Marie-Louise von Franz facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Marie-Louise von Franz
Marie-Louise von Franz
Born	(1915-01-04)4 January 1915 Munich, German Empire
Died	17 February 1998(1998-02-17) (aged 83) Küsnacht, Switzerland
Nationality	Swiss
Known for	psychological interpretation of fairy tales and of alchemy
Scientific career
Fields	Psychology
Influenced	Jean Dalby Clift

Marie-Louise von Franz (4 January 1915 – 17 February 1998) was a Swiss Jungian psychologist and scholar, known for her psychological interpretations of fairy tales and of alchemical manuscripts.

Early life and education

Marie-Louise Ida Margareta von Franz was born in Munich, Germany, the daughter of a colonel in the Austrian army.

After World War I, in 1919, her family moved to Switzerland, near St. Gallen. From 1928 on, she lived in Zurich, together with her elder sister, so that both could attend a high school (gymnasium) in Zurich, specializing in languages and literature. Three years later, her parents moved to Zurich as well.

Meeting Carl Gustav Jung

In Zurich, at the age of 18, in 1933, when about to finish secondary school, von Franz met the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung when, together with a classmate and nephew of Jung's assistant Toni Wolff, she and seven boys she had befriended were invited by Jung to his Bollingen Tower near Zurich. For von Franz, this was a powerful and "decisive encounter of her life", as she told her sister later the same evening.

At the meeting, Jung and the pupils discussed psychology. When Jung commented on a "mentally ill woman, who [actually, not to be taken symbolically] lived on the moon" M.-L. von Franz understood, that there are two levels of reality. The psychological, inner world with its dreams and myths was as real as the outer world.

Studies, lean times and private tutoring

In 1933, at the University of Zurich, von Franz started studies in Classical philology and Classical languages (Latin and Greek) as major subjects and in literature and ancient history as minor subjects.

Due to her father's major financial loss in the early 1930s, she had to self-finance her tuition, by giving private lessons as a tutor in Latin and Greek for gymnasium and university students. In the years after finishing her studies, she continued this to support herself, working on fairy tale texts.

In addition to her university studies, von Franz occupied herself with Jungian psychology. She attended Jung's psychological lectures at the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School in Zurich (now the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich) and, in 1935 and thereafter, also attended his psychological seminars. In 1934 she started analytical training with Jung.

Collaboration with C.G. Jung

In order to pay C.G. Jung for her training analysis, she translated works for him from Greek and Latin texts. Among others, she translated two major alchemical manuscripts: Aurora Consurgens, which has been attributed to Thomas Aquinas, and Musaeum Hermeticum. As many of its passages were of Islamic and Persian origin, von Franz took up Arabic as study subject at university.

This was the beginning of a long-standing collaboration with C.G. Jung, which continued until his death in 1961. Their collaboration was especially close in the field of alchemy. Not only did she translate works, she also commented on the origin and psychological meaning of Aurora Consurgens. She offered support for the theory that the Christian-alchemical text might have been dictated by Thomas Aquinas himself.

The experience that Jung termed "objective Psyche" or "collective unconscious" marked her life and work as well as her way of living. She worked to understand the reality of this autonomous psyche acting independently from consciousness.

Career

Von Franz worked with Carl Jung, whom she met in 1933 and with whom she collaborated until his death in 1961.

From 1942 on until her death, Marie-Louise von Franz practised as an analyst, mainly in Küsnacht, Switzerland. In 1987, she claimed to have interpreted over 65,000 dreams.

She wrote more than 20 books on analytical psychology, most notably on fairy tales as they relate to archetypal psychology and depth psychology. She amplified the themes and characters of these tales and focused on subjects such as the problem of evil, the changing attitude towards the female archetype.

