| Emma Jung | |
|---|---|
| Born | Emma Rauschenbach March 30, 1882 Schaffhausen, Switzerland |
| Died | November 27, 1955 (aged 73) Zürich, Switzerland |
| Nationality | Swiss |
| Occupation | Psychoanalyst |
Emma Rauschenbach Jung, (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.
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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.
The Jungs married on 14 February 1903, seven years after they first met. Together they had five children: Agathe, Gret, Franz, Marianne and Helene.
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 is strongly 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.[1]
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.[2]