Untold Intelligence

Untold Intelligence is a book about being after shattering. Morvern pieces together her life surviving the terrible suffering of mind control, turning to her childhood diaries and later notebooks to tell this story. The focus of this autobiographical book is sexual abuse and a child taken.

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Untold Intelligence is a book about being after shattering. Morvern pieces together her life surviving the terrible suffering of mind control and sexual abuse. She turns to her childhood diaries and later notebooks to tell this story.


The complexity of the text, traversing columns and incorporating personal and public images, also exceeds this story. Across the pages that become more prayer than puzzle, the human tradition that Morvern celebrates is that of seeing mystically, in the face of terror.


Morvern can carry the reader with her into this study of faith by recourse to a range of diverse sources: the Bible’s most erotic poem, the writings of Kabbalists, psychiatric discourse on dissociation, a Jungian exploration of the Tarot, and the dialogue in films including “Bugsy” and “Morvern Callar”.


The book is populated by visionaries who have inspired Morvern with their own creations: poet and painter, William Blake; writer and filmmaker, Marguerite Duras; film director Stanley Kubrick. Engaging too with the psychoanalytic thinking of Freud and Lacan, the book asks whether God is just the perfect fantasy material today—or, encountering trauma, is divine love more real than anything?