Translate This Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan

ISBN: 0671703781

Author: Douglas, Claire

Condition: Used

A fascinating biography of the beautiful and erotically charged woman whose visions of her own heroic quest inspired Jung and influenced his psychology.Exceptionally creative and beautiful Christiana Morgan was an erotic muse who influenced twentieth-century psychology and inspired its creators, including Jung himself, who saw in her the quintessential "anima woman" who ignites gifted men.The first biography of this remarkable figure is an elegant and insightful portrait of a woman who yearned to express her genius yet sublimated it to spark Jung and her lover Henry Murray, a psychologist who invented a novel personality theory of his own. Claire Douglas brings the early days of analytical psychology alive as she traces Morgan's turbulent life: her girlhood in a prominent Boston family; her society debut and early loves; her escape into nursing in World War I; her difficult marriage; her intellectual awakening in the ferment of postwar New York; her impassioned analysis with Jung; her love affairs and friendships with Chaim Weizmann, Henry A. Murray, Alfred North Whitehead, Lewis Mumford and others; her role as an analyst and a contributor to psychological thought at the Harvard Psychological Clinic; her visionary quest with Jung and later at her Romantic tower retreat; her tragic death.Based on access to Morgan's papers and thirteen years' research, the book includes some of Morgan's own illustrations of her harrowing visions. At once compelling in human terms and riveting from a feminist point of view, this authoritative portrait of a woman's struggles in a man's domain explores a vital question: how well has the world of psychology listened to the female soul?