individuation. Jung thought the deep psychological work of every human was not only exploring the individual unconscious but also exploring the collective unconscious (or the universal symbols and archetypes inherited and shared by all humans that can appear in places like dreams) and integrating those two forces with the conscious to achieve self-actualization.
Beyond establishing a new branch of psychoanalysis, Jung pioneered the idea of introversion and extroversion in his personality-type work that inspired the Myers-Briggs personality test. He originated the theory that every person has a 'shadow' self, or suppressed characteristics and desires. He identified 12 archetypes of the human psyche that have been used as storytelling devices by writers in all forms, including those in Hollywood. His ideas have influenced artists like Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists, writers like Herman Hesse and Olga Tokarczuk, and musicians like David Bowie and the South Korean boy band BTS.
In honor of Jung's sesquicentennial birthday, the XXIII International Congress on Analytical Psychology will be hosted in Zurich this August. But the opening presentation won't be about the man himself. Instead, the topic will be a new book published in January, Dedicated to the Soul: The Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung, which, for the first time, documents the private work of his wife, Emma.
'Emma Jung was at the center of [Carl] Jung's life,' says Sonu Shamdasani, Professor of Jung History at University College London and editor of The Red Book, Jung's dive into the depths of his own unconscious during a troubled time in his life, which had been locked away in a bank vault and left unpublished in his lifetime. 'Without Emma Jung, his work would not have been possible, and not just in terms of maintaining the household, raising the children, and so forth, but as a co-participant in his work.'
(Not an extrovert or an introvert? There's a word for that.)
There are many wives of great men who were only later given credit for the critical role they played in their husbands' work. (Pollock's wife Lee Krasner, Alfred Hitchcock's wife Alma Reville, and Vera Nabokov, to name a few). While Emma Jung was celebrated during her life and in the nearly 70 years since her death as a key supporter of her husband, the record has largely been silent on her role beyond wife, mother and associate to Jung—that is, on her independent inquiries into her own psyche that she expressed through poetry, paintings, dream analysis, lectures, and other writings that established her as an intellectual force in her own right.
And she isn't alone.
Jung was surrounded by female followers, so much so that the women were given derogatory nicknames at the time—including Jungfrauen ('Jung's women') and 'Valkyries.' Some started as patients, some as students, but many became scholars, psychoanalysts, and Jungian acolytes. Some also became Jung's lovers.
'These women had come from all over the world,' writes Maggy Anthony, author and one-time student at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, in Salome's Embrace: The Jungian Women. 'Once there, the charisma of Jung and his thought, which took the feminine seriously for the first time, induced them to want to share it with others through analysis and through their writing.'
Many of these women have been celebrated along the way for their role as Jung's muses, collaborators, and disciples. But in the past two decades, several, including Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff, have begun to step out of the great psychoanalyst's shadow. With the publication in January of Dedicated to the Soul, Emma also now is joining the ranks of Jungian woman who are being recognized for their original work and their contributions to the field of psychology.
'I hope people start to see the individuality of each and every one of these women, and that we better understand their contributions,' says Fischer. As a trained historian, Fischer says he hopes Jungian scholarship moves 'away from the hagiographic tale of Carl Jung.'
'He didn't operate in a vacuum. And that goes for the women, but also for other men around him. His work is deeply rooted in these intellectual networks and exchanges.' Antonia Anna "Toni" Wolff (1888-1953) was a Swiss Jungian analyst and a close associate and sometime lover of psychiatrist Carl Jung. Photograph by Bridgeman Images Maiden and Mother
Growing up in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, Emma Jung—née Rauschenbach—was an avid student who was denied an advanced education following the rules of propriety for women of her high-class station. Instead of going to college, she went to Paris on something of an independent study-finishing school year. After she returned home, she began exchanging letters with Jung in 1899. The exact details of how they first became acquainted remain unknown, but they did have some distant family ties (his uncle was an architect who built her family home; her mother babysit for young Carl on occasion as an act of charity for the struggling Jung family). Their courtship was filled with both romance and ideas. Jung encouraged Emma's intellectual curiosity and included lists of book recommendations in his letters.
Once they were married, Emma eagerly assisted her new husband with his work. Jung was at the start of his career, working for what would become the famous mental institution, the Burghölzli. Emma was his translator, notetaker, test and case study subject when needed, and even assisted him with patients. Over the course of their marriage, the Jungian education Emma received led her to become an analyst herself, as well as the first elected president of the Psychology Club of Zurich. She also published two books: one on the legend of the Holy Grail, a subject of fascination since her youth, and a set of papers exploring Jung's ideas of animus and anima, or the masculine and feminine aspects of the psyche.
