Labyrinths

Emma was clever, attractive, and wealthy, one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland, when, at age seventeen, she met and fell in love with Carl Jung, a brilliant but penniless doctor working in a lunatic asylum. Determined to share his adventurous life and to continue her own studies, she was too young to understand Carl’s complex personality, which was laden with secrets, or to conceive what dramas lay ahead.

Labyrinths tells the story of Emma and Carl’s unconventional marriage, their friendship and subsequent rift with Sigmund Freud, and their contribution to the development of psychoanalysis. In its many twists and turns, the Jung marriage was indeed labyrinthine, and Emma was forced to fight with everything she had to keep her husband close to her. Carl’s belief in polygamy led to many affairs, including a ménage à trois with a former patient, Toni Wolff, that lasted some thirty years. But as Emma came to understand her husband better, the marriage thrived, and finally, always encouraged by Carl, Emma emerged to become a noted analyst in her own right.

At the center of this gripping book is a resourceful and intelligent woman long overshadowed by her famous husband, and the inside story of the foundations of the psychoanalytic movement.