Translate this Darkness

The Life of Christiana Morgan, the Veiled Woman in Jung's Circle

Claire Douglas

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691236964
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

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.

Part One

CHRISTIANA

Enormous laughter—sadness underneath.

CHRISTIANA MORGAN,

Diary

ONE

Family Trees
and Their Fruit

In many lives it is the beginnings that are most significant: the first steps, though seemingly effaced, leave their imprint on everything else that follows.

LEWIS MUMFORD

On a spring day in 1906, Christiana Drummond Councilman and her father worked side by side on the hillside of their new summer home in Maine, digging into the damp, sweet-smelling earth. From where they stood, sloped gently down to the York River and an expanse of tidal marsh beyond. Christiana at eight years old was a slender, dark-eyed, evenfeatured little girl, whose freckled face predicted her later beauty. A strand of long brown hair escaped from her bow as she looked sideways up at her father, her expression somewhat shy, somewhat mischievous. She delighted in having him all to herself like this, away from his hospital, his friends and students, her mother, and her two sisters. A fresh breeze blew past them, carrying with it a briny sea-bottom smell as the ocean tide drew back from the river.

Christiana’s father gardened without gloves or hat. Though he was fifty-one, he looked surprisingly youthful and bent easily to his task, his exertion and the sun turning his complexion the ruddy color of his thin red-brown hair and auburn mustache. Christiana, mindful of the reprovals of her strict Bostonian mother, chattered about dirty hands. Her father seized a handful of earth and held it up to her face. “You must never think of this as dirty,” he admonished, and then he told her of his Southern boyhood and of his early love for the soil, that “wonderful and mysterious substance which nourishes all plant life.” They returned to their work, and she warmed herself in the pleasure of his interest. As she shared her father’s fascination with nature, his feeling for the earth, and the joy he derived from growing things, Christiana made an apt and devoted student, unlocking his secret garden world with her curiosity and allying herself with the beauty he loved. And as she embraced the slow and laborious discipline of his earthy pursuits, she became his favorite child.

In a reminiscence of her childhood, Christiana declared that her father, the volatile outsider, had created her through experiences such as these; she responded to him with intense love and an idealization of him and his values. Her feelings for her mother were more complex and echoed her father’s mockery of his wife’s stern Bostonianism. But at the heart of Christiana’s wariness about her mother lay the realization that Isabella Councilman found her middle daughter as alien as her husband. As Christiana grew into adulthood, she adopted her father’s view of his wife as a superficial woman defined by an arbitrary code of moral stricture and social grace. Christiana battled this aspect of her mother all her life; she dismissed Isabella’s world as “half convention and half lie” yet could not escape feeling suffocated by that world’s demands. And although Christiana was her father’s favorite, he allowed her only a temporary glimpse into the masculine world he would have opened to a son.

Christiana’s parents, William and Isabella (née Coolidge) Councilman, had vastly different family backgrounds. The Coolidges, bred-in-the-bone Bostonians, were part of that small society of interrelated families, sometimes called Boston Brahmins, about whom Henry James wrote so perceptively. Isabella Coolidge, though raised within this highly mannered and select circle, was unconventional in her choice of a husband. She turned away many suitors to marry, at the relatively advanced age of thirty-three, Dr. William Councilman, a new professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. He was an outsider, a Southerner, and the first faculty member who was not himself a Harvard man. It was not lack of beauty or of social grace that led Isabella to marry late. Early pictures of her show a muted docility, a sultry intelligence. As a young matron, Isabella had olive skin, curly black hair, deep-set brown eyes, and a voluptuous though narrow-waisted figure. Later photographs show a corpulent figure and a face grown hard-lipped and plain.

Despite her mother’s early sensual beauty, Christiana puzzled that two such opposite people should have married. Externally, her two parents seemed fond enough of each other, yet within the walls of their home, theirs was a tumultuous, abrasive marriage, and they used their extensive verbal flair to disparage one another’s background and outlook. Isabella criticized the Southerner’s uncouthness, his disdain for convention, his ribald wit, his love of strong drink, and his penchant for seeking interesting companions from outside their circle. William faulted his wife for what he called her Bostonian pretentions, for the falsity he found in Bostonian manners, for the narrow sphere of her friendships and activities, within a circle he thought of as dull. Although he refused Bostonian conventions for himself, he nevertheless expected her to behave like a conventional woman and stay within the very world he mocked. They expected no change from one another. It was the children who became the battlefield of their war. Christiana remarked that her father used fierce temper and derision, her mother nagging recriminations and icy condescension, in “waging a mortal battle over the values they transmitted to their children.”

The daughters were forced to choose sides. The eldest, Isa, and the youngest, Elizabeth, adapted easily to their mother’s Bostonian decorum, and they and their subsequent families remembered her affectionately as a highly intelligent, dynamic woman with woefully inadequate outlets for her energy.

