A Forgotten Visionary

Christiana Morgan and A New Class Starting Tomorrow

I was in Maine last weekend delivering a lecture and workshop about one of the founders of American psychology, a woman named Christiana Morgan. Before the workshop, I had the honor of visiting three different archives at Harvard University to research her history and view some of her unpublished work. Despite being a co-founder of the influential Harvard Psychological Clinic, a skilled clinician, a mentor to countless reputable psychologists, the co-author of a widely used psychological test, a visionary, and an artist, Christiana’s legacy has been largely lost or misattributed to the name of a male colleague.

Born in 1897, Christiana had been expected to marry and have children, which she did at ages nineteen and twenty. But she craved a life of the mind and was constantly restless and dissatisfied, worrying that something was wrong with her for being unable to live happily in the roles others expected of her. In 1926, at the age of twenty-eight, Christiana traveled to Zurich to undergo analysis with Carl Jung. She brought with her questions for which she was desperately seeking answers.

“Am I repressing maternal instincts, or am I just born to emphasize something else as much if not more?”

“Why do I feel it is such a curse for a woman to have my psychology? It seems to be against all her right development.”

Jung was astounded by Christiana’s intelligence and her acumen for psychological work, and he described her as having a benevolent fate because of her inner struggle and her search for answers at such a young age. While the journey of individuation has often been ascribed to people in “the second half of life” in Jungian psychology, Jung celebrated Christiana’s search in her late twenties.

“I have seen people even at sixty who finally discovered that they had seen only half of the world, that they had lived only half of their life, which is of course a very sad discovery at that age,” Jung said.

While in analysis, Jung taught Christiana a method called “active imagination” that he’d developed a decade earlier to provide direct engagement with the archetypal unconscious. He viewed her capacity for inner work as unusually skilled and her visions as providing a female equivalent to the male encounter with the unconscious he’d recently experienced. Jung was curious to understand the similarities and differences in the journey of individuation for men and women.

“You are a pioneer woman,” Jung told Christiana.

He instructed her to carefully record and paint her visions, just as he’d done with his Red Book. Christiana engaged faithfully and placed the 100 visions that emerged during that time in large leather-bound folios, volumes which are now housed in the rare book archives at Harvard University.

Here are some of her paintings from those years.

Between 1930-1934, Jung lectured on Christiana’s visions to explore the archetypal symbolism and the sequence of female individuation. These lectures are available for study in two thick, expensive volumes known as The Vision Seminars. But, unfortunately, her original work has yet to be published or made available. There’s still no way to read her words directly, in their proper sequence, without commentary—much of it archaic.

A growing group of us are working alongside Christiana’s granddaughter, the filmmaker Hilary Morgan, to restore Christiana’s legacy, including the possible publication of her original visions, an unpublished manuscript, countless other works of art, the preservation of her home in Massachusettes, and the re-attribution of her name to a famous psychological test and to the history of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, which led the way for the founding of the field of psychology in America. There is a great deal more to do as well. Now that I’m home from a fast-paced trip to the East Coast, I’m personally looking forward to spending quiet time with the hundreds of photos I took of materials in the archives. Had there been more time, I could easily have been lost in there for days.