137 - Arthur I. Miller [9]
The fur-coat ladies
Jung had also started lecturing at the University of Zürich, where he held students spellbound. He ranged over not only psychiatry but also history, culture, mysticism, hysteria, and family dynamics, focusing particularly on women’s problems. Many in his audience were wealthy women from Zürich’s high society—his “fur-coat ladies.” After lectures they would flock to talk to him.
Some of the fur-coat ladies began to invite the professor back to their homes for private consultations. There were no ethical guidelines in psychoanalysis in those days and the treatment sessions, often intense, sometimes ended in sex. Jung’s flirtations began to get out of hand. But the more dangerous they became, the more they excited him. He bragged of his “heroic efforts” to keep his female patients at arm’s length. The hospital community was small and gossip quickly spread.
Emma was painfully aware of her husband’s infidelities. Eager to placate her, he resigned from the Burghölzli, allowed her to assume a larger role in his day-to-day work, and built a new house for their growing family in Küsnacht, outside Zürich. She was pregnant with their third child in another effort to bring the family closer.
Jung even analyzed Emma to convince her that the rumors of his infidelities were untrue. In fact this was far from the case. As he wrote to Freud, “the prerequisite for a good marriage is license to be unfaithful.” Jung soon resumed his infidelities. Whenever Emma threatened divorce he would suddenly become incapacitated, claiming fatigue from overwork or suffering a serious accident such as falling down stairs. Emma would have to drop everything to nurse him back to health. Eventually she resigned herself to the situation.
Jung meets Freud
Jung first became famous for his word-association tests. In these he measured patients’ responses to stimulus words such as “mother,” “father,” and “sad,” and noted cases where they did not reply or hesitated before replying. He concluded that the slower the response, the more deeply the patient was delving into his unconscious. The speed and quality of the responses, he wrote, could be explained by the action of “feeling-toned complexes,” which he later abbreviated to “complexes.” These, he suggested, existed below the conscious level and could only be perceived when the patient’s threshold of attention was lowered by using stimulus words.
Like Freud he claimed that experiments of this sort were proof of the unconscious. But while he agreed with Freud’s hypothesis that there was a personal unconscious that was constructed out of worldly experiences, he was also beginning to sense the presence of a deeper shared unconscious that could only be imagined.
His conclusions seemed to square with Freud’s concept of repression in which people kept their neuroses locked up in their unconscious. The role of the psychoanalyst, in Freud’s view, was to root them out to improve the patient’s conscious life. Jung disagreed with Freud’s hypothesis that sexual trauma was the primary cause of repression. He was eager to meet Freud and talk through these points of difference and in 1907 arranged to visit him in Vienna.
On that first historic meeting, Jung arrived at Freud’s apartment for lunch at 1 p.m. and left some thirteen hours later. The main point of contention was Jung’s belief that parapsychology deserved to be classed as a scientific field. Born in 1856, Freud was nineteen years older than Jung. He was only five foot seven, but his immaculate grooming, sharply observant eyes, and ever-present cigar gave him an aura of authority.
Freud’s eldest son Martin was present and recalled vividly Jung’s “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 and thin close-cropped hair.” Jung dominated the meeting with stories of his cases