Tower on the Marsh – This Jungian Life

Christiana Morgan

Tower on the Marsh Project

Many Americans have visited C.G. Jung’s tower at Bollingen in Switzerland, but few realize that here in Massachusetts we have our own architectural embodiment of Jungian thought. Help to protect and restore this historic site to ensure it becomes a living space for scholars, artists, and the wider Jungian community.

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Designed and built by Jungian Analyst Christiana Morgan in 1939, the Tower on the Marsh is a unique work of art that embodies the understandings Christiana reached through her work with Carl Jung and the unfolding of her visions.

Ilona Melker

Psychoanalyst

Restoring Christiana Morgan’s Tower on the Marsh

One of Jung’s most influential American collaborators was Christiana Morgan, who traveled to Zurich in 1926 to become his analysand. Together, Jung and Morgan explored the trance-like techniques of active imagination, through which Morgan encountered a series of extraordinary archetypal visions. Her paintings and writings from this period became the foundation of Jung’s Vision Seminars (1930–1934).

After returning to the United States, Morgan continued to express her inner life through art, including paintings, illustrated manuscripts, and intricate wood carvings. She also built a structure that gave form to her creative and psychological insights: a stone tower overlooking the Parker River in Byfield, Massachusetts.

Like Bollingen Tower for Jung, this Tower on the Marsh became Morgan’s personal retreat, where she transformed many of her visions into elaborate carvings, drawings, and stained-glass windows. The Tower stands as a rare, tangible expression of Jungian inner work made manifest in the outer world.

Today, however, the Tower on the Marsh is in urgent need of restoration. To protect and preserve this historic site, Hilary Morgan, Christiana Morgan’s granddaughter, has convened a group of eminent Jungians — The Tower Group — to lead a conservation and fundraising effort that will open the Tower to scholars, artists, and the wider Jungian community.

This Jungian Life is proud to support this project. If you are able to contribute to the Tower’s repair and preservation, your gift will help ensure that this singular site becomes a living space for research, creativity, and community for generations to come.

Contribute to the Tower Project

Christiana Morgan: A Pioneer Woman

Christiana Drummond Councilman Morgan (1897–1967) was born into a prominent Boston family, made her debut in Boston society, and then promptly set aside conventional expectations. She volunteered as a nurse during World War I, and then moved to New York, where she found intellectual stimulation in the vibrant, experimental atmosphere of the post-war city.

In 1926, Morgan travelled to Zurich to work with C.G. Jung, beginning a visionary collaboration that influenced both profoundly. Through active imagination, Morgan experienced a series of profound archetypal encounters: the visions, paintings, and writings that became the foundation of Jung’s Vision Seminars (1930–1934). Jung regarded her as the quintessential “anima woman,” and her material was vital to shaping several of his key ideas:

the archetypal structure of the unconscious
the concept of anima
the use of active imagination in therapy

Jung wrote of Morgan’s visions:

“There is material here for the next two to three hundred years… Such visions as these represent the psychology of our time.”

But Christiana Morgan was far more than “Jung’s most studied patient.” Her independent influence on American psychology was highly significant. At Harvard, she became a maverick clinician and researcher, working alongside her partner and collaborator Henry Murray at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Together they developed the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), the most widely used projective psychoanalytic test, which is still in use globally by psychologists, clinicians, corporations, and government agencies.
Morgan was intensely creative, intellectually formidable, and always magnetic. Jung called her “une femme inspiratrice” and a “pioneer woman.” Her personal life was expansive, unconventional and turbulent, including deep friendships and relationships with figures such as Chaim Weizmann, Henry A. Murray, Alfred North Whitehead, and Lewis Mumford.

If you’d like to learn more about Morgan’s life and work, we recommend Claire Douglas’ biography, Translate This Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan.

“The critic Lewis Mumford called her one of the three great minds he had met at Harvard.”

Claire Douglas

Translate This Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan

The Vision for Christiana Morgan’s Tower on the Marsh

After Morgan’s death, the Tower was bequeathed to an academic institution, now the Governor’s Academy. Over time, however, the Tower has suffered from neglect, and Morgan’s wish that it continue to inspire as a sacred place, dedicated to the advancement of Jungian thought, has faded from view.

The Tower is in need of significant restoration and a renewed commitment to Morgan’s vision.

With careful conservation, the Tower will provide visitors, scholars, artists and the students of the Governor’s Academy with the opportunity to research, create, and learn in a unique environment rich in history and meaning. The restored Tower will offer curricular, residential, and creative work in the arts and humanities, as well as summer opportunities for residencies and retreats.

A three-stage project has begun to renovate the Tower, ensure Morgan’s rightful place in the history of depth psychology, and serve future scholars and artists:

Stage 1: Professional inventory and assessment of the Tower
Stage 2: Restoration of Tower architecture, artifacts, and gardens
Stage 3: Program development: a center for teaching and research that emphasizes Morgan’s life and work.

The project is led by The Tower Group, composed of

Hilary Morgan, filmmaker and granddaughter of Christiana Morgan.
Deborah Stewart, Jungian analyst and a host of the This Jungian Life podcast;
Dr. Jan Marlan, Jungian analyst and former editor of the IAAP news bulletin,
Dr. James Page, Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Maine System; and
Brian Pfeiffer, internationally recognized New England architectural historian.

This Jungian Life is proud to support The Tower Group. If you are able to contribute, your generosity will help safeguard a unique and irreplaceable site in the history of Jungian psychology.

Contribute to the Tower Project