Throughout the scholarship on and preservation work of Jung's legacy since his death in 1961, Emma has not been entirely overlooked. The description for the Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung, the foundation established by his heirs in 2007, states that they are 'dedicated to the maintenance and development of the literary and creative heritage of Carl Gustav Jung and his wife, Emma Jung-Rauschenbach.' The mission of the Haus C.G. Jung, the family home on the banks of Lake Zurich in Küsnacht, Switzerland, which is a public museum and still occupied by family members, is to keep 'the memory alive of the physician and explorer of the human soul, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), and that of his wife and associate, Emma Jung-Rauschenbach.'
All this—the work Emma had done in support or in tandem with her husband's ideas—the family knew about. But they didn't know what else she had been working on in private.
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That all changed when the family discovered a trove of her papers. According to Fischer, interest in Emma and the other women around Jung began to grow in the 1990s and early 2000s. Around that time, a French author named Imelda Gaudissart began research for a biography (eventually published in 2010) of Emma and approached the family about the rights to publish some of her papers. Ultimately, they declined. The reasons were two-fold: 'I felt it was our obligation to do her justice, and I wanted it to do myself,' Fischer explains. But also, they just didn't know what was in there. Family lore had it that Emma had destroyed a lot of her personal papers in the months before her death in 1955. Plus, the Jungs' children had other priorities.
'I think because in that first generation of descendants, they wanted to keep their mother private to them, they didn't even look into the material,' Fischer says. The keeper of the family archives had also been busy for years fielding requests concerning Carl Jung. 'Up until then, Emma Jung hadn't been that much in the focus, so I don't think he had too many reasons to check in more detail her papers.'
Gaudissart's interest prompted Fischer to take a deeper look into the family archives. What he found was a treasure trove that would become Dedicated to the Soul, a book he co-edited and published earlier this year.
Dedicated to the Soul is a collection of Emma's lectures, poetry, letters, and drawings that show the depth of Emma's private inquiry, the creativity and breadth of her thinking, and the strength of the analytical work she was doing on herself. Fischer describes the discovery as like finding pieces of Emma's mosaic 'to get a much better understanding of how she became who she was and who she was portrayed and remembered [as] at the end of her life.'
'We don't have to exaggerate; she doesn't necessarily have [Jung's] originality, but she's very curious. She works for years on her own psychological material and takes it to a very deep [place], and I think that that somehow got lost,' Fischer says. 'You could tell this woman made peace with her situation, namely in her married life. And you have to wonder how she did it. It can't have been easy.' Self and Shadow
One of the chief difficulties in Emma's marriage was the other women—and her husband's wandering eye when it came to his female collaborators and followers. Sabina Spielrein was one of the first.
Spielrein met Jung when she was committed to the Burghölzli at 19. Her upbringing had been difficult, characterized by emotional and possible sexual abuse. She reached her breaking point after the death of a beloved younger sister and eventually landed in the mental institution in Zurich where Jung was working and where she was diagnosed with hysteria.
For decades, the story told about Spielrein embodied all the sensational stereotypes of the Jungfrauen. She was reduced to the femme fatale who fell in love with and seduced the genius young doctor on the verge of developing a revolutionary new field in psychology. The dramatized and ahistorical portrayal of her life in David Cronenberg's 2011 A Dangerous Method didn't help.
The truth, of course, is much more complicated—and much more interesting. She was Jung's first affair, but not the last, and the exact nature of their relationship is not fully known. But at the Burghölzli, Spielrein turned her life around. Within three months, she was recovering, had applied to medical school, and was on her way to becoming 'one of the most innovative thinkers in psychology in the twentieth century,' according to an article in European Judaism by John Launer, the author of the first biography of Spielrein in English published in 2014.
'The erasure of her life story and intellectual achievements, and the invention in their place of an erotic walk-on part in Jung's life, is one of the more shocking examples of how women's histories have often been rewritten to diminish them,' Launer writes. Sabina Spielrein, who corresponded with both Jung and Freud and helped the latter develop the concept of the death instinct. Photograph by Eraza Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
Throughout her career, as catalogued by Launer, Spielrein conducted the first study of schizophrenic speech (the subject of her dissertation); came up with early ideas that contributed to the development of the death instinct, an idea later fully formed and introduced by Freud (who gave her a glancing nod in a footnote); wrote a handful of innovative papers on family dynamics; radically combined several scientific fields of study in her work on child development; and began working on ideas that would eventually pop back up in the field of evolutionary psychology.