Another field of interest and writing was alchemy, which von Franz discussed from the Jungian psychological perspective. She edited, translated and commented on Aurora Consurgens, attributed to Thomas Aquinas, on the problem of opposites in alchemy. During her last years of life, she commented on the Arabic alchemical manuscript of Muḥammad Ibn Umail Hal ar-Rumuz (Solving the Symbols). For alchemists, imaginatio vera was an important approach to matter. It resembles in many aspects the active imagination discovered by C. G. Jung. Marie-Louise von Franz lectured in 1969 about active imagination and alchemy and also wrote about it in Man and His Symbols. Active imagination may be described as conscious dreaming.

A third field of interest and research was synchronicity, psyche and matter, and numbers. It seems to have been triggered by Jung, whose research had led him to the hypothesis about the unity of the psychic and material worlds—that they are one and the same, just different manifestations. He also believed that this concept of the unus mundus could be investigated by means of researching archetypes. Due to his advanced age, he turned the problem over to von Franz. Two of her books, Number and Time and Psyche and Matter, deal with this research.

In 1968, von Franz was the first to argue that the mathematical structure of DNA is analogous to that of the I Ching. She cited the I Ching in an essay, "Symbols of the Unus Mundus", published in her book Psyche and Matter.

Another basic concern throughout many of her works was how the collective unconscious compensates for the one-sidedness of Christianity and its ruling god image, via fairy tales and alchemy.

Films

In addition to her many books, von Franz made a series of films in 1987 titled The Way of the Dream, along with her student, Fraser Boa. In The Wisdom of the Dream, a channel 4 television series, London 1989, von Franz was interviewed. Text of the film is printed in: Seegaller, S. and Berger, M: Jung – the Wisdom of the Dream. London 1989.

Lectures

In 1941–1944 von Franz was an associate member of the Psychological Club, Zurich. There she first lectured on the visions of Perpetua on June 7, 1941, which later was expanded and published as her first book The Visions of Perpetua. In the following years, she held many lectures at the Zurich Psychological Club. They constituted the basis of many of her books.

Between 1942 and 1952 she acted as its librarian.

In 1944 she became one of its full members.

In 1948, she was a co-founder of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich.

In 1974, von Franz together with some of her pupils (René Malamud, Willi Obrist, Alfred Ribi, and Paul Walder) founded the "Stiftung für Jung'sche Psychologie" (Foundation for Jungian Psychology). The aim of this foundation is to support research and promulgation of findings in the field of Jungian depth psychology. It also publishes the journal Jungiana.

Personal life

Jung encouraged von Franz to live with fellow Jungian analyst Barbara Hannah, who was 23 years older than she was. When Hannah asked Jung why he was so keen on putting them together, Jung replied that he wanted von Franz "to see that not all women are such brutes as her mother". Jung also stated that "the real reason you should live together is that your chief interest will be analysis, and analysts should not live alone." The two women became lifelong friends.

Correspondence with Wolfgang Pauli

Von Franz had a lengthy exchange of letters with Wolfgang Pauli, winner of a Nobel Prize in physics. On Pauli's death, his widow Franca deliberately destroyed all the letters von Franz had sent to her husband, and which he had kept locked inside his writing desk. But the letters sent by Pauli to von Franz were all saved and were later made available to researchers (and published as well).

Bollingen tower

Von Franz was passionately interested in nature and gardening. In order to meet her love for nature, she acquired a piece of land at the borders of a large forest above Bollingen. There, in 1958, she built a quadrate tower following the example of C. G. Jung. The tower was meant to be a hermitage, having neither electricity nor a flushing cistern. She used to take her wood for heating and cooking from the surrounding woods. Besides the house, there was a bog pond, abundant with toads and frogs, which she loved. This tower enabled her "to escape modern civilization and all its unrest from time to time and to find a refuge in nature", as her sister reported. At that place, she felt "in tune with the spirit of nature" and she wrote a good many of her books that she had planned early on in her life, and which she had realised one after the other, throughout the decades.

