Franny Glass Was Right All Along

The story of three interconnected women

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The whole time I was writing Quarterlife, pieces of another vast story kept popping up like clues in a mystery that wanted to be followed and uncovered.

1.

Among the many scrapped and discarded pages of various book drafts was my exploration of Franny Glass, a fictional college student created by J.D. Salinger and introduced in the pages of The New Yorker in 1955 in the throes of an existential crisis. Though fictional, Franny provided rich evidence that the soulful anguish of Quarterlife had not sprung up with the turn of the millennia or with Millennials and avocado toast, as so many clickbait articles sought to convey.

In the original story, Franny sits at lunch with her Yale boyfriend, Lane, smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis while trying to explain why she’d been so disappointed with school lately—her poetry class in particular. Lane doesn’t seem able to understand her anguish, nor her increasingly pale and nauseous look as they sit together. After a while, she wants to drop the conversation entirely, but Lane keeps prodding her. She does her best to wrap things up, scratching the surface of her frustration with college and so many revered male professors.

"I know this much, is all," Franny said. "If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful.”

Early in my research, I noted a crucial line in a relatively obscure series of lectures—The Vision Seminars—that Jung delivered in the early 1930s. He declared that a brilliant patient of his, a twenty-eight-year-old woman, had a benevolent fate because she was experiencing a crisis of individuation far earlier in life than typically observed.

Our patient is a woman of about thirty years of age. She is highly educated, very intelligent, a typical intellectual, with an almost mathematical mind. She is a natural scientist by education and exceedingly rational. She has a great deal of intuition, which really ought to function but is repressed because it yields irrational results, and that is very disagreeable to the rational mind. Such a case, a mental attitude of such a character, is likely to come up against a situation early in life where that attitude becomes useless. If fate is benevolent, one soon gets into a tight hole. If fate is not benevolent, it allows one to live a long time with such an attitude, and so one loses a lot of opportunities in life. This woman got into a hole at about thirty. That is pretty decent; obviously her fate is benevolent, it has given her a chance at thirty.

Despite her serious crisis, Jung felt that her prognosis was good because she had an opportunity to pursue her full life for many decades into the future, rather than experiencing a crisis of meaning in middle age when so much of life has already passed.

This younger patient was an American woman from Massachusetts who’d originally sought Jung’s help in 1926. She traveled to Zurich with a list of questions she hoped he could help her answer. The result of this visit was that she learned from Jung how to “trance,” one of the early names of his method of active imagination. In his lectures on her resulting visions, Jung began to convey the brilliance of the archetypal unconscious, the journey of individuation in a woman’s psyche, and the profound necessity for culture to restore and protect the feminine.

3.

Franny, I learned later, was based on Salinger’s second wife whom he married in 1955 when she was nineteen and he thirty-six, nearly twice her age. He gave her a copy of The New Yorker's “Franny” as a wedding present and, as perhaps could have been predicted by even a distracted reading of that original story, their union was not a happy one.

Salinger’s then-bride was a woman named Claire Douglas.

4.

While Jung attempted to protect the confidentiality of the subject of his Vision Seminars by never naming her directly, her name was quickly guessed by various participants in the close-knit community of his students and analysands. Jung’s young patient’s name was Christiana Morgan.

Morgan went on to help found the field of psychology in America, and co-author the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), though her name was removed from its authorship as soon as it was officially published and began being sold. It has since become Harvard’s most purchased publication in history, with sales continuing to this day.

Morgan also engaged in wide-ranging scholarship and research while helping to run the Harvard Psychological Clinic and mentoring countless young clinicians.

A woman before her time, however, Morgan’s work was only minimally recognized while she was alive. She barely received official recognition for her original ideas and work, and when she did—as with the TAT—it was later removed.

5.

For twelve years, Claire Douglas endured an isolated life and unhappy marriage to Salinger before divorcing him in 1967. After pursuing her own higher education and becoming a Jungian Analyst, she became captivated by the mysterious, barely-known woman in Jung’s Vision Seminars, with whom she shared some overlapping biographical details.

For over a decade, Douglas devoted herself to learning about the life and work of Christiana Morgan, ultimately crafting an incredible biography (still the only one) entitled Translate This Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan, the Veiled Woman in Jung's Circle.

She also wrote the introduction to the Princeton publication of Jung’s Vision Seminars (1997), placing Christiana’s visions, and Jung’s at-times faulty understanding of them, within a needed cultural and psychological context.

Jung's struggle to reclaim his feminine and feeling sides generates the subtext of the seminar. In the early lectures, Jung valued the initiatory quality of Morgan's visions and described her feminine path as "downward" and through "suffering." He cheered Morgan's reconnection with earth, nature, and the soil, and allowed himself to be moved by the power of the sometimes terrifying archetypal feminine figures she encountered. However much Jung felt the importance of these powerful aspects of the feminine and understood the healing potential in the wild and fiery parts of the fantasies, he could accept them only with ambivalence. (Douglas, The Vision Seminars, p. xvi).

And yet:

In his analysis of the visions, Jung noted that the Judeo-Christian split of soul from matter, which labeled one good and the other evil, caused a particular problem for women. This was because men arrogated the divine realm for themselves and tended to cast women, the earth, the flesh, and the devil all together indiscriminately. Jung realized that Morgan was confronting one of the major dilemmas of the age and striving toward the chief goal of Jungian psychology: how to be responsibly alive to all aspects of one's self without restriction. (ibid; p.xxii)

Douglas’s insights have brought Morgan’s name and work back into the zeitgeist and informed countless other scholars through her profound clarity, and evident passion for Christiana Morgan’s story.

6.

In 1967, the same year that Douglas walked away from her marriage, Morgan walked, devastated, into the ocean and died.

7.

Douglas, born about forty years after Morgan, was no doubt personally captivated by the parallels of their stories and what might have come of Morgan’s life if she’d found a way to leave the man—Henry Murray—whose mind had both attracted her and trapped her for forty years. Douglas leaves us all with the question of who Morgan could have been if she’d been able to walk away from him instead.

8.

In her time, it seems, Franny grew up to reclaim her own story, and make sense of her existential malaise within male-dominated academia and the pursuit of intellectualism without beauty. She ultimately found her own mind, defended it, protected it, and then pursued an understanding of another woman—just a couple of decades her senior—whose life and work were increasingly lost inside that same world of American Ivy League education.

While depicted as neurotic and maladjusted, Franny Glass was right all along.

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Original printing of “Franny,” The New Yorker, 1955

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I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, and director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, The New York Post, The Tamron Hall Show, Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper, Literary Hub, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast.