Guislaine Vincent Morland: archives

This collection is uncatalogued. The following is an interim description which may be altered when detailed cataloguing takes place in future.
Records created and collected by Guislaine Vincent Morland - (nom de plume Guislaine Vincent de Damas; married name: Guislaine Morland) relating to her training as a Jungian analyst, spiritual study and her own analysis. Guislaine’s records reflect her Jungian approach to Jung's concept of the 'self' as the centering unifying principle of authority (in psychological life) superior to and beyond ego, and include journals written and later rewritten with analysis, artworks created and interpreted by herself and her analyst, stories and poetry, and training notes and records - all in all her own healing process.
Guislaine has described her work and material as follows:
"My writings - the material here reflects the reality of the psyche, my relationship to and conversation with its figures - which is so close to fiction writing, the process of transformation, ancestral presence, and influence. There is the rational and conscious: essays, case studies, thesis versus the non-rational and unconscious: art work, dreams, fantasies, spontaneous writings and what Jung calls 'active imagination'. There is my typology as Intuitive, introverted, with quite good Thinking, less good Feeling, and even less good Sensation (so-called Inferior Function) which is considered to be the back door through which the numinous and the unconscious sneak in. Writings and drawings illustrate the alchemical process, i.e., heat - no transformation without emotion brought to consciousness. It is an inevitable part of Individuation. The arts, visual aural literary and spiritual are a vital part of my life. An artistic thread runs through me via the maternal line, - the hidden order of art. Jung has said in 1934, 'The essential thing is the life of theindividual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs from these hidden sources in individuals.'"

The collection includes:

1. Records relating to Guislaine’s membership and training with the Guild of Analytical Psychologists (GAP) ( formerly the Guild of Analytical Psychology and Spirituality), including correspondence regarding a placement in the psychiatric wing of the Chelsea Westminster Hospital, application to and self-evaluation in the training and placement, seminar essays, and art posters designed by Guislaine for her workshops and talks. Also volunteer work at the Sobell Hospice in Oxford and several years study of Transcendent Meditation with Alistair Shearer, teacher and cultural historian in India and London.
2. Journals, including:
- A series of eight edited journals containing curated entries from earlier journals, copied and edited (sections cut out) (but not re written) out later in life when Guislaine was starting to apply her psychotherapy. The original entries date from 1986 – 1989 and have since been discarded, though some pages have been pasted into these new journals. The volumes also contain some reflections written retrospectively as part of the process of revisiting and transcribing the entries. The first journal entry in 1986 records Guislaine’s analyst suggesting that she keep a journal using her left hand, having been moved to the right in nursery school. Initials pointed left, slowly this corrected itself. The psychotherapist considered this indicating arrested development of that side of the brain, now being activated. Other entries relate to her daily life, a diagnosis of acute anxiety and a short period of depression - psychotherapy, personal and family life and related traumas, dreams, art, the process of drawing, travel and other observations. Dreams are often recalled in great detail with a focus on imagery, and dream entries are denoted by a symbol. Guislaine saw this process of returning to the journals "as a means to see past the ego-self into the inner world of psyche and shadow self". Guislaine also has mild synaesthesia and is mediumistic (kept secret until recently) which has been difficult to learn to live with.
- A series of six personal journals, 2001-2006, with playful sketches, pencil portraits of imagined characters, fantasies, and trees and their knots which looked at in a psychological manner reveal stages of life and their woundedness. Written in the present rather than reflective there are entries relating to Guislaine’s daily life, imagination, fantasy and therapy, personal and family life, dreams, drawings and other observations. Also includes inspiration for fables, characters that come and go in poems and short stories, many notes and quotes.
- Loose pages removed from original journals and notebooks which have since been discarded. Guislaine likes taking a handful of fragments at random to see how they form a story of their own.
3. Imaging and poemagogic / creative writing, including:
Poetry written by Guislaine, including for an Open College of the Arts course.
Publications by Guislaine: The Food of Love. A Story Cookbook (Chattto&Windus) and No Name, To Be A Witch Is Not A Willed Thing (Damas).
Tree of Life ['Arbre de vie'] manuscript written in French, Guislaine's paternal tongue.
Newspaper cuttings of published feature articles (The Saturday Times Review and The Observer Magazine) and other papers relating to Guislaine’s research and writing.
4. Personal and family records: Selected family documents chosen by Guislaine as having particular psychological significance to her (from a wider body of records which were declined for inclusion in the archive) in the way they gave her an entrance to family life from which she was excluded. These include letters written by Guislaine to her father and correspondence between Guislaine’s mother, Gael Elton Mayo, and her in the 1940s and 1950s.
5. Artwork, including:
- Artworks by Guislaine including self-portrait as a bird (heron), 1990s; a series of small paintings created in 1963 whilst Guislaine was living in New York with her grandmother; copies of ink drawings created March - April 1991 during Morland's therapy sessions at the Priory, with annotations and reflections on reverse; still life watercolours; drawings and paintings of Guislaine's dreams, in ink and watercolour, with handwritten annotations and reflections including transcriptions of her analyst's interpretations; copies and prints of drawings created for friends and relatives; and a series of mandala-like drawings from 2009 whilst Guislaine was undergoing tinnitus treatment.
- Drawings by Guislaine - starting with her initial 'G' which turned into a cartoon-ish human figure, reflecting mood and feeling of the day.
- Photographs and prints of a black panther sculpture in soapstone sculpted by Guislaine
- Sketchbooks containing colour photographs, with handwritten annotations, of sculptures sculpted by Guislaine, including 'snake in a plate', 'feminine head', 'Mrs Buddha', a silver fish holding a swiveling coin in its mouth (a commissioned piece designed by Guislaine) and black soapstone panther and green soapstone head. The first head was Neanderthal-like, Guislaine kept working on the head and slowly over a period of months the same piece of clay transformed from caveman-like to 'Roman emperor' to a Robert Kennedy look-alike, then moving East Asian-like and finally androgynous, one profile male and the other female with an African air - this is the final 'head' named Mrs Buddha. It felt to Guislaine as though her hands were drawing out an evolutionary civilising process of the human.
- Colour drawing (while in hospital during lockdown 2021 - severe illness, loss of 11kg) of a cow sitting under a large tree, with writing in its branches, with handwritten annotations by Guislaine and accompanying journal entry re dream on which the drawing is based.
- Collated drawings and prints by Guislaine, Natasha Morland [eldest daughter], Stephen Gebb (von Schneur Gebrovsky) [half-brother], and Betsy von Furstenberg [stepmother].

