It is as if we are more inclined to ask the unknown ‘What shall I do?,’ while the East prefers the question: ‘To what total order does my conduct belong? ~Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, p. 120.

The analysis of older people provides a wealth of dream symbols that psychically prepare the dreams for impending death. It is in fact true, as Jung has emphasized, that the unconscious psyche pays very little attention to the abrupt end of bodily life and behaves as if the psychic life of the individual, that is, the individuation process, will simply continue. … The unconscious “believes” quite obviously in a life after death. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz (1987), ix.

We constantly build our lives by our ego-decisions and it is only in old age when one looks back that one sees that the whole thing had a pattern. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Pages 6-7

Similarly, a man who is drowned in the unconscious behaves like the animus of a woman. A possessed man — Hitler, for example – has all the animus traits; he is carried away by every emotion, is full of unconsidered opinions, and expresses himself sloppily and didactically, often in an emotional uproar. ~Marie Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 64.

Marie-Louis von Franz reports that Jung once told her symbolic enactment with the body is more efficient than ‘ordinary active imagination’ but he could not say why. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, On Active Imagination, Page 126

The alchemistic tradition enabled him [Jung] to connect the experiences and insights he had acquired through his direct, personal ‘descent into the unconscious with an objectively existing parallel material and to represent it in this way. This also made possible a connection with his insights into the historical roots of European intellectual development. ~Marie Louise von Franz, Jung by Gerhard Wehr, Page 397

His [Jung’s] passionate commitment was to the droits de l’homme, the fundamental rights of man and the greatest possible freedom of the individual, which are guaranteed on one hand by the federal state, and on the other even more by the maturity, wisdom, and conscientiousness of the individual members of a community. The individual, in this sense, is even more important than the system. Naturally he repudiated any sort of dictatorship or tyranny; he did not believe in forcible ‘improvements’ in a system as long as the individual had not changed himself. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, Jung: A Biography by Gerhard Wehr, Page 306.

It [Collective Unconscious] is a modern, scientific expression for an inner experience that has been known to mankind from time immemorial, the experience in which strange and unknown things from our own inner world happen to us, in which influences from within can suddenly alter us, in which we have dreams and ideas which we feel as if we are not doing ourselves, but which appear in us strangely and overwhelmingly. In earlier times these influences were attributed to a divine fluid (mana), or to a god, demon, or ‘spirit,’ a fitting expression of the feeling that this influence has an objective, quite foreign and autonomous existence, as well as the sense of its being something overpowering, which has the conscious ego at its mercy. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 170

Number and Time by Marie-Louise Von Franz

Basing himself on Pierre Janet’s early work, Jung therefore defined the psyche as a spectrum-like field of reality situated between the “infrared” pole of material bodily reactions at the one end, and the “ultraviolet” pole of the archetypes at the other. The center of our psychic inwardness slides along this “spectrum” like a ray of light and is drawn sometimes more to the one end, sometimes more to the other.  If one is overcome by an instinctive occurrence, then the emphasis of the ego awareness will slide more to the left, whereas if one is “possessed” by an idea one is more attracted to the righthand archetypal pole. It may, however, be surmised, as Jung himself realized, that the two poles partake of one and the same unknown living reality and are registered only as two different factors in consciousness. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, Page 4

Jung took great pains to demonstrate that the archetypes of the unconscious possess a kind of ‘quasi-intelligence’, which is not the same as our ego consciousness… a ‘meaning’ manifests itself in synchronistic phenomena which appears to be independent of consciousness and to be completely transcendental. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, Page 199

As Jung points out, the lowest collective level of our psyche is simply pure nature, “Nature, which includes everything, thus also the unknown, inclusive of matter.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, Page 8

In it the preconscious aspect of the object is to be found, as it were, on the “animal” or instinctual level of the psyche. It is only with the activation of this level that synchronistic events appear to be constellated.  ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 8

To the assumption that the psyche be a quality of matter or that matter be a concrete aspect of the psyche I would make no objection, provided that ‘psyche’ be defined as the collective unconscious.  ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 8; Footnote 5

