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In the roaring twenties, right in the downward swing of the Jazz Age, an impetuous, only partly educated American 20 something-year-old embarked on a series of ‘active imagination’ trances in Zurich, Switzerland. Married, she had previously had a fling with Chaim Weizmann. The founder of Israel had already had quite a turnover of good-looking American girls. But she was clearly special.
Claire Douglas's meticulous and well-sourced study engagingly traces the life and times as well as the ancestry of a quite remarkable woman whose history till now has been obscured; akin to an unknown rock, concealed beneath the rusty waters under the ramshackle seaside pier of Jungian analysis.
With Jung's encouragement, Christiana produced a welter of spirited primal adventures, consumed by snakes, coupling with giant negroes, and providing Jung with a massive store of fantasy data. Like Freud, he was able to behave like a boutique shopper selecting whatever suited his own interpretation of that obscure and still contentious domain, the unconscious. Later, she protested at the way he had used the material, but seems to have forgiven him when he visited the Harvard Psychological Clinic in the thirties.