Writing a biography isn't simply narrating a life, however famous or adventurous. For a writer, it means delving into the depths of the character they've chosen to portray. Writing a biography in the form of a novel doesn't mean seeking that truth, which, though unattainable, remains the historian's goal. The writer must work with myth, charm, and charisma, but also with the frailties and vices that every human being carries with them as baggage for existence.
It takes subtlety, patience, and intuition, therefore, to fictionalize a life and avoid falling into hagiography or, worse, vilification. It requires painstaking work, especially on oneself, and one must curb the urge—which we all have—to put ourselves in the place of the character we want to narrate. It requires mastery and good writing skills.
These are qualities that Sandra Petrignani demonstrates once again in her recent Dearest Doctor Jung (Neri Pozza, 2025, pp. 240, also available as an e-book), a novel that revolves around one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis , but not only that. One of the book's main protagonists is, in fact, Egle Corsani, a writer who has always needed a river to gaze at from the window and a novel to write. Sitting on the veranda of her new home overlooking the Tiber, she is truly ready to return to the book she has begun on Carl Gustav Jung. The spark within her was ignited after encountering the tormented and disturbing figure of Christiana Morgan, Jung's patient from the 1920s and his follower.
Egle imagines her return, thirty years after their first therapy, to Küsnacht, to the house on the shore of Lake Zurich that Jung himself had built. Christiana wants to see one last time the man who had quelled her fears, helping her to understand and forgive herself. Lady Morgana, as he called her, finds him as she left him, a pipe between his teeth, a shrewd gaze above his gold-rimmed glasses, only the slight hunch of his shoulders and his cane supporting a body still powerful despite the inexorable years. Because, perhaps, once again, Jung will be able to change her destiny.
Egle gazes at herself reflected in the pages as they fill: in Christiana's existential questions, in her loneliness, in her yearnings for happiness; in Carl's calm confidence, in his compassionate detachment. And in that pas de deux, the writer finds a key to confronting the wretched nostalgia for what she no longer has.
In Dearest Doctor Jung, Sandra Petrignani stages an imaginary final meeting between the father of depth psychology – a contradictory, paternal, fearless and reckless man behind the monument erected by fame – and an extraordinary woman , determined to follow in his footsteps.
We asked Sandra Petrignani what inspired her story:
The inspiration came from discovering many years ago, more than twenty, that Carl Gustav Jung (I read about him because I had undergone a lengthy Jungian analysis) had two beloved homes on Lake Zurich. One in Küsnacht, a very bourgeois house, where he lived with his wife and five children, and the other in Bollingen, which he had built with his own hands and the help of a few workers, a very spartan one, without running water, electricity, or gas. It was the home of the soul, where he retreated for complete isolation. Very few were allowed. I'm always drawn to places, and especially to the homes of people who interest me.
Who was Christiana Morgan in real life?
An American psychoanalyst who, in the 1920s, underwent analysis with Jung, and they developed a very strong bond. In the novel, I imagine Lady Morgana, as he called her, returning to visit him in the final months of the great therapist's life, her mentor, to discuss herself, how to cope with old age, and the nagging problem of mortality, the present, and the past.
What thread unites Egle and Christiana?
Egle, who has to write a book about a huge and controversial figure like Jung, a very powerful intellectual and a serial male seducer, as we would say today, needs to contrast him with different female characters revolving around him. In short, I'd say Christiana is a narrative device rather than Egle's alter ego.
And what thread unites the two women to Jung?
"The fascination he undoubtedly exerts. But also a fragile part of him that they both know and recognize, and it is to this part they become most attached, because it is this that allows him to understand the female mind and soul so intimately."
Really, as Jung claims, "the meaning of life is life"?
"I certainly think so. And, of course, what do we do with it? Because beyond life, and perhaps before, there is a darkness that we try to illuminate with hypotheses, lacking the slightest proof. But the Jungian idea of an experiential cycle, which goes beyond a single life, connects to my feelings, to my Buddhist studies in my youth, to otherwise inexplicable experiences I've gone through."