The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  Freud had a huge appetite for sex, but mainly as an intellectual pursuit. When he was only 41 he wrote to Fliess, “Sexual excitation is of no more use to a person like me.” He lived by a thoroughly Victorian moral code. Even though his theories stressed the power of unconscious sexual impulses, Freud edited such wishes out of his own behavior. He was, after all, a married man, and he had said that no marriage was secure until the wife had succeeded in making herself a mother to her husband. After six children in rapid succession, his desires may have been quenched by anxieties about contraception. In 1908 he said, “Marriage ceases to furnish the satisfaction of sexual needs that it promised, since all the contraceptives available hitherto impair sexual enjoyment, hurt the fine susceptibilities of both partners, and even actually cause illness.”

  There was one instance when Freud admitted he dreamed about other women. In 1909 he traveled to the U.S. with Jung and other colleagues to deliver a series of lectures. One morning upon awakening, Freud confided to Jung he was having erotic dreams about American women. “I haven’t been able to sleep since I came to America,” confessed Freud. “I continue to dream of prostitutes.” “Well, why don’t you do something about it?” said Jung. Freud recoiled in horror. “But I am a married man!” he exclaimed.

  Freud’s theories described the forces shaping human behavior as sexual. But culture siphoned off the instinctual energy of sex and sublimated it into social functioning. Freud’s own life epitomized the viewpoint he thought tragic but true: “The sexual life of a civilized man is seriously disabled.”

  HIS THOUGHTS: It is hard to imagine anyone having more thoughts on sex than Sigmund Freud. While some psychiatrists have observed the penis attached to the boy, Dr. Freud found the boy attached to the penis. Indeed, the penis was the axis of Freud’s universe. Not having a penis, he thought, implied lack of the masculine virtues of strength and rationality, and his view of women as inferior to men bears this out. “Penis envy” was the basic factor in Freud’s psychology of women; they could feel compensated for their deficiency only by having children. Woman’s highest role was that of “beloved wife” in a marriage based on sexual inequality.

  Freud warned of “the harm that is inherent in sexuality, [it] being one of the most dangerous activities of the human being.” Since “our civilization is built up entirely at the expense of sexuality,” Freud concluded that the cultured individual was necessarily repressed. Sex, by its power to reassert primal urges, had the potential to undermine society. In spite of such dire views, Freud claimed to “stand for an incomparably freer sexual life,” but chose not to partake of that freedom. He saw no implications for himself when he said, “Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life … apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this.”

  —K.P.

  The Beloved Of The Jung-Frauen

  CARL GUSTAV JUNG (July 26, 1875-June 6, 1961)

  HIS FAME: A German-Swiss contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Jung was the creator and father of analytical psychology, which incorporated many of his theories, including those of collective unconscious, the attitude types (extrovert and introvert), and the four function types (thought, intuition, feeling, and sensation).

  HIS PERSON: A strange and imaginative minister’s son, as a child Carl had visions, one of God defecating on a cathedral. He developed a lifelong interest in folklore from listening to peasants’ tales and claimed he had two personalities.

  Though he wanted to be an archaeologist, he chose medicine as a profession for practical reasons. In 1903, married and practicing psychiatry at a Zurich clinic, he began a study of word association, which led him to correspond with Sigmund Freud. The two met in 1907. Jung thought Freud “the first man of importance I had encountered”; Freud thought Jung “magnificent.” They had their differences; for example, Freud wasn’t keen on Jung’s interest in parapsychology, and Jung was not a total believer in Freud’s sexual theories. Of Freud’s “Little Hans” theory (which contended that children believe that girls are castrated boys), Jung said, “Agatha [his little daughter] has never heard of Little Hans.” When their close collaboration came to a bitter end in 1913, Sándor Ferenczi, an associate of Freud’s, quipped, “The Jung no longer believe in Freud.”

  Jung in 1912, just before his mental crisis

  Jung went on to develop his own “school,” run his institute, write his books, and travel to New Mexico and Africa to study primitive cultures. From these studies he formulated his theory of mythological archetypes common to all cultures. At his retreat in Bollingen, on Lake Zurich, he himself built a tower-shaped house and annex to which he could withdraw. When there he led a simple life—cutting his own wood, carving stone, and meditating.

  Jung was a bull of a man, 6 ft. 1 in. tall with rough-hewn features, visionary eyes, and an imposing physicality. His sense of humor was robust (Freud once defended its coarseness) and witty (“Show me a sane person and I’ll cure him for you”). He had a ferocious temper and a tendency to be callous; he once called a patient with a syphilis phobia a “filthy swine.” His leaning toward the grandiose may have inspired his initial admiration of Hitler (“a spiritual vessel”) and the Nazis (“the twilight of the gods”), which earned him just reproach from Jews; his reply was that they were paranoid. By 1939 he had changed his mind about Hitler and deemed him “more than half crazy.”

  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.”r />
  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.”