Mary Esther Harding

Mary Esther Harding (1888–1971) was a British-American Jungian analyst who was the first significant Jungian psychoanalyst in the United States.

Mary Esther Harding was born in Shropshire, England as the fourth of six daughters of a dental surgeon. She was an avid reader and was home schooled until the age of eleven. Pursuing her goal of becoming a missionary doctor, she attended the London School of Medicine for Women, where she graduated in 1914 in a class of nine students. She was then an intern at the Royal Infirmary in London, the first hospital in London to accept women interns. At that time she wrote her first book, The Circulatory Failure of Diphtheria and later herself contracted the disease. After her recovery a friend named Constance Long gave her Beatrice Hinkle's translation of Psychology of the Unconscious by Carl Gustav Jung, which led her to move to Switzerland and enter analysis with him, along with a small group of other students attending Jung's Küsnacht home near Zurich.

In 1919, Eleanor Bertine and Kristine Mann traveled to Zurich following an International Conference of Medical Women. Eleanor Bertine and Esther Harding developed a close relationship there and, in 1924, decided to relocate to New York City. Each year they would travel to Zurich for two months of analysis and spend summers at Bailey Island, Maine, the ancestral summer home of Kristine Mann. There they saw analysands from the United States and Canada in a quiet, comfortable setting away from the distractions of daily life and conducive to profound experiences of the unconscious.

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