In consequence of the autonomy of the physical phenomena there cannot be only one approach to the mystery of being-there must be at least

two: namely, the physical happening on the one hand, and the psychic reflection on the other, but it is hardly possible to decide what is reflecting what!  ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 8; fn 5

Everything in the contents of the collective unconscious are not directly observable either. In both cases the essential nature of the thing will only be perceptible by inference, like the track of a nuclear particle in the Wilson chamber. ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 8, fn 6

Practically speaking the archetypal ‘traces’ are observed first and foremost m dreams, where they become visible as psychic forms they can however also appear concretely and objectively in the form of physical factors. ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 8, fn 6

But we do know for certain that the empirical world of appearances is in some way based on a transcendental background. ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 9

I think you are correct in assuming that synchronicity, though in practice a relatively rare phenomenon, is an all-pervading factor or principle in the universe, i.e., in the unus mundus, where there is no incommensurability between so-called matter and so-called psyche.  ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 9

In this connection I always come upon the enigma of the natural number. I have a distinct feeling that number is a key to the mystery, since it is just as much discovered as it is invented. It is quantity as well as meaning.  ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 9

The I Ching, is a formidable psychological system that endeavors to organize the play of the archetypes into a certain pattern, so that a ‘reading’ becomes possible.  ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 11

The orderedness which is illustrated in synchronistic happenings differs from that of the properties of natural numbers or the discontinuities of physics in that the latter have existed from eternity and occur regularly, whereas synchronistic events are acts of creation in time.  ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 12

The archetypes represent an unconscious objective reality which behaves at the same time like a subjective one-in other words, like a consciousness. Hence the reality underlying the unconscious effects includes the observing subject and is therefore constituted in a way we cannot conceive. ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 15

The transcendental psychophysical background corresponds to a ‘potential world’ in so far as all those conditions which determine the form of empirical phenomena are inherent in it.  ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 18

(If Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious is accepted) “we become aware that in everyday waking life, situations are present which are fundamentally just as amazing as the more infrequent unusual manifestations of telepathy.  ~Pascual Jordan, Number and Time, Page 36

Indeed [says Jung], this ordering capacity or quality of the mind also inheres in the other realms; physics can create order in the psychic, and the psyche in the realm of matter, but in principle both are subject to the mind or spirit, in other words-number.  ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 53

In this way every individual number possesses an overlapping aspect. Through its retrograde relationship to the primal monad each number “reaches across” to its successor. This hen-to-pan aspect, as Jung points out, is specific to every number. This fact can be illustrated as follows:  ~Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, Page 65

The Unity cannot be One, because it is the Whole, and cannot be distinguished from Two, for it resorbs in itself all contrasting aspects, opposing and uniting with one another, such as right and left, high and low, in front and behind, round and square, the ensemble of Yang and Yin. Every ensemble, Unity, and Pair, the Whole, when one wishes to express it in a numerical form, is to be found in all the uneven numbers beginning with the number three (1 plus 2), ~Marcel Granet, Number and Time, 102-103

In the mythological productions of the unconscious psyche, underworld divinities are particularly likely to appear in triadic form. According to Jung, they represent the flow of psychic energy, indicating a connection with time and fate. ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 104

Jung defined natural number as the archetype of order which has become conscious. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, Page 143

Jung also observed that undulating curves in his patients’ pictures indicated feeling. ~, Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, Page 149

“The mandala symbolizes, by its central point, the ultimate unity of all archetypes as well as of the multiplicity of the phenomenal world and is therefore the empirical equivalent of the metaphysical concept of the unus mundus.” ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 150

all emotional, and therefore energy laden, psychic processes evince a striking tendency to become rhythmical. ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 157

An organism is not, in spite of its inherent, meaningful arrangement, necessarily meaningful in the total context.  ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 165

Without man’s reflecting consciousness the world is monstrously meaningless; for according to our experience man is the only creature that can determine “meaning” at all. ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 165