Spielrein promoted her ideas through lectures and in her professional work, but there were several factors working against their having a lasting influence at that time, according to Klara Naszkowska, a gender, sexuality, and women's studies professor at Montclair State University and founding director of the International Association for Spielrein Studies.
First, her groundbreaking perspective on combining ideas from different disciplines extended to combining ideas from different schools of thought. Spielrein had a complicated relationship with Jung and Freud—the former for the obvious reasons, the latter due to a three-way correspondence that developed between Jung, Freud, and Spielrein, 'which puts both men in a poor light as they had tried to silence her' about the affair, according to Launer. But that didn't stop her from also trying to draw on both their schools of thought in her work. Unfortunately, by that time, the intellectual schism between Jung and his one-time mentor Freud was firmly in place, and the camps maintained a scholarly separation.
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Second, Spielrein moved to Russia in 1923, far away from the hub of the psychoanalytic movement. 'She basically moves to Mars,' says Naszkowska. Then, during the Holocaust, she and family were murdered by the Nazis, and 'she completely disappears from the intellectual record for 35 years.'
Naszkowska says the erasure of Spielrein started to change in the 1970s when a box of her papers was discovered during renovations at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva. People were initially interested in her because of her interactions with both Freud and Jung. While the first wave of attention focused on the affair, in the past few decades, more attention has been paid to Spielrein's own groundbreaking achievements.
The International Association for Spielrein Studies was founded in 2017. According to Naszkowska, 'The main idea behind it was always to make the wrongs right with our work, to do her justice that wasn't done to her during her lifetime, but also after her death for many, many, many decades, so that her name is known and so that her ideas not only receive the recognition they deserve, but also they're used, incorporated in syllabi, and taught.'
Toni Wolff may not have languished in quite the same decades-long obscurity, but her reputation and ideas have only begun to receive more serious attention since the publication of The Red Book in 2009, with her critical role in that period of Jung's life attracting more notice.
Wolff met Jung six years after Spielrein, but under similar circumstances. She would become one of the most serious of Jung's affairs, both in the intense connection between the two and in how interwoven Wolff became in the lives of Jung and his family.
Wolff arrived in Jung's world as a patient after a breakdown induced by the death of her father. Following the set pattern, she came for treatment and stayed as a Jungian convert after her recovery. According to Anthony, their professional relationship turned personal around the time that Jung was going through his seismic breakup with Freud and beginning the deep and difficult exploration of his own unconscious that would become The Red Book and set the foundation for his lifetime's work.
It was this last event that would establish their close relationship. 'For it was to Toni that he turned as he began his descent into the dark, largely unexplored realms of the unconscious,' Anthony writes. 'In essence, she had to become his analyst.'
Wolff would go on to become one of his primary assistants and his muse before becoming a professional analyst herself. While Wolff would work mostly within the Jungian model—unlike Spielrein, who also pursued inquiries outside of it—she was critical in developing a framework that addressed how Jung's idea of individuation specifically applied to women. She is best known for a paper she published in 1956 titled, 'Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche.'
When it comes to Jung's ideas, both Shamdasani and Fischer say that what the scholarship around the Jung women shows is that Jung was not on a solo intellectual journey. His work was collaborative, both in its nature and in the necessity for Jung to see that the ideas he was generating based on his own unconscious work were replicable in others.
'I think with every individual story that is being more profoundly researched, it becomes clear that [Jung] wasn't just a solitary genius working everything he ever wrote out from his inner self,' Fischer says. 'He operated in dialogue not only with his soul, but also with the people around him…I see much of it is an interplay, and it's sometimes hard to really pin it down to one person or the other as being the sole original originator of a concept or of an idea.'
Emma Jung, Spielrein, and Wolff aren't the only three women whose collaborations and ideas touched Carl Jung and who deserve their own spotlight. Their stories show that the work unpacking the lives and intellectual worlds of the early women of psychoanalysis will only lead to a deeper, richer understanding of the intellectual history of the field
As Emma wrote to her husband on February 5,1902: 'The world is full of the enigmatic and the mysterious, and people just live their lives without asking many questions…O who could know much, know all!'