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Life Arts    H4'ed 9/28/14

Jung's Thought and the Age of Aquarius

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Now, all people who live long enough enter the second half of life. Don't all people in the second half of life undergo the individuation process willy-nilly? Yes, they do.

But not all people who undergo the individuation process willy-nilly experience personal transformation.

Moreover, not all people who self-consciously undertake to undergo the individuation process experience personal transformation.

It is instructive to examine the case of the American woman Mrs. Christiana Morgan and then examine Dr. Jung's life journey.

THE CASE OF MRS. CHRISTIANA MORGAN

The 28-year-old beautiful and gifted American woman Mrs. Christiana Morgan (1897-1967), who had a history of depression, including postpartum depression after she gave birth to her son on September 6, 1920, went to Zurich for analysis with Dr. Jung. He instructed her in how to use the trance-like technique of active imagination. She proved to be remarkably adept at active imagination. Because Dr. Jung had processed his own active-imagination images by making paintings of them, he urged her to make paintings of the images she had had using active imagination. Because of her earlier art education, she proved to be remarkably adept at making paintings of the images she had had in her practice of active imagination. She also wrote up verbal accounts of her active- imagination exercises.

Some of Mrs. Morgan's paintings are reproduced in the two volumes titled VISIONS: NOTES OF THE SEMINAR GIVEN 1930-1934 BY C. G. JUNG, edited by Claire Douglas (Princeton University Press, 1997).

In her book TRANSLATE THIS DARKNESS: THE LIFE OF CHRISTIANA MORGAN (1993), Dr. Claire Douglas enables us to learn more about the life of Mrs. Morgan before she went to Zurich for analysis with Dr. Jung and her long life after her analysis with him. (A few of Mrs. Morgan's visions paintings are reproduced in Dr. Douglas' book, along with a selection of photographs of certain people.)

At 28, Mrs. Morgan had been younger when she started her practice of active imagination than Dr. Jung had been when he had started his self-experimentation with active imagination. In addition, he had a far better formal education by the time when he started his self-experimentation with active imagination than she had by the time when she started her experiment with active imagination.

Dr Douglas quotes the following passage from a letter that Mrs. Morgan wrote on September 24, 1925, to her long-time lover Henry (Harry) A. Murray, an independently wealthy man on the faculty at HarvardUniversity:

"'The full philosophy remains to be worked out. Let's do it, Harry! To go on with what Jung has begun would be the biggest thing that could be done at the present time. Is there a bigger whale or a whiter whale?'" (quoted on page 183).

This sounds like the expression of an admirable ambition. (Of course in 1925, Dr. Jung was only 50 years old and could still undertake further work to go on with what he had begun -- and he did.)

As Dr. Douglas explains, Mrs. Morgan subsequently worked as a lay analyst at a clinic at Harvard. She was involved in the development of the Thematic Apperception Test and in research about it.

Nevertheless, Dr. Douglas does not report that Mrs. Morgan had a major breakthrough in her understanding of the material from the unconscious that she had experienced in her experimentation with active imagination.

As we will see, Dr. Jung got lucky and caught a big break in 1929 that enabled him to advance his self-understanding of his own active-imagination exercises significantly.

In contrast, Mrs. Morgan was not so lucky -- she did not catch a comparable big break that enabled her to advance her understanding of the material from the unconscious that she had received through her experimentation with active imagination. As a result, she did not experience the inner "mysterium coniunctionis" that Dr. Jung experienced and wrote about perceptively in his massively researched book MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS: AN INQUIRY INTO THE SEPARATION AND SYNTHESIS OF PSYCHIC OPPOSITES IN ALCHEMY, translated by R. F. C. Hull (2nd ed., 1970; German original ed. in two parts, 1955 and 1956).

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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