Since a creation without the reflecting consciousness of man has no recognizable meaning, the hypothesis of a latent meaning invests man with a cosmogonic significance, a veritable raison d’etre. ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 165

In Mysterium Coniunctionis is, Jung made the important statement that the mandala is the inner psychic counterpart, and synchronistic phenomena the parapsychological equivalent, of the unus mundus. ~Marie Louise von Franz, Number and Time, Page 195

Jung applied the term “luminosity” to this quasi consciousness of the archetypes, in order to differentiate it from the “light” of ego consciousness.  ~Marie Louise von Franz, Number and Time, Page 199

The meaning that unites these inner and outer happenings consists of knowledge unmediated by the sense organs. This quality of knowledge is what Jung calls “absolute knowledge, since it seems to be detached from our consciousness.  ~Marie Louise von Franz, Number and Time, Page 200

It must be emphasized, however, that these ordering principles which underlie memory in the cell cannot be identical with what Jung termed “absolute knowledge,” but can only be an approximate form of it. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, Page 203, fn 23

As already mentioned, Jung termed number the most primitive form of the spirit. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, Page 213

When something psychic happens in the individual which he feels as belonging to himself, that something is his own spirit. But if anything psychic happens which seems strange, then it is somebody else’s spirit, and it may be causing a possession.  ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 214

The hallmarks of spirit, are, firstly, the principle of spontaneous movement and activity; secondly, the spontaneous capacity to produce images independently of sense perception; and thirdly, the autonomous and sovereign manipulation of these images. ~Carl Jung, Number and Time, Page 214-215

Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction

Jung therefore describes genuine synchronistic phenomena as “parapsychological,” marginal phenomena which are only observable when our ego consciousness becomes “dimmed.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, Number and Time, Page 225

Although I believe that Jung himself would not have cared to publish these juvenilia, they are highly interesting, readable, and important.

They are lectures he gave to his fellow students at Basel University when he was between twenty-one and twenty-three years of age. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xiii

The lectures were supposed to meet a high scientific standard and at the same time to express political and other opinions in an outspoken manner befitting a closed circle whose members felt free of academic and social conventions.

The reader has to bear this in mind when reading the often sarcastic and strong language that the young medical candidate, C. G. Jung, used in expressing his convictions. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xiii

Jung, seeing that catastrophe, the First World War, coming, was impelled to warn them urgently.

It disappointed him how little his companions reacted to it.

As a whole, however, the Zofingia was for Jung a positive experience. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xiv

He [Jung] was a cheerful comrade, “always prepared to revolt against the ‘League of Virtue.’ ”

He later discovered that he could dance quite well without having learned to.

His student name, incidentally, was Walze (barrel). ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xiv

His little dachshund would look at me so earnestly, just as though he understood every word, and Jung did not fail to tell me how the sensitive animal would sometimes whimper piteously when occult forces were active.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xiv

Often they sat until late in the night at the pub called “Breo.”

Jung did not like to walk home alone through the Nightingale Wood, so he told his friend such interesting stories that he came along with him without noticing it.

When he stayed out until it was already morning, Jung picked some flowers to soften his mother’s anger. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xv

Although the views of physics that he criticizes are naturally outdated, it is

fascinating to see how Jung attacks just the weak points.

First he shows the absurdity of the concept of ether, which was generally believed.in then, until Albert Einstein showed, through his theory of relativity, that it is an unnecessary hypothesis. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xvi

Then Jung adds to these quotations the idea of the existence of a non-physiological “intellectual being” or “life force” which some contemporary vitalistic physiologists also postulated.

This life-principle, i.e., the soul, he says, “extends far beyond our consciousness”-here Jung first mentions indirectly the idea of an unconscious psyche.

This soul is intelligent (purposeful in its acts) and independent of space-time.

These three aspects of the psyche are concepts that Jung retained throughout his life. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xviii

Then follows, in Jung’s lecture, an attack against the representatives of religion and their ineffectualness, because they deny themselves what for Jung is the very essence of religion: the reality of mystery and of the “extrasensory realm.”

