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The Tragic Muse of Modern Psychology: Christiana Morgan. Part 1.

Between the ages of 11 and 19, I took so many standardized intelligence and personality tests that I remember the somatic experience of each one: the draining hourglass synchronized to the smog that often obscured access to my thoughts; the suggestive, ominous Rorschach inkblots tightening my throat at my absolute conviction that everything I saw in those shapes would signal to the examiner—and the world—my extreme wrongness, and then that other test with those dark, ambiguous drawings tugging like intuition, alerting me to future danger.

Each card pierced something profound within my unconscious mind with its particular and peculiar sadness.

The specific images portrayed people turned away from one another, collapsed on beds, seemingly without expression, and yet imbued entirely with an emotional resonance that had lived inside of me always, worrying away the lining of my daily existence.

When I was researching my memoir Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life, in 2016, I came across these same images from the tests of my childhood, but I recognized in them another story, one I couldn’t yet tell, but could feel.

The images telegraphed something of the person who drew them. As a child, I never would have considered the person who created the test, but as an adult, my body’s first response was: “Oh! That artist is in trouble.”

I did not know that I was reading the cards exactly as they were designed to be interpreted. Only the test was supposed to expose MY unconscious motivations, not those of the person who created the cards.

These 31 illustrated cards, called the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), comprise one of the first true projective measures in personality testing. Still in use today, each image is ambiguous, used as a prompt for the viewer to tell the story of what they see in the picture.

The test acts on the subconscious mind and is designed to reveal the client's personality dynamics and unconscious motivation.

But it’s the images themselves that have their own not-so-ambiguous story. As I began researching this specific test, I discovered more about the artist: Christiana Morgan, a brilliant, original, and tormented woman trying to conquer her demons.

Years before she began drawing images for this test, she was taught by the Swiss psychoanalyst Dr. Carl Jung how to drop into the center of her body to examine the demons that lurked in her unconscious, and to draw them out, as visions.

That means that Morgan’s interior pain and, by extension, Jung’s possessiveness and jealousy, and the narcissism of Morgan’s lover, the renowned psychologist Henry Murray, are the foundational centerpiece for these images that make up an iconic personality test.

It begs the question: If people, flawed by nature, devise tests to uncover the flaws in others, can any measure truly be uncorrupted?

This is the story of Christiana Morgan—a student of Dr. Carl Jung, and the lover of renowned psychologist Henry Murray—and how she was erased after helping to create one of the most essential projective measures of all time: the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).

It’s 1926 in New York City, and 28-year-old Christiana Morgan, a forward-thinking, sexually restless wife and mother, has decided to change her life and history.

She packs the bag she’ll bring to Zurich, where she is planning to join Carl Jung’s Introvert/Extrovert club and insist on becoming his patient. Surely, if anyone can help sort out the mess she’s found herself in, it will be the psychoanalyst.

While it is true that she and the prominent doctor Henry “Harry” Murray have not acted on their accelerating urges, the energy of their connection vibrates with such ferocity it creates a bulwark around them, keeping their respective spouses marooned on the other side of the bridgeless moat to peer down at the hungry alligators.

She is searching for answers about her complicated romantic situation, hoping for solutions and insights before they ruin their marriages and their deep respect and admiration for each other’s intellect.

What she can’t possibly know is how her unfettered access to Jung will provide him with limitless opportunity to unearth and devour the boundlessness of her divine unconscious mind, inadvertently serving him (and the history and making of psychological thought), and then Harry Morgan, more than they will ever help her.

My most profound insights don't go in the free version—they're distilled from my 27 years in therapy, decades of independent study, and work as a mental health advocate. These deeper dives are reserved for readers committed to going deeper.

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