Duty Before Self : A...

The epic romance of psychoanalysis is made up of numerous smaller romances, each inviting a variety of interpretations, quite enough to nourish the literary imagination for a long time to come.

John Kerr’s, “A Most Dangerous Method,” is an engaging, beautifully written, account of the ill-fated alliance between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung that began in 1906 when the 50-year-old Freud named Jung, a 31-year-old psychiatrist at the Burgholzli clinic in Zurich, as heir to his psychoanalytic program. Before they parted company seven years later, in a mood of rancor and disillusionment, Freud and Jung had exchanged nearly 700 letters. Sabina Spielrein (play-pure in German), whom Jung referred to as his “test case” went on to become one of the first female analysts to be admitted to Freud’s circle. The recent discoveries of Spielrein’s diaries, professional and personal papers, and her correspondence with Freud and Jung supplement the by-now familiar Freud-Jung letters, to provide Kerr’s narrative with its original and provocative twist.

Kerr, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic historian, has employed Spielrein as a case in point to illustrate the dangers inherent in the psychoanalytic method, where the patient’s childhood family romance is both an opportunity for cure and a Faustian temptation. The intensity of the patient-analyst relationship stirs up those profound emotional responses called “transferences.” The patient’s transferences are clues to the unconscious fantasies that have created her symptoms. The dangers reside in the analyst’s counter-transferences. The analyst may violate the patient’s emotional vulnerability by advancing her sexual thoughts and fantasies into a realized sexual performance. In the course of her analysis with Jung, from the time she was 18 until she was 23, Spielrein become his student, his friend, his muse and finally his lover. As if succumbing to his erotic impulses were not betrayal enough, Jung went on to chastise Spielrein for seducing him.

Biography is also a hazardous method. When Kerr tells us that he is granting Spielrein a “pivotal” role in the evolution of psychoanalysis it turns out that he too is subtly chastising her; this time, for undermining the alliance between Freud and Jung. Thus Kerr ends up repeating Jung’s culminating betrayal, which was itself a re-enactment of Spielrein’s perverse fantasies about her father’s “chastising hand,” the very fantasies that brought her into treatment in the first place. Kerr’s literary treatment of Spielrein is symptomatic of other problems in his otherwise cogently reasoned and plausible account of a critical turning point in psychoanalytic history.

Kerr’s efforts to be impartial toward the two personages of psychoanalysis trivialize the sexual abuse inflicted on Spielrein by her analyst. Feeling that he must event the score by criticizing Freud for his moral shortcomings, Kerr gives full credence to Jung’s rumor that Freud had an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna. Furthermore, he argues that Freud used his knowledge of Jung’s affair with Spielrein to keep Jung in line. True, Freud could be autocratic and he was intolerant of “advancements” that diluted the psychosexual theory that was crucial to his version of psychoanalysis. But Kerr’s notion that Freud tried to blackmail Jung into ideological submission is flimsy conjecture. In the same spirit of exonerating Jung, Kerr depicts Spielrein as an agent provocateur, the go-between who exposed Jung’s treacheries to Freud and then told Jung about Freud’s growing disillusionment with him.

Although Kerr had wanted to rescue Spielrein from psychoanalytic oblivion by calling attention to her unrecognized contributions to psychoanalysis, she comes off as a pastiche of Jungian female archetypes rather than an actual woman of some considerable intellectual accomplishment. Spielrein emerges from Kerr’s historical reconstruction, as none other than the inspirational Jewish anima, the treacherous masculinized animus, the vengeful female who sabotaged whatever might have been salvaged from the deteriorating relations relations between her two psychoanalytic mentors.

In “Translate This Darkness,” Claire Douglas’ psychobiography of one of Jung’s later patients, Christiana Morgan, the perversion entailed in Jung’s female archetypes is exposed. Douglas’s authority derives from her many years of clinical practice as a psychoanalyst and her deep appreciation of Jungian texts. Her voice is authentic and her arguments, though debatable, are compelling because she remains faithful to her subject. Whereas Jung had exploited Morgan’s visions in order to animate and elucidate his theory of unconscious mental functioning, Douglas “translates her darkness” by illuminating and clarifying the visions that Morgan was unable to explore in her actual life. As Douglas describes this gifted woman’s tragic life, she also demonstrates how her creativity was betrayed by the perverse scenario that characterized her analysis and went on to determine the quality of her relationship with one of America’s most influential psychologists, Henry (Harry) A. Murray--another of Jung’s patients.

