California psychoanalyst Douglas turns a fascinated but
short-sighted eye to the life of Christiana Morgan, a woman of
influence in the formative years of American psychoanalysis. A
blue-blooded Bostonian through her mother, Morgan rebelled against
the life of ease prepared for her by rushing into an engagement
with a Harvard boy-turned-soldier on the eve of his departure for
France during WW I. Busy as a nurse while her betrothed was losing
his humanity to the horrors of trench warfare, Douglas found her
subsequent marriage far from harmonious as Bill Morgan struggled to
find his niche as a civilian. A child failed to add stability, with
Christiana finding time while living in N.Y.C. to have an affair
with Zionist Chaim Weizmann. Her attraction to future psychoanalyst
Henry Murray led to a fiery passion when they went to Cambridge
University to study, accompanied by their spouses. Jung's writings
and Herman Melville's Pierre provided sustenance to feed the pair's
infatuation, and when Murray and the Morgans traveled to Zurich in
the mid-1920's to be analyzed, Christiana's beauty, along with her
visions and drawings - rich in the archetypal imagery Jung was
exploring - enchanted Jung as well. But Christiana returned to
America with her self-doubts unresolved, and, though she became
Murray's right hand in leading the Harvard Psychological Clinic,
the couple's passion suffered from his infidelity, leading her to
bouts of alcoholism and reclusion, and finally to suicide in the
1960's. Christiana's tragic fife has little impact as presented
here, however; Douglas's narrow focus on the Morgan/Murray love
story leaves no room for a larger social and intellectual view,
with the cloying intimacy of the prose, as well as extensive (and
unjustified) excerpts from Morgan's correspondence and diaries,
making the narrative tedious and turgid. The merits of what might
have been a useful biography are squandered here in stylistic
excess and single-minded scholarship. (Kirkus Reviews)
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.
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