Translate This Darkness : The Life of Christiana Morgan [Paperback]

Claire Douglas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 27, 1997

Christiana Morgan was an erotic muse who influenced twentieth-century psychology and inspired its male creators, including C. G. Jung, who saw in her the quintessential "anima woman." Here Claire Douglas offers the first biography of this remarkable woman, exploring how Morgan yearned to express her genius yet sublimated it to spark not only Jung but also her own lover Henry A. Murray, a psychologist who with her help invented the thematic apperception test (TAT). Douglas recounts Morgan's own contributions to the study of emotions and feelings at the Harvard Psychological Clinic and vividly describes the analyst's turbulent life: her girlhood in a prominent Boston family; her difficult marriage; her intellectual awakening in postwar New York; her impassioned analysis with Jung, including her "visions" of a woman's heroic quest, many of which furthered his work on archetypes; her love affairs and experiences with sexual experimentation; her alcoholism; and, finally, her tragic death.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As Carl Jung's patient in Zurich in 1926-27, American psychologist Christiana Morgan (1897-1967) made paintings of her trance-induced visions of an assertive woman's heroic quest. But Jung, according to this poignant biography, instructed Morgan to devote herself as subordinate and muse to her married lover, the psychologist Henry Murray. Neglecting her husband Will, Morgan worked unobtrusively alongside Murray at Harvard, coauthoring the Thematic Apperception Test and making unacknowledged contributions to his groundbreaking work on personality theory. Though she glamorized her role as mistress in a private mythology complete with carved icons and invented gods, the relationship, observes psychoanalyst Douglas, "was one more triangle that primarily served the interests of a man," contributing to Morgan's alcoholism and suicide by drowning. Douglas portrays an independent-minded woman who rebelled against her Boston Brahmin mother, had passionate friendships with Lewis Mumford and Alfred North Whitehead, but who ultimately betrayed herself by sacrificing her own creativity. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Douglas, a psychoanalyst, traces the life of Morgan, a lay analyst and research associate at Harvard's psychological clinic during the first half of the 20th century. Morgan worked closely with psychoanalyst Henry Murray and was Murray's lover for most of her adult life. She also profoundly affected and had intimate relationships with Carl Jung, Chaim Weizmann, Alfred North Whitehead, Lewis Mumford, and other pioneers of philosophy and psychology. The author describes how Morgan was able to crack society's shell despite its narrow view of the role of females in the 1900s and also explains why Morgan never received the recognition she deserved. Her frustration and unhappiness led to depression, alcoholism, sadomasochism, and suicide. This is an in-depth psychoanalytic and biographical study of a complex and interesting woman. For most serious psychology collections.
- Marguerite Mroz, Baltimore Cty. P.L.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 398 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (October 27, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691017352
• ISBN-13: 978-0691017358
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,121,098 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Different View, May 16, 2010

By 

Linda C. Gilbert (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Translate This Darkness : The Life of Christiana Morgan (Paperback)

I enjoyed this book. Loved the details and development of Christiana's early life and was excited in reading about the development of clinical services at Harvard. Disappointed with the rushed feeling and lack of adequate detail in the last chapter that would have made it a great biography. My own experience of things Jungian include just over 30+ years either as a patient (10 years), self-guided student (25 years), wife of Jungian analyst (10 years), etc. I've been around long enough to cherish the brilliance of Jung's contributions to the body of knowledge of the unconscious and the elemental makeup of the human psyche. I've also been around long enough to despair the hypocrisy I've witnessed in the Jungian community, including my own, as a result of the poor role model of a husband and lover that Jung inadvertently but unavoidably represented in his life and since. For instance, what is it with the worship of the introverted/intuitive function? It is really ghastly to watch someone nearly cut lose a finger on a cutting board only to be heard muttering sheepishly after, "I'm an intuitive type" - didn't Jung advocate for individuation and the integration of personality? Or how about all the virtual cash buy-outs of analytic titles, and sexual infidelities, all in the name of "The Self" (try to argue that one!)Sex and alcohol as tools of Active Imagination definitely have their drawbacks as we see in the life of Morgan and Murray. The amplification of symbols of the unconscious through art, writing, dance, and yes, sex, should lead to greater consciousness and, one would hope, greater humanity. How sad that the actual result too often is personal corruption due to self-serving interpretations of the work, contributing to the loss of true psychological intimacy with oneself and others. Let it be a lesson to those running to view the Red Book, that it is the potential red book in the psyche of each individual where the Grail is ultimately found.

