Emma Jung

Who they were

Emma Jung is often remembered only as Carl Jung's wife, which undersells her considerably. She practised as an analyst from 1930 and was the first elected president of the Psychology Club of Zurich. Her two long essays on the animus and the anima are still set texts in analyst training — and notably, she wrote about the animus from the inside, as a woman describing her own experience of the inner masculine figure, rather than theorising about women from outside. She spent decades on a study of the Grail legend, reading the quest as an image of psychological search; she died before finishing it, and Marie-Louise von Franz completed the work.