The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (92 page)

His son Franz called Jung “maddening and marvelous.” He cheated at games and was a poor loser, walked around the garden dressed only in ragged shorts, was a gourmet cook. He loved detective novels and dogs. “The Sage of Zurich” died at age 85.

LOVE LIFE:
It was 22 years after its occurrence that, in a letter to Freud, Jung finally confessed to one of the significant events in his sex life: “My veneration for you has something of the nature of a ‘religious crush’ because of its undeniable erotic undertone. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshiped.” The man has never been identified. The incident, he felt, made the transference of his male patients repugnant to him. He and Freud had a stormy relationship, marked by intense quarrels and emotional reconciliations, during one of which Freud fainted and was carried to a couch by Jung. Both admitted the homosexual overtones in their natures, never given physical expression; both were basically heterosexual beings.

Jung’s early loves included a village girl he met only briefly but with whom he was enraptured; a friend’s good-looking but slightly cross-eyed mother; and a French-Swiss girl he nearly became engaged to in his student days.

Emma Rauschenbach, whom he married on Feb. 14, 1903, was the major love of his life. When he was a young medical student, visiting family friends, he caught sight of her—a 15-year-old in braids, standing on a staircase—and remarked to a friend, who did not take him seriously, that she would be his wife.

It was six years before his prophecy was fulfilled. Emma was an intelligent and pretty girl who had been burdened at 12 by her father’s dependence upon her when he suddenly went blind. Jung, eloquent and intellectual, represented an exciting escape. Their courtship was romantic (boating picnics and love letters), but they probably didn’t sleep together before they married. Jung later wrote of their honeymoon at Lake Como: “My wife was apprehensive—but all went well.

We got into an argument about the rights and wrongs of distributing money between husbands and wives. Trust a Swiss bank account to break into a honeymoon in Italy.” They had five children—four girls and a boy. It is not known whether they practiced contraception, though Jung wrote Freud that he tried

“every conceivable trick to stem the tide of these little blessings.”

At first their marriage was idyllic. By 1906, however, Jung was having dreams, one of which, about two horses, was interpreted by Freud as “the failure of a rich marriage.” Jung replied, “I am happy with my wife in every way …

there has been no sexual failure, more likely a social one.” The dream held, he believed, “an illegitimate sexual wish that had better not see the light of day.”

In 1907 he became briefly infatuated with a woman he met while traveling with Emma in present-day Yugoslavia. In 1909 one of his patients wanted him to impregnate her, and he confessed that his professional relationship with her had

“polygamous components.” However, these two experiences only set the stage for the other important woman in his life—Toni Wolff, 13 years his junior, who came to him as a patient in 1910. Later, during his “confrontation with his unconscious,”

a near breakdown which began in 1913 and lasted several years, she helped him search out his
anima
, the female element of his nature. In Jung’s typecasting of the women in his life, she was the “
femme inspiratrice
” (“female inspiration”), while Emma was wife and mother. Toni was elegant, with a delicately modeled face. At Jung’s insistence she became a friend of the family, coming to Sunday dinner at the big house at Küsnacht on Lake Zurich. Emma was jealous, but Jung had his heart set on a triangle, which he later justified in theories about marriage in which the “many-faceted gem” (Carl), needing more than the “simple cube” (Emma), looks outside of the marital relationship for satisfaction. (According to biographer Barbara Hannah, Jung felt that fathers must live “the whole of their erotic life” or the “unlived life is then unconsciously displaced onto the daughters.”) So powerful was his personality that he came close to convincing both women that the triangle was an ideal situation. It lasted for almost 40 years. Emma and Toni both became practicing analysts. Emma gave lectures on the Holy Grail and exchanged advice with Freud; Toni developed original theories about female function types. However, Toni, restive in her role as mistress in straitlaced Zurich, began to demand that Jung divorce Emma. He refused, and his own disenchantment expressed itself in criticism of her; for example, when he saw her new apartment he said,

“Only Toni would have gone to live in a place with marble pillars and a study like Mussolini’s.” Toni, heartbroken, drinking and smoking too much, died at 64 of a heart attack. Emma died two years later in 1955. She and Jung had been married 52 years. “She was a queen! She was a queen!” cried Jung after her death.

Many of his followers were young female intellectuals, known jocularly as the “Jung-Frauen.” Though only a few may have slept with him, they tended to adore him for his bearlike appeal, his sensibility, his empathy for women. He saw beneath the surface, an endearing quality. One old patient of Jung’s, whom Freud called a “phenomenally ugly female,” was to Jung a pleasant woman who “had such lovely delusions and said such interesting things.”

Among his women friends was Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, a flamboyant creature and supposedly an ex-circus rider, who created Eranos, a discussion group for intellectuals which met at her home. The meetings at least once degenerated into debauchery; an anonymous participant said it was the “nearest I ever came to wicked abandonment in my life.” Jung was there, “bubbling over with wit, mockery, and drunken spirit.” Some of these women claimed to have been his lovers. One gave him poor marks in lovemaking while another, Jolanda Jacobi, claimed he was undersexed. A cynical Jungian countered, “Presumably
she
hadn’t been his mistress anyway.”

Ruth Bailey, an Englishwoman he met in Africa who was his friend for more than 35 years, became his housekeeper and companion after Emma died. He was then over 80 and cantankerous. After a quarrel over two tomatoes, he advised her, “All you have to remember is not to do anything to make me angry.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
“The prerequisite for a good marriage … is the license to be unfaithful.”

