A sensational, eye-opening account of Emma Jung’s organic relationship to Carl Gustav Jung and the hitherto unfamiliar function she played in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement.

Clever and ambitious, Emma Jung yearned to study the natural sciences in the University of Zurich. However the rigid rules of correct Swiss society at the start of the twentieth century dictated a woman of Emma’s stature-one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland-travel to Paris to ‘complete’ her education, about Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Relationship to Carl, and the first Years of Psychoanalysis to prepare for relationship to a suitable man.

Engaged to the son of one of her father’s rich business colleagues, Emma’s conventional and predictable life was upended when she met Carl Jung. The child of the penniless pastor operating as an assistant physician within an crazy asylum, Jung dazzled Emma along with his cleverness, confidence, and visual appearance. More essential, he offered her freedom through the confines of a traditional haute-bourgeois lifestyle. But Emma didn’t understand that Jung’s charisma masked a dark interior-fostered by a strange, isolated childhood and the intimate abuse he’d experienced like a boy-as well like a compulsive philandering that would threaten their marriage.

Using characters, family interviews, and wealthy, never-before-published archival material, Catrine Clay illuminates the Jungs’ unorthodox marriage and explores how it shaped-and was shaped by-the scandalous brand-new movement of psychoanalysis. Most important, Clay discloses how Carl Jung could do not have attained what he do without Emma assisting him through his personal torments. The Emma that emerges in the webpages of Labyrinths is a strong, amazing female, who, with her husband’s encouragement, becomes a successful analyst in her very own right.