Here again we meet a point of view that Jung never gave up and that-so it seems to me-will be a problem for future generations. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xviii – xvix

Jung remained all his lifetime a “liberal” (in a nonpolitical sense) and voted seldom for the conservative Freisinnige Partei in Zurich, but rather for the Landesring der Unabhangigen (which since his time has changed in its policies). ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xvix

It was probably the Siegfried image in Jung’s psyche that Freud sensed when he wanted to make him his crown prince and leader of the psychoanalytic movement, and that induced the later Jung to take steps to save the International General Medical Society of Psychotherapy, only leading him into trouble. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xix

An archetypal symbol, according to the later Jung, is dead and obsolete as soon as its content is known and can be intellectually formulated.

Otherwise it contains a wealth of unknown aspects. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xxii

We know that Jung’s own father’s religious convictions were in his later life undermined by contemporary materialistic doubts, a fact that led to many fruitless discussions between father and son. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xxiii

It is noteworthy that Jung speaks here in the plural, that Christ for him was not the only god-man as Christian doctrine maintains.

We know from his later writings that the Buddha was for him also such a god-man. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xxiii

But Jung goes on to say that it does not seem right on this account to throw away our whole Christian tradition.

We “must accept the supramundane nature of Christ, no more and no less,” and even more we must accept the “mystery,” the world of metaphysical ideas to which Christ belongs and from which springs all religious life. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xxiv

In 1912 he came to the conclusion that he personally could not return to the medieval or original Christian myth and set his foot on the path of finding his own myth by a form of meditation that he later called “active imagination.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Zofingia Lectures Introduction, Page xxv

The Grail Legend by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz

Emma Jung spent thirty years of her life researching the Grail story. ~Van Wady, The Grail Legend by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz. Page 1

I was pulled to read this work because of Robert Johnson’s love affair with Perceval and the Grail Legend that dates from around 1987 when he first began talking about it as his platform for exploring Western Man’s Wounded Feeling Function. Emma Jung was his analyst in Zurich and he took a course on the Grail Legend from her. ~Van Wady, The Grail Legend by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz. Page 3

I am indebted to Robert [Johnson] for pointing the way and indebted to Emma Jung for her passionate search that reaches beyond the grave. I am also moved by Carl Jung’s fidelity to his wife in the one way he could truly honor her. ~Van Wady, The Grail Legend by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz. Page 3

I met him (Jung) when I was eighteen. And I began in the year later in ’34: I began analysis with him. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, A Matter of Heart, Film Transcript

We went out there to the tower, and out of the bushes suddenly–we were standing around, kind of, you know awkwardly, as one does, not knowing what was going to happen–and then out of the bushes came a man, and I was deeply impressed by him. I thought he naturally, he [Jung] was a Methuselah because when you are eighteen you ‘think a 58 year (Jung) old is ready for the cemetery. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, A Matter of Heart, Film Transcript

Marie Louise Von Franz – C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time

Everything I have written has a double bottom. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 4.

The most essential and certainly the most impressive thing about synchronicity occurrences…is the fact that in them the duality of soul and matter seems to be eliminated. They are therefore an empirical indication of an ultimate unity of all existence, which Jung, using the terminology of medieval natural philosophy, called the Unus Mundus. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 247

Life has been so cruel to some people that one cannot pass judgment on them for being warped. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 24

Strangely enough, Jung’s discoveries were less accepted or were accepted more slowly in his own profession, academic psychiatry, than in many others. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 6

As I saw it, a scientific truth was a hypothesis which might be adequate for the moment but was not to be preserved as an article of faith for all time.  ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 9

I have set up neither a system nor a general theory but have merely formulated auxiliary concepts to serve me as tools…. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 9

I have never been inclined to think that our senses were capable of perceiving all forms of being…. All comprehension and all that is comprehended is in itself psychic, and to that extent we are hopelessly cooped up in an exclusively psychic world. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 9

… at the source of the great confessional religions as well as of many smaller mystical movements we find individual historical personalities whose lives were distinguished by numinous experiences. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 11