—A.E.

Crusader For B.C.

MARGARET SANGER (Sept. 14, 1883–Sept. 6, 1966)

HER FAME:
Margaret Sanger was among the foremost pioneers of sexual freedom and enjoyment and of birth control in the early 20th century. She faced extraordinary opposition—and triumphed over it—in her campaign to educate doctors and laymen, change laws, popularize the use of diaphragms, and start birth-control clinics throughout the world. She also contributed vitally to the development of the pill.

HER PERSON:
Margaret Sanger, a

fiery, petite, redheaded woman, was the

daughter of a pious Catholic mother and

a tyrannical, freethinking Socialist Irish

father. One of 11 children, Margaret

grew up in Corning, N.Y., watching her

mother’s tuberculosis worsen with each

child she bore and each of her seven

miscarriages. When Margaret was 16,

TB killed her mother. This, plus her

childhood privations as part of an over—

large, poor family, inspired Margaret

toward her crusade for birth control, or

B.C., as she called it. A significant turning

point occurred for her when, working as

a maternity nurse in New York, she tended

a woman hemorrhaging as the result of a self-induced abortion. As the attendant doctor was leaving, the patient pleaded with him desperately, begging for contraceptive advice. He laughed and advised her to make “Jake [her husband] sleep on the roof.” Months later, the woman died after another self-induced abortion.

From then on, Margaret resolved to get to the root of the problem. And with her ceaseless work, she truly turned the tide for the women of her time.

SEX LIFE:
“Saint Margaret,” as she was called by a grateful correspondent, was a very complicated woman, and not always a saint to her two husbands and her many lovers. Throughout her entire life she repeated a trying emotional pattern, being generally in love with some man who was just out of reach, sexually or emotionally, and bored with the one who was too easily within her grasp.

Margaret not only was a proponent of B.C. but also vigorously espoused

“free love” and sensual, spiritual sex. She told her first husband, William Sanger, an architect, that she must be free to make love with other men if she wished. It was for “the cause,” she explained; and furthermore, although she and Bill were often separated by their careers, sex was the only thing that could put her to sleep at night when she was tense and nervous. He responded tartly, “I still hold that intercourse is not to be classed with a square meal.” Eventually she divorced Sanger and more or less took custody of their children, while continuing to take a dazzling series of lovers.

In 1922 Margaret married again—this time a fabulously rich, uncultured Dutch businessman from South Africa. J. Noah H. Slee was 64 and she was 39. Margaret demanded a marriage contract that allowed her a private apartment in their home and the freedom to come and go as she pleased, with no questions asked. He very reluctantly agreed. And she, after teaching him how to make love more artfully, continued to take lovers until he died in 1941.

Nonetheless, Mr. Slee called her “the adventure of my life” and remained sexually vigorous throughout the marriage, although he found her neglect

maddening. Margaret Sanger could never be truly married to a man, for she was married first to her cause.

SEX PARTNERS:
The list of her lovers is long, for Margaret loved sex, passion, romance,
and
adoration from several men at a time. Her partners ranged from a hot-blooded Spanish anarchist to an editor of the
London Times Literary
Supplement
. For much of her life she had an intimate friendship with the great sexologist Havelock Ellis, whom she called “the King.” Whether or not they were actual lovers is unknown, for Ellis was essentially impotent until he was in his 60s. Nonetheless, Margaret practiced what Ellis preached—free love. She had serious affairs with diverse men—Herbert Simonds, a chemical engineer; Angus Snead MacDonald, a lusty architect from Kentucky; and Hugh de Selincourt, a cultured but mediocre novelist who practiced “Karezza,” an East Indian method of male sexual control. Her most celebrated lover was the English writer H. G. Wells. Although married, he was a notorious womanizer. He was 53, she 42, when in 1921 they began a passionate affair that continued on and off for years. In 1924, after a night of sex in London, she received a two-word note from Wells in the morning: “Wonderful! Unforgettable!” Margaret described Wells as “a sort of naughty boy-man.” Once, when they spoke together at a B.C.

conference, she feared that the ribald things Wells whispered in her ear onstage could be heard over the PA system throughout the hall.

HER ADVICE:
Margaret wrote numerous books full of advice about sex, love, and birth control, as well as an autobiography. At one point she wrote that the male sex urge is “blind, imperious, and driving,” and in a book entitled
Happiness in Marriage
she advised men to be tender on their wedding night and to delay their climaxes. She likened the sex act to a musical symphony, culminating in the bliss of simultaneous orgasm. “To be the master of his passion instead of its slave is the first essential rule in love etiquette every young husband must learn,”

she said, and outlined these nuptial rules: “(1) Avoid hurry. (2) Avoid violence. (3) Seek first of all to allay nervous fears and apprehension.”

HER THOUGHTS:
“There are three uses or purposes for sexual intercourse—

physical relief, procreation, and communion. The first two have little to do with the art of love. Power, says Balzac in his
Physiology of Love
, does not consist in striking hard and often, but in striking properly.”

“Never be ashamed of passion. If you are strongly sexed, you are richly endowed.”

“Especially in the case of women may the damage entailed by too long continued abstinence bring about deep disturbances.”

As an old woman, she told her 16-year-old granddaughter: “Kissing, petting, and even intercourse are all right as long as they are sincere. I have never given a kiss in my life that wasn’t sincere. As for intercourse, I’d say three times a day was about right.”

—A.W.