Douglas picks up the threads of Jung’s life where Kerr leaves off. Shortly after Freud’s rejection and Spielrein’s defection to the Freudian camp, Jung suffered a shattering break with reality. A patient, Antonia (Toni) Wolff, helped to cure him by serving as his analyst; providing him with emotional support, listening to his dreams and fantasies. By the time Morgan and Murray met Jung, Wolff was his acknowledged mistress, therapist, soul mate and intellectual collaborator. Emma Jung, having endured and survived her husband’s affair with Spielrein, was resigned to the roles assigned to her--housekeeper and mother to five children, with permission to practice psychoanalysis on her off-hours. This split in Jung’s images of the female was crucial to his sanity. Unfortunately, he inflicted his personal perverse scenario on his patients, male and female alike. The perversion helped to keep Harry Murray’s depression at bay. It proved disastrous for Christiana Morgan.

When Morgan came to Jung’s private clinic in 1926 with her husband Will, she was 29 years old and the mother of a 6-year-old boy. She was already accustomed to verifying her identity by mirroring some man’s fantasies; the greater the man, the more submissive was Morgan’s surrender of her own soul. Morgan unconsciously complied with what Jung needed to hear by demonstrating gifts for trancing and other out-of-consciousness experiences that inevitably confirmed her analyst’s theories of female anima and animus. Instead of analyzing Morgan’s pathologically submissive attitude, Jung convinced her that she was the quintessential “animal woman” who must fulfill her archetypal destiny by assuming the role of lover-inspiratrice to Murray.

Like Emma Jung, who had intuited that the female split preserved her husband’s mental equilibrium, Murray’s wife, Josephine, assented to the arrangement. Will Morgan did his best to deny that his wife now belonged to his friend, Murray--body and soul.

Three years after Morgan became his inspiratrice, Murray became head of the Harvard University Psychological Clinic, where together they invented the Thematic Apperception Test, a diagnostic instrument consisting of a series of photographs and drawings designed to activate the fantasies that a subject “harbored in his unconscious or wanted to conceal.” Since it was common knowledge at Harvard that the basic idea of “active-imagination” had come from Morgan, who also designed the interview method, wrote up several parts of the test manual and drew many of the pictures, her name preceded Murray’s as chief author. After World War II, as the TAT became one of the most widely used diagnostic tests in the United States, Murray concurred with the publisher’s suggestion that Morgan’s name be eliminated from the byline.

Inexorably, as each of his literary ambitions--a biography of Herman Melville, at tract on philosophy and passion, a book on Morgan’s visions--came to nothing, Murray eliminated everything in Christiana Morgan’s intellectual and emotional life that might distract her from her inspirational duties. And Morgan ever-bound to her role, collaborated in her own obliteration. “Mansol, (Murray) made me kneel down and three times made me repeat to him--’I given you my body and my spirit. . . . For a year I shall become Melville. I shall think, read, feel, know nothing but Melville. My God demands it.’ ”

Whenever Christiana vacillated, Harry invoked some sophistry or other to spur her on. Their union was the essence of romantic love. Nothing “in the history of mankind” could compare with it. Clearly, Morgan and Murray had to elevate their love to a sacred place, for to recognize the tawdry truth of their hopeless relationship would have been tantamount to forsaking the Jungian ideals that had governed their lives. It has often been said that a person would die for an ideal rather than see that ideal perish.

Fully conscious of how threatening all this might seem to the whole Jungian enterprise, Douglas does not compromise. She shows how Jung had diverted Morgan away from the task of deciphering her visions “toward the supposedly more womanly one of inspiring Murray.” She explains how “Murray put Morgan’s mind, ‘her animus’ to work in accordance with Jung’s instructions to his handmaidens in Zurich” and how, Morgan, “this good daughter of the fathers dutifully read what men had written about visions and about love,” instead of finding her own voice.

Douglas has chosen to enrich her Jungian heritage with her feminist understandings. Better to scrutinize and question her psychoanalytic ideals than to betray the subject of her analysis--Christiana Morgan.