The significant difference … between merely pathological cases and ‘inspired’ personalities is that sooner or later the latter find an extensive following and can therefore transmit their effect down the centuries…. they are talking of something that is ‘in the air’ and is ‘spoken from the heart.’  ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 11

The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Führer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 11

it seems to me very much more cautious and reasonable to take cognizance of the fact that there is not only a psychic but also a psychoid unconscious, before presuming to pronounce metaphysical judgments…. There is no need to fear that the inner experience will thereby be deprived of its reality and vitality. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 12

There was a daimon in me…. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon. I could never stop at anything once attained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision. Since my contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool rushing ahead. … I had no patience with people aside from my patients. I had to obey an inner law…. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 22

“Shamefully

A power wrests away the heart from us,

For the Heavenly Ones each demand sacrifice;

But if it should be withheld

Never has that led to good,” ~Holderlin, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 23

The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me.  ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 23

Part of being a good cook, of course, is being a gourmet. He loved to let his guests guess what ingredients had gone into a soup or a sauce; I remember a boeuf braisé à la marseillaise with a sauce of sixteen ingredients!  ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 25

Rather like Goethe’s “God-nature,” Jung referred to nature as “God’s world” an overwhelming mystery all around us, full of the most wonderful and awesome events and forms. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 27

To ‘God’s world’ belonged everything superhuman dazzling light, the darkness of the abyss, the cold impassivity of infinite space and time, and the uncanny grotesqueness of the irrational world of chance. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 27

For the rest of his life, and despite certain moral criticisms of the character of Faust, Jung kept his great admiration for Goethe and, indeed, loved him as one loves a kindred spirit. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 35

This transformation is a process in the collective psyche, which is a preparation for the new Aeon, the Age of Aquarius. This new image of God appears in Jung’s first dream of the underground phallic god-king, awaiting in this hidden form its eventual resurrection. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 37

The thinking type finds the feeling type stupid and sentimental; the latter takes the thinking type to be a “cold intellectual. To the sensation type, the intuitive is “unreal,” whereas the latter finds the sensation type a “flat spiritless pedestrian creature,” etc. Food for one is poison for the other. Judging from my practical experiences, the merit of Jungian typology, ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 48

The treatment is also never merely logotherapy (Victor Frankl), because to therapeutic encounter, as understood by Jung, belong all those irrational imponderabilia, such as tone of voice, facial expression, gestures and by no means least that unconscious itself “which really is unconscious.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 54

it should be clear enough that Jung was not a pupil of Freud’s who defected, as has often been erroneously reported, but that he had already developed the basic features of his own life-work before his meeting with Freud. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 61

I knew Jung personally from 1933 until his death and I never perceived the slightest conscious or unconscious trace of any such attitude. On the contrary he frequently inveighed against Hitler and Nazism in quite unambiguous terms. He had numerous Jewish refugees among his analysands (some of whom he treated gratis) ~ Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 63

As Mircea Eliade points out, the shaman himself does not heal; he mediates the healing confrontation of the patient with the divine powers.  ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 66

The reproach most frequently levelled against Jung is that individuation is an asocial, egocentric exercise. This is by no means the case. The human being, in his instinctual nature, is a social being, and when this nature is rescued from unconsciousness and related to consciousness he becomes more socially fit and better related to his fellow men. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 75

In exactly the same way Jung thought that psychic processes, and especially dreams, should be described both causally and in respect to their goal or purpose. The psychic healing process can only be understood from the final standpoint, whereas the causal standpoint is more apt to yield a diagnosis. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 87

One of Jung’s most important contributions to the art of dream analysis lay in adding an interpretation on the subjective level to Freud’s interpretation on the objective level. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 92

In the reading of this Eastern guide to meditation it became clear to Jung that he had set out quite spontaneously along an inner way that had not only been known in the East for hundreds of years but had over many centuries been developed into a structured inner path. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 113

Most Zen masters expressly decline to take serious account of dreams, which they look upon as fragments of illusion which must be overcome. Jung, on the other hand, regards dreams as ”messages from the Self” which support the way of meditation. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 114