Christiana preferred her father’s vigorous iconoclasm. She and, later, her son viewed Isabella as convention-ridden, cold, punctilious, and judgmental. Though not denying Isabella’s intelligence and vigor, they found her personality too often obscured by a grating irritability and an obsession with petty details. The father and the middle daughter allied themselves against her, making a game of never taking her seriously; instead they laughed at her and designated her the butt of family jokes. Yet in her own character, Christiana echoed some of the more interesting and complex of her mother’s ancestors, who hardly hailed from exclusively Puritan stock.

Isabella Coolidge was born in Boston on March 20, 1861. She traced her family back on both parents’ sides to the early colonists. Her ancestors included John and Mary Coolidge, who came with Governor Winthrop to the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England in 1630; Isaac Allerton, who landed at Plymouth on the Mayflower on November 9, 1620; and William Shurtleff, who traveled to Plymouth in 1634 as a bonded servant.

A rather complete genealogy can be pieced together about her forebears in North America. Isabella’s father, David Hill Coolidge, was the first of the family to attend Harvard College (in 1854) and Harvard Law School. He married Isabella Shurtleff, whose father was an eminent physician. The family history kept by the Coolidges, Shurtleffs, and Allertons is often a simple recitation of births, marriages, dwelling places, occupations, and deaths, but it also catches some of the adventure of these settlers’ early centuries in New England, with vivid portrayals of many a character whose life differed markedly from “the stern, hard and unloving Puritan ancestors” Christiana and her father deplored. Many of the brief sketches were of hardworking, even heroic souls, who were puritanically religious. Many led uneventful lives in their roles as mothers, housewives, farmers, selectmen, militiamen, builders, and ironworkers, then, more recently, as doctors and lawyers with society wives. But there were also mystical Swedenborgians, madcap brothers, wastrels, black sheep, weird eccentrics, rumrunners, bad wives, elopements, and passionate involvements with unsuitable mates. Three characters in particular stand out: Isaac Allerton, Susanna Shurtleff, and Hannah Dustan. They are extremes—excessive distillations of general family characteristics—yet at the same time they contain elements that troubled Christiana’s own character and contributed to the underlying force and passionate complexity of her heritage.

Isaac Allerton was a talented and complicated man whose place in history has been woefully neglected. By far the most colorful of the Pilgrims, he also got into the most trouble. The fifth signer of the Mayflower covenants, he was the confidant of William Brewster, the Pilgrim leader, and Governor Bradford’s right-hand man. In 1626, Allerton’s first wife having died in childbirth, he married William Brewster’s daughter, and Brewster came to rely on Allerton to parlay and trade with the Indians.

Isaac Allerton’s character ranged beyond the narrow confines of the Pilgrims’ tenets. His religious leanings were toward the scandalously mystical Amsterdam Ancient Brethren sect, though he was nominally a Separatist and a Puritan. For a time, Allerton’s trading made him the richest man in the colony; in the process he crossed the Atlantic seven times, a heroic feat in those days. Allerton took furs to England, borrowed money on behalf of the Pilgrims, and negotiated settlements for the Plymouth colonists. But he judged men poorly and traded far better and more successfully on his own behalf than for the Pilgrims. His courage, imagination, and an intuitive panache that had little grounding in practicality echo as major keys in Christiana’s character, as does his more shadowy side.

On the Shurtleff side, the William Shurtleff who landed in Plymouth in 1634 had a great-granddaughter, Susanna, who lived from 1751 to 1842; she was Isabella Coolidge’s great-great-grand-father’s sister. Susanna lived her long and remarkable life in a farmhouse overlooking Plymouth harbor. The family biographer in his genealogical remembrances portrayed her as a charming, beautiful child with considerable social and intellectual skills, but as she grew into adulthood, she became a different person. “A change came over the young woman as silent as the midnight thief, more cruel than the grave. She became extremely excitable, restless, wakeful and eccentric. There was mental aberration, and she betrayed permanent delusions during all the rest of her life.”

Susanna had what would now be called schizophrenia: she heard voices, talked to herself, had delusions and several autistically repetitive habits. Her biographer blamed her illness on her intuitive sensibilities combined with a precipitating shock. It seems that many of Susanna’s friends were killed in a shipwreck off Plymouth. They were buried in the same grave at Plymouth’s burial hill, with Susanna and her family in attendance. Susanna’s illness began shortly afterward. The young woman spent more and more time at a little table by the fireplace, smoking a pipe she filled with her own homegrown tobacco and talking to herself. She developed her own religion, had remarkable intuitive abilities, and believed in witches and evil spirits. Still, her family and community had a great affection for her and tolerated her vagaries. She lived all her life on her family’s farm, dying at age ninety-two.

