The Women Around Jung: Emma, Toni Wolff, and Sabina Spielrein

Three women shaped Carl Jung’s life and work in overlapping, complicated ways, and the historical record has treated them very differently. One got a standing Wednesday dinner and a place at his seminars for over four decades. One was, by his own account, the reason he built his theory of psychological types at all — and was then written out of the story that mattered most to her for the better part of a century. One was murdered by a Nazi death squad along with her two daughters.

The timeline

Emma Jung (Rauschenbach): the wife who financed the theory and then built her own

Emma Rauschenbach was, at the time of her 1903 marriage to Jung, reportedly the second-richest heiress in Switzerland — her father owned the watch manufacturer IWC Schaffhausen. Her money underwrote the early Jung household and, by most accounts, gave Jung the financial freedom to leave a conventional psychiatric career path. She raised five children (Agathe, Gret, Marianne, Helene, and Franz) and, for decades, functioned as what one biographer has called his “intellectual editor.”

She did not stay in that supporting role. In 1930 she began formal training and work as an analyst herself, and spent roughly the last thirty years of her life on a scholarly study of the Grail legend read through Jungian psychology. She died in 1955 with the manuscript unfinished; Marie-Louise von Franz spent a further fifteen years completing it, and The Grail Legend was published under both their names in 1960 (German) and 1970 (English).

Toni Wolff: the arrangement Emma tolerated, and the theory Wolff helped build

Jung’s relationship with Toni Wolff began in 1913, when she was 25 and he was 38, and continued for the rest of her life — forty years. Jung reportedly told Emma directly that he did not consider Wolff a mistress but an “other wife.” A working routine formed around it: Jung had dinner at Wolff’s home on Wednesdays; she came to the Jung household in Küsnacht on Sundays; the two women are reported to have sat on either side of him at his seminars, and Wolff often travelled with him on lecture tours. Accounts describe the arrangement as accepted, if not comfortable, within the family and fully accepted by Jung’s analysands.

Wolff was not a passive figure in this. From the 1920s she worked as Jung’s professional collaborator, seeing many of the same patients he did in a complementary role — by most accounts more focused on the personal, practical dimension of analysis where Jung worked at the archetypal level. She is credited with helping Jung identify, define and name several of his best-known concepts, including anima, animus, persona, and the framework of psychological types. She died in 1953, aged 64, eight years before Jung.

Sabina Spielrein: the patient, the paper, and the eight decades of silence

Spielrein’s case is the one where the record is most uncomfortable, and least resolved.

She was admitted to the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in 1904, at 19, and became Jung’s first sustained psychoanalytic case. The therapeutic relationship became a romantic one and, by the accounts that survive, was never properly closed as therapy before it became something else. Spielrein recovered, went on to medical school, and became an analyst and theorist in her own right — publishing “Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being” in 1912, in which she introduced the idea of a destructive drive operating alongside sexuality.

In 1920, Freud drew on that same idea in developing his theory of the death instinct. He did not credit her. Her contribution went largely unmentioned in the Freudian literature on the subject for decades. Spielrein herself was murdered in August 1942, along with her two daughters, Renata and Eva, by the SS Einsatzgruppe D death squad at Zmievskaya Balka outside Rostov-on-Don, part of the mass killing of roughly 27,000 people, most of them Jewish.

Her own letters and diaries — including previously unknown letters from Jung to her — sat undiscovered in a University of Geneva basement until 1977, when the psychoanalyst Aldo Carotenuto learned of the cache and eventually published it. Only then, more than three decades after her death, did Spielrein’s own role in the early history of psychoanalysis begin to be reassessed on its own terms rather than as a footnote to Jung’s or Freud’s.

The daughters who kept the archive

Two of Jung’s five children have their own, smaller footprint in the historical and search record.

Agathe Niehus-Jung (1904–1998), the eldest, worked alongside her sister Marianne on preparing their father’s papers for publication, and specifically played a role in preparing The Red Book for its eventual release. Gret Baumann-Jung (1906–1995) took her father’s ideas in an unexpected direction: she became a well-known astrologer in the Zurich area, publishing on a psychological approach to astrology, including an analysis of Jung’s own horoscope. She recorded a remark Jung made to her shortly before his death, discussing horoscopes: “The funny thing is that the darned stuff even works after death.”

Where to check this for yourself

• Wikipedia’s sourced entries on Emma Jung and Toni Wolff.
• The Swiss National Museum’s account of Sabina Spielrein’s rediscovery as a figure in her own right.
• Wikipedia’s entry on Sabina Spielrein, including the circumstances of her death and the 1977 discovery of her papers.

What is still unclear

The precise chronology of when Spielrein and Jung’s relationship became romantic, and exactly when and how it ended, is contested between her own later accounts, Jung’s family’s accounts, and the secondary scholarship built on the 1977 letters — this site has not read the primary Carotenuto edition directly and is relying on secondary summaries of it. And beyond the handful of facts above, independent biographical detail on Agathe Niehus-Jung and Gret Baumann-Jung is thin in the sources available here; both deserve more than this page currently gives them.

Where this site cannot verify something, it says so rather than filling the gap.