Although the wisdom of the East made a profound impression on Jung, nevertheless he constantly warned Westerners against imitating its yoga techniques and other practices. He looked upon such imitation as theft and as a disregard of our own psychic heritage, especially of our shadow. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 114

He [Jung] writes that he does not seek, as the East Indian does, to be freed from nature and the inner opposites. Instead he seeks that wisdom which comes from the fullness of a life lived with devotion “Nature, the psyche, and life appear to me like divinity unfolded. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 115

Here Jung confesses his Christian spiritual heritage: conflict (represented by the symbol of the cross) may not be circumvented, nor suffering avoided. He liked to quote Thomas à Kempis to the effect that suffering is the horse which carries us fastest to wholeness. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 115

Jung found the Buddha to be a more complete human being than the Christ, because the Buddha lived his life and took as his task the realization of the Self through understanding, whereas with the Christ this realization was more like a fate which happened to him. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 115

Jung foresaw that the East would exert a growing psychological influence on our culture, while we would intervene drastically in their world with materialism and political destruction. He saw that Buddhism, too, has been weakened by a partial hardening into an outer formula, as Christianity has with the Westerner. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 115-116

It is clear to me,” wrote a Japanese professor, “that Jung can contribute to our spiritual tradition and religion a reality basis that we have partly lost.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 116

The dynamic which produces such inner symbolic patterns in the psyche is what Jung understands by the word “spirit.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 93

Religion, says Jung, “on the primitive level means the psychic regulatory system that is coordinated with the dynamism of instinct. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 83

In Jung’s opinion, therefore, symbols were not invented or thought up by man, but were produced from the unconscious by way of so-called revelation or intuition. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 88

The advocates of hallucinogenic drugs are engulfed in a one-sidedly overvalued unconscious, and movements and parties which are politically and rationalistically oriented hope to change the world with only conscious sociological measures, completely ignoring the unconscious. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 97

The medically controlled use of hallucinogenic drugs which has come into practice in recent years is also crippled by the same misuse of power, which is characteristic of many of the methods which employ imagination: the power of the unconscious is conjured up through the use of the drug, but it is then the controlling therapist, instead of the experiencing subject, who is responsible for the confrontation. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 119

Drug users are often plagued by fearful anxiety dreams and visions which are meant to prevent them from going further into the unconscious (a bad trip!), and the dreams of politically and sociologically oriented world reformers generally criticize their intellectualism, their inflation and their lack of feeling. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 98

In civilized societies the priest is primarily the guardian of existing collective ritual and tradition; among primitive peoples, however, the figure of the shaman is characterized by individual experience of the world of spirits (which today we call the unconscious) and his main function is the healing of personal illnesses and disturbances in the life of the collective. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 99

Jung did not enter this world in a trance-state, but rather in full consciousness and without any diminution of the individual moral responsibility which is one of the attainments of Western culture. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 117

It is generally agreed today that Jung’s greatest and most characteristic discovery was the empirical proof that there is in fact such a ”collective soul” or collective psyche the collective unconscious, to use the name he gave it. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 123-124

In his later work Jung wrote that the archetypes might, in the last analysis, be partly non-psychic, but for the present at least can be described only in terms of their ordering function in the psychic field. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 125

At first Jung regarded the question of the origin of the archetypes as one of heredity, but in his later works he left the question completely open. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 126

Intensive contact with the unconscious is thus not only important for the mentally ill, because the healing tendencies of the psychic self-regulatory system can come into their consciousness in this way. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 97

The secret poet and director of the dream, however, is, as we have said, the “spirit,” the active, dynamic aspect of the psyche. Spirit is the real culture creating factor in human beings. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 88

From ancient Iran there are accounts of such celestial journeys in which the ecstatic experiences what, under normal conditions, would be in store for the soul after death. In the Book of Artay Viraf there is a description of the suffering of Viraf for seven days from tetanus. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 104