Later years

Between the 1950s and 1970s, von Franz travelled widely, not only for holidays but also for lecturing. She visited European countries including Austria, England, Germany, Greece, Italy and Scotland, as well as America, Egypt and some Asian countries.

After 1986 she turned to a more introverted life at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland. Several times a year she took a retreat into her Bollingen tower, which in some years was up to a five months stay. She concentrated mainly on her creative work, especially alchemy and continued to meet friends and patients from all over the world.

Illness and death

During her last years, von Franz had Parkinson's disease. Barbara Davies stated that she took only a minimum of medicine, so that she was increasingly physically affected by her illness until death, but could keep a clear mind and consciousness.

Von Franz died in Küsnacht, Switzerland on 17 February 1998. She was 83.

Selected works

Most of these titles are a translation of the original German title. A few titles were originally published in English.

• Alchemical Active Imagination ISBN: 0-87773-589-1
• Alchemy: An Introduction To The Symbolism And The Psychology ISBN: 0-919123-04-X
• Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales ISBN: 1-894574-01-X
• Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche ISBN: 1-57062-426-7
• Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales ISBN: 0-919123-77-5
• Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy. Inner City Books, Toronto, 2000. ISBN: 0-919123-90-2
• C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time ISBN: 0-919123-78-3
• Creation Myths ISBN: 0-87773-528-X
• Dreams. Shambhala, Boston, 1991. ISBN: 0-87773-901-3
• Feminine in Fairy Tales ISBN: 1-57062-609-X
• Individuation in Fairy Tales ISBN: 1-57062-613-8
• Interpretation of Fairytales. Spring Publications, Dallas, 8th Printing, 1987. ISBN: 0-88214-101-5
• Light from the Darkness: The Paintings of Peter Birkhäuser ISBN: 3-7643-1190-8 (1980)
• Number and Time ISBN: 0-8101-0532-2 (1974)
• On Divination and Synchronicity: ... ISBN: 0-919123-02-3
• On Dreams & Death: A Jungian Interpretation ISBN: 0-8126-9367-1
• Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology: Reflections of the Soul ISBN: 0-87548-417-4
• Psyche and Matter, Shambhala, Boston (1992) ISBN: 0-87773-902-1
• Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motif in Fairytales ISBN: 0-919123-01-5
• Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle With the Paradise of Childhood ISBN: 0-938434-01-2
• The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption ISBN: 0-919123-84-8
• The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man ISBN: 1-57062-611-1
• The Interpretation of Fairy Tales ISBN: 0-87773-526-3
• The Passion of Perpetua: A Psychological Interpretation of Her Visions. Inner City Books, Toronto, 2004. ISBN: 1-894574-11-7
• The Problem of the Puer Aeternus ISBN: 0-919123-88-0
• The Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales ISBN: 0-87773-974-9
• The Way of the Dream, ISBN: 1-57062-036-9
• The Way of the Dream DVD
• Time Rhythm and Repose ISBN: 0-500-81016-8

The Fountain of the Love of Wisdom: An Homage to Marie-Louise von Franz is a compilation of eulogies, essays, personal impressions, book reviews, and more from dozens of people who were influenced by von Franz. It also contains a list of von Franzens' English books.

• Arthur I. Miller: Deciphering the Cosmic Number (137): Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of Scientific Obsession, W. W. Norton & Co. (2009) ISBN: 0-393-06532-4 features the collaboration between Pauli, Jung and also von Franz

The Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz

"Fons Mercurialis", "Mercurial Fountain" or "Fountain of Life", plate included in the Rosarium Philosophorum, 1550. Logo of Stiftung für Jung'sche Psychologie, Jungian Psychology Foundation, Küsnacht, Switzerland, responsible for the English edition of the Complete Works.

On January 4, 2021, on the 106th anniversary of the author's birth, Chiron Publications began publishing a new translation in English of the 28 volumes that make up her Collected Works, estimating a 10-year period for completion.

See also

In Spanish: Marie-Louise von Franz para niños