In any event, the upshot of the surfacing of the anima archetype in Ignatius Loyola's psyche as he was recovering from his wound in Loyola castle was that he then set out on his famous religious quest seeking out spiritual directors who could help him his inner spiritual life.
For his account of his religious quest, see the book A Pilgrim's Testament: The Memoirs of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, translated by Parmananda R. Divarkar, S.J.; edited by Barton T. Geger, S.J. (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2020).
In my estimate, Melville, Dr. Jung, and Dr. Murray were other men in whom the anima archetype in their psyches surfaced significantly enough to demand their attention. Like Ignatius Loyola, each of them was, in effect, being urged to undertake a religious quest in his own personal life. For Melville, his religious quest included his new career as a poet, which started before the Civil War (1861-1865) and continued long after it. However, for Dr. Jung and Dr. Murray, their respective religious quests included remaining married and also having at least one significant mistress each as they attempted to the best of their ability to work through the surfacing of the anima archetype in their psyches.
Melville's surviving poetry has been gathered together in the volume Herman Melville: Complete Poems, edited by Hershel Parker (Library of America, 2019), published on the occasion of the centennial of his birth.
Now, can the counterpart to the anima archetype in a man's psyche surface in a woman's psyche? Yes, no doubt about it. When this happens in a woman, she is being summoned to undertake her own religious quest - as Christiana Morgan surely was being summoned.
Now, as we might expect, the feminist Claire Douglas criticizes both Dr. Jung and Dr. Murray for their respective projections of anima archetype onto women. However, in the case of Dr. Murray, he co-authored a remarkable number of publications with other men, which suggests that he found certain men to be muses - not just certain women. (See the index in her book for femme inspiratrice and for women.)
In any event, the inception of Dr. Murray's secret extramarital love affair with Christiana Morgan prepared him for the extraordinary encounter with Dr. Jung in 1925. For Dr. Murray, that encounter was involved creative personal transformation that he devoted the rest of his life to working out - most notably in his secret extramarital love affair with Christiana Morgan.
As Robinson's biography of Dr. Murray makes clear, their secret love affair worked out reasonably well for him, as he was remarkably productive up to his retirement from Harvard in 1962 at the age of 69 - but he continued to publish subsequently.
But Christiana Morgan died in 1967 at the age of 69, possibly as the result of suicide. As the feminist author and Jungian analyst Claire Douglas makes clear in her 1992 biography of Christiana Morgan, she did live a fulfilling life to a certain degree - as a Jungian analyst and as a contributor to certain works that Dr. Murray carried out at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Douglas carefully lists Christiana Morgan's published and unpublished works and her correspondence (pages 66-369). However, in the final analysis, Christiana Morgan's secret love affair with Dr. Murray did not, in the end, provide her with enduring satisfaction in her life, as she turned more and more to drinking. In my estimate, Douglas' criticisms of Dr. Murray's behavior in their secret love affair are not only fair but astute.
But are there any lessons to be learned from those two lovers and their decades-long extramarital affair - and/or from the competing accounts of their affair presented by Robinson and Douglas?
Don't take Dr. Jung as your exemplar and guide!
Leave out Melville and the imaginary characters from his novels and from other literary and mythical sources from your ways of imagining and referring to one another!
Rather than reading about Romanticism and Byronic heroes, read Martin Buber's book I and Thou. Try to encounter one another in meaningful dialogue.
But if we want to attune ourselves to the universe's creativity, then we should strive to express our creativity in our decision-making and actions - both in our small, private actions and in our more public actions.
For further reading on this theme, see Teilhard's book The Divine Milieu, mentioned above, and Fox's book Sheer Joy: [Four] Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality (esp. pages 245-382), also mentioned above.
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