In the Roman Sominum Scipionis, described by Macrobius, Scipio is instructed in the secrets of the beyond by tile spirit. of his dead ancestor, and the so-called Oracula Chaldaica depict at great length an initiate’s visionary journey to the beyond. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 105

Although in the last analysis the myth, like the dream, is “its own meaning,” one cannot ignore the historical fact that myths do not have the same meaning for people living in the present that they had for past cultures. If they are to have meaning for us today, then they must be reinterpreted psychologically. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 130

Our “modern” interpretations will probably be regarded as amplifying mythologems and a new interpretation will once again attain validity. This does no damage to the “eternal” myth. We are the ones who suffer when we can no longer connect it to our own psychic life. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 133

One wonders why the Christ-image, as an Anthropos figure uniting humanity, was inadequate to the task of liberating “the true man,” so that such projections of a differently modified Anthropos-image occurred and why was the symbolic image of the Buddha unable to protect the East from the invasion of communistic ideology? ~Marie Louise von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 135

The astrological image of the Aquarian period is an image of man which, according to Jung, represents the Anthropos as an image of the Self, or of the greater inner personality which lives in every human being and in the collective psyche. He pours water from a jug into the mouth of a fish, of the constellation of the so-called “Southern Fish,” which represents something still unconscious. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 136

This could mean that the task of man in the Aquarian Age will be to become conscious of his larger inner presence, the Anthropos, and to give the utmost care to the unconscious and to nature, instead of exploiting it (as is the case today, for the most part). ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 136

In the Kabbala, Adam Kadmon consists of the precepts of the Torah, and the Adam-image of the Mandaeans consisted of “the law.” Psychologically this means that at this cultural level the individual cannot make direct contact with the “inner man” but must do so through religious precepts. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 136

The Anthropos, seen as mankind’s “group soul” is, namely, an image of the bond uniting all men, or of inter-human Eros, the preconscious ground of all communication and community among men, as well as being that psychic element which, through its power to compensate and limit, stands opposed to the boundless or one-sided drive to live out any single instinct. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 138

The appearance of the Antichrist at the end of the second Christian millennium is to be accompanied by an indescribable world-wide catastrophe, which is described in the darkest colors in the Johannine Revelation. Then, however, unmediated and in the midst of the most utter destruction, there will appear in heaven the sun-woman, “with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 164

St. Augustine, the Church father, made a distinction between two kinds of awareness: a morning awareness (cognitio matutina) and an evening awareness (cognitio vespertina). ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 176

Augustine compares the gradual transformation of morning awareness into evening awareness with the succession of the symbolic days of the Genesis story of creation. On the first day there is knowledge of the Self in God, then follows knowledge of the firmament, of the earth, of the sea, of “things that grow out of the earth,” of “all animals that swim in the water and that fly in the air” until finally, on the sixth day, man discovers knowledge of man himself. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 176

He [Eckhart] too made a distinction between an “evening knowledge,” in which the creature is known in himself and a “morning knowledge” in which creature and the human self are known “in the One which is God Himself.” This morning knowledge, however, is discovered only by the man who is ”detached,” who has forgotten his ego and all creatures and who lives in a psychic condition “in which God is nearer the soul than the soul is to itself.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 177

The essay by James Hillman, “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic,” on this subject seems to me to be unsuccessful. Hillman’s conclusions are based on the erroneous assumption that monotheism equals Self equals old king, and polytheism equals animus and anima equals son, which historically is not justified. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 196

The feminine factor had a determining influence on Jung’s personality and thought. The intellect, the purely masculine spirit of the world of professional scholarship, was alien to him, because this world knows nothing of the process of fertilization through the unconscious. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 145

But the integration of the feminine into the world of masculine Logos to which our culture has been committed up to the present was not simply a personal matter with Jung. He was convinced that in general it is required of everyone these days. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 146

The mandala differs from a personal god-image not only in its feminine aspect but also in its unequivocally mathematical-geometrical character. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 150