15 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Jungian American Feminism, March 28, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Translate This Darkness : The Life of Christiana Morgan (Paperback)

Translate this Darkness is an unevenly argued book that one cannot decide is about how dangerous men are to women or how dangerous women are to themselves, or how dangerous life is to the living.

While on the one hand author Claire Douglas describes her heroine, Christiana Morgan, in sympathetic terms almost exclusively, Carl Jung's and Henry Murray's influence on Mrs. Morgan is seen as predominantly destructive. Their general existence in her life -- as father figures, as receivers of her endlessly extolled beauty and erotic influence -- is seen as parasitic. They are all 'round exploitative conquerors of the feminine mystique

One cannot help but simply exclaim out loud at several points in the book, especially during the epilogue, what a load of hypocritical American feminist rubbish it is. Why doesn't Christiana just leave Murray, find someone else, and write something in her own right. Jung's 'women', after all, did not need his permission to write and create and have lives of their own.

Douglas claims that these men somehow did not allow Morgan to take responsibility for her own life. Her famous visions, painted by her, and the subject of a four-and-a-half year seminar by Jung in the 1930s (which Douglas has edited, published by Princeton) are considered by Douglas to be of biblical importance to the women of the world. Rather than being used to further an understanding of the feminine by Morgan, these visions were expropriated by Jung for his own supposedly deluded purposes, and were "feared" by Murray as they represented an overwhelming feminine "power" that must be thwarted, lest he lose his own masculine power to it.

First Jung: for the great part of Morgan's life he was simply 3,000 miles away in another part of the world, after the age of 50 making use of Morgan's visions as he made use of so much other diverse literature that influenced his ideas. To say that he unjustly "bent" Morgan's visions to satisfy his own theory of archetypes, thereby damaging Christiana Morgan's soul, becomes irreconcilable when one considers Douglas's statement that these visions also helped Jung to develop those theories (should have been good for her soul, no?)

Wolfgang Pauli's dreams and visions served the same purpose for Jung (see the book Atom and Archetype). Pauli, it may be argued, also lived a life of relatively unrealized potential. He had bouts of alcoholism as did Morgan, and died relatively young, but no one would think to lay this at Jung's feet, perhaps because Pauli was a man and had won a Nobel prize. Morgan was just a poor uneducated girl with a lot of potential that was subsumed by the power of male masculinity and not allowed to be realised into some Golden Flower, if we are to believe the thesis.

Now Murray: he was influenced by Jung to take Christiana as a mistress. This is because Murray was already married, as was Morgan. So it's a tough call who's at fault here. If it was a man's influence that has again ruined the life of yet another woman, blaming Murray for being the wrong man begs the question that there is probably a right man. If the answer is that there should be no man and that Morgan could have gone it alone with strength and conviction, why didn't she, if she had so much "power"? Perhaps she was not so powerful, after all, and certainly without Jung, her visions would not have seen the light of day, as they were "visioned" with his encouragement.

We are left simply with a melodrama of Jungian proportion, an analysis that has been terminated prematurely through the exhaustion and limitations of the two participants. Douglas comes in to pronounce that the unjust winners are still the men and losers the women, in the process ignoring or misrepresenting the success of the women in Jung's circle, and smarter women everywhere.

Men are once again back to being faulted for wanting something from women. To make something out of a mass of visions which would in another time and place be considered certifiable, is not enough. It remains with feminism that it must be the cake and the eating of it, too, something which, if Ms. Douglas would only admit, Jung and Murray were simply not able to have with the impunity she implies, and, therefore, not at all.

2 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Error in author listing, January 14, 2001

By 

claire douglas (Malibu, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Translate This Darkness : The Life of Christiana Morgan (Paperback)

Sorry, I don't know how to let you know other than this but you have an extra author's name in the listing of my book. It is by Claire Douglas alone. Your Chaire Douglas as co author needs to be deleted. Whoever is reading this please send it on to the right person. Thanks. C. D. As I'm on the subject: my The Woman in the Mirror is out again thanks to you, Holly, and Backinprint.com and through the authors guild. Could you also list it? Thank you.