The third notable personality whose character later echoed in Christiana’s was Hannah Dustan, born in 1657. A direct ancestor of Christiana’s on her mother’s side, she was a Colonial heroine, commemorated by statues in Haverhill and on Penacook, or Dustin, Island. Hannah married a bricklayer and farmer, Thomas Dustan, in 1677 and lived with him near Haverhill, Massachusetts. Near the end of King William’s War, in 1697, just days after she delivered her twelfth (and ninth living) child, a band of Indians entered her house, forced Hannah Dustan to rise from her childbed with her baby, then torched the place. (Thomas, who had seen the Indians approaching, had raced home and managed to save seven of the children.) The Indians knew they could not travel undetected with a crying baby, so they flung the little one against an apple tree, dashing out her brains, and then compelled the grieving Hannah to march half dressed through the snowy wilderness to their raiding camp, on an island in the Merrimack River.

Two weeks later, Hannah rose before daybreak one day, stole some tomahawks, and, directing a boy and another woman hostage, proceeded to scalp her Indian captors—men, women, and children—in their sleep.

Henry David Thoreau retells the story in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ending Hannah Dustan’s astonishing tale by imaginatively re-creating the terror of her hazardous flight through the primeval forest. It is as if he were trying to comprehend and convey the bitter, almost unassimilable horror of her experience. “They escaped as by a miracle all roving bands of Indians, and reached their homes in safety, with their trophies, for which the General Court paid them fifty pounds. The family of Hannah Dustan all assembled alive once more, except the infant whose brains were dashed out against the apple-tree, and there have been many who in later times have lived to say they had eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree.”

Dustan’s descendants still preserve pieces of the tomahawk and the cloth in which she carried the Indian scalp trophies, while Christiana’s niece keeps one of Hannah Dustan’s wrought-iron candelabra on her living room mantel.

Hannah Dustan may have returned from the horrors of her adventure marked by more than her heroism, for she bore a daughter within the year. Occasional ancestors over the next two hundred years were unexpectedly Indian-looking, severely courageous, fiercely taciturn, so turned in upon their private world sometimes, as was Susanna Shurtleff, as to suggest mental aberration. Most, though, escaped the fruit of that apple tree, becoming consummate New England club men and like Isabella Coolidge, their social wives.

Christiana Morgan inherited excess as well as rectitude and was torn between both worlds. When she went to see Carl Jung in Zurich in the 1920s, he encouraged her almost psychic capacity for introspection and trance. Her trances simmered with an ebullient, yet oddly savage and bloody, energy in which Indians played a pivotal role. Though Jung tended to consign Morgan’s Indians to a parochial American collective unconscious, Morgan’s deep connection with Indians seems to have been an essential part of her individuality and creativity, rooted in her mother’s link to Hannah Dustan and her Pilgrim lineage.

Isabella herself, Christiana’s mother, might have been shocked by her wildly unconventional ancestors, for the Coolidges occupied their place in Boston society in an eminently sober, sane, and respectable way. Though a lawyer, Isabella’s father did not have to work hard, and the family lived a comfortable life. Both parents occupied themselves with a round of clubs, duties, and social engagements that kept them closely involved with a small circle of friends and relatives.

Isabella was the only daughter and second child in a family of four. Her brothers were educated at Harvard, two becoming architects, the youngest a doctor. Isabella had very little formal education and suffered from it, but it was considered neither appropriate nor necessary to educate her much beyond the basics of reading and writing and the music, literature, and conversational languages a lady might need to take her place in cultured society. Eventually she turned waspish, focusing her unused brain, often obsessively, on the Saturday Morning Club, her Boston Garden Club, the newly founded Symphony, and a Round Table Discussion Group, where members reflected on such diverse subjects as politics, men’s colleges, and theosophy. Besides occupying herself with these organizations, she fussed over her husband and daughters, the family’s social life, and innumerable petty details that Christiana and her father thought absurd.

It is much more difficult to reconstruct a woman’s history than a man’s, especially when the daughter tends to see the mother through the father’s eyes and both are veiled by the prejudices of the age. Isabella lived a very proper life and, perhaps as a consequence, was a cipher to almost all who knew her. There is a large packet of letters, however, which Isabella wrote, long before she was married, to a friend of her brother’s, William Thayer. A historian, he traveled a good bit overseas, and at that distance a lively correspondence blossomed between them. Underneath the vivacious chatter, Isabella’s letters reveal a flair for flouting convention and a sensibility capable of forming deep attachments.

The letters show Isabella as neither so constricted nor so intellectually dismissible as Christiana and her father chose to regard her as being. Besides the letters, there remains an intriguing painting of Isabella Coolidge that belies the notion of her as a coldly superficial society woman. The portrai...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Christiana
• Part Two: Wona and Mansol
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index