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Translate This Darkness : The Life of Christiana Morgan
Claire Douglas Manufacturer: Princeton University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback  General
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ASIN: 0691017352 |
Book Description
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.
Customer Reviews:
Jungian American Feminism.......2003-03-29
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.
Error in author listing.......2001-01-15
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