1980s-2000s

2 boxes; 8 O/S folders, 3 sketchbooks.

The following information has been provided by Guislaine Vincent Morland, 2023:
Guislaine Vincent Morland (nom de plume Guislaine Vincent de Damas) is a Jungian analyst with a bi-lingual French/English private practice in Central London. She is a senior member and former Supervisor and Training Committee member, and Trustee of the Guild of Analytical Psychologists (formerly the Guild of Analytical Psychology and Spirituality). Her training background includes two Intensive Summer Programmes at the C G Jung Institute, Kusnacht (1998/2001), Marion Woodman’s BodySoul Leadership Program, and volunteer work at the Sobell Hospice in Oxford (1996). Guislaine writes, sculpts and draws. She has published articles, short stories and fiction in national newspapers and magazines (Literary Review, The Observer Magazine, The Saturday Times Review, Harpers&Queen) and has published two books The Food of Love Cookbook (Chatto&Windus, chosen by Carmen Callil) and No Name, To Be A Witch Is Not A Willed Thing.
Guislaine’s practice intersects with her interest in living the symbolic life, her close interest in the arts, dreams and imagery, seeing art as a means of exploring that which cannot be expressed in words, as a spiritual regenerating impulse for body and soul, beyond intellect, beyond ego, drawing from the bottomless well of the so-called 'unconscious' something then to be crafted into form and shared out into the world.
Understanding her family history has also been a central aspect in Guislaine’s own analysis. Her family lineage is made up of writers, artists, medics and academics, including Elton Mayo (social scientist and industrial psychologist) and Ursula McConnell (one of the first women to be trained in anthropology in Australia). In her adulthood, Guislaine, brought up as outsider (fostered aged nine with unknown relatives, the mother's sister and brother in law), felt a strong need to get to know and connect with her family and hear family stories. She travelled to Damascus in 2000 to research her paternal line's origin going back to the great-grandfather, a foundling in the massacre of more than 10,000 Christians in Damascus in the late nineteenth century - Alfred Vincent de Damas, given the name of the monastery of the White Fathers (&Mothers - St Vincent de Paul) in Alexandria where he was taken for safety. Guislaine describes herself as having suffered perhaps "a typical post-war history of chronic trauma (neglect, uprootedness, abduction, sexual abuse) which would take her more than fifty years (two generations) to be expressed in images and words. The childhood mirrored ancestral (archetypal) patterns". She spent her childhood being moved around extensively, attending fourteen schools in New York, Belem (Brasil), Madrid, London, Strasbourg and Paris and starting work at the age of sixteen.
Guislaine Vincent Morland worked in a variety of roles in the 1960s and 70s in New York City, where she was born, as a PA to a French-American art collecting family, department store private shopping service and buyer, PA to the producer of The Saturday Afternoon Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts, and photographer developing her own black and white prints. During the 1980s and 1990s, her work focused on writing with feature length articles in The Observer Magazine, The Times Saturday Review and The Literary Review and Harper's&Queen. In 1987 she published her book The Food of Love Cookbook (Chatto and Windus, chosen by Carmen Callil). Guislaine has always been shy of herself as artist and yet has painted, written and sculpted over many years almost as if in secret, not having been brought up with the confidence and support. This she found in the becoming of a Jungian analyst.
Guislaine attended The Priory during the 1980s, where she saw a Consultant Psychotherapist and Psychiatrist who suggested she draw and write using her left hand as part of her treatment. It was at this stage that she first became interested in the work of Carl Jung. Guislaine describes Jung as having a profound impact on her over the following twenty years as she read and absorbed his vision, teachings, whilst undertaking analysis. Guislaine describes having ‘big dreams’ featuring Carl Jung coming to her assistance, which she wrote about in her third – and successful – application to the Guild of Analytical Psychologists. She found herself drawn to this profession against the odds and some disbelief in her entourage, not having a university degree and so deeply affected by such an unstable background. But it beckoned and like a calling demanded to be addressed - or else. She undertook studies at CG Jung Institute in Zurich as well as in London. Over the years Guislaine worked with six Jungian analysts in London, Winchester and Oxford: Cara Denman, Dr Niel Micklem, Petrina Morris, Juliet Miller, Diane Zervas Hirst, and in Zurich Diane Cousineau. Working with such different analysts belonging to different trainings (Jungian) enabled her to explore her own multi-culture multi-lingual background and a diverse (not borderline but has been to the borderlands as one analyst put it) self's worldview.

Transferred to Wellcome.

This collection is currently uncatalogued and cannot be ordered online. Requests to view uncatalogued material are considered on a case by case basis. Please contact collections@wellcomecollection.org for more details.