If the process of robbing cosmic nature of its soul by the withdrawal of the gods or of God into the human being continues as at present, “then everything of a divine or daemonic character outside us must return to the psyche, to the inside of the unknown man, whence it apparently originated.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 153

Like Toynbee, Jung was convinced that we are in a period of cultural decline today and that the survival or disappearance of our culture depends on a renewal of our archetypal myth. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 183

Christianity slumbers and has neglected to develop its myth in the course of the centuries. Those who gave expression to the dark stirrings of growth in mythic ideas were refused a hearing. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 199

It is one of Jung’s greatest achievements, the significance of which has not yet been adequately recognized, that he rediscovered the projected religious myth of alchemy and showed unmistakably where it originated and where it is still at work today: not in matter but in the objective unconscious psyche of Western man. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 201

In their day the alchemists were the “empiricists in experience of God,” in contrast to the denominational representatives of the different creeds, whose aim was not experience but the consolidation and exegesis of a historically revealed truth. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 203

Greek alchemy, like the mathematics and the natural sciences of antiquity, was continued by the Arabs. In the Islamic world the alchemists were much closer in spirit to the Shi’ites, who were also “empiricists in experience of God,” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 203-204

Thus he [Mercurius] is always a paradox containing within himself the most incompatible possible opposites. The alchemists at least suspected the psychic origin of this symbol and therefore defined Mercurius as “spirit” and “Soul.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 208

There have always been great individuals who knew about this divine aspect of the soul: St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Ruysbroeck, Tauler and numerous others even Giordano Bruno called the soul “God’s light.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 218

The “terrible God” whom Nicholas of Flüe also encountered, whom Martin Luther and Jakob Böhme and many others knew, became for Jung a permanent reality as a result of this experience. All his childish and naïve ideas about a “loving God” as a Summum Bonum were outgrown once and for all. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 160

In Western alchemy, too, several masters suspected that it was a question of a meditative development of one’s own inner personality which, it was hoped, would then complete itself in the outer world. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 220

Petrus Bonus then further describes the stone as the resurrecting body which is spiritual as well as corporeal and of such subtlety that it can penetrate and pervade anything. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 221

The Gnostics, in their way, attained to a similar deep understanding of Christ as symbol of the Self, but they were caught in an inflation. They felt themselves to be superior to the “blind multitude,” in possession of a mystery which set them apart. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 233

As physics has to relate its measurements to objects, it is obliged to distinguish the observing medium from the thing observed, with the result that the categories of space, time, and causality become relative. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 236

From 1929 on Jung observed a class of events that appear to point to a direct relation between psyche and matter. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 236

Toward the end of his life Jung planned to concentrate his research on the nature of natural numbers, in which he saw archetypal structures and a primordial, very primitive expression of the spirit, that is, of psychic dynamics. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 246

While the mandala represents a psychological analogy to the unus mundus, synchronistic phenomena represent a parapsychological analogy which points empirically to an ultimate unity of the world. In the end everything that happens in one and the same world and is part of it. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 249

Jung had his dream of the giant radiolarian, hidden in the center of the forest, while he was still a student in the Gymnasium, and this dream led to his decision to study natural science. Although at that time he could not have known anything about the universal meaning of the dream image, he rightly concluded that it was an indication that he should seek the light of all further knowledge in the secret orderedness of nature. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 139

In 1927 Jung dreamed of such a mandala. He painted it and called it a “Window on Eternity.” A year later he painted a similar picture, with a golden castle in the center. Shortly after that there ensued an extraordinary coincidence: Richard Wilhelm sent him the manuscript of The Secret of the Golden Flower, in which Jung enthusiastically recognized a description of the same process at work. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 140

The symbols of the cosmic Anthropos and the mandala are synonymous; they both point to an ultimate inner psychic unity, to the Self. The Buddha, the great Eastern symbol of this unity, was always represented in the early days as a twelve-spoked wheel; it was only after some contact with Greece that he began to be represented in India as a human figure. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 141

As womb or matrix of the “psychic ground,” the mandala contains more feminine features, which in the East are expressed by the image of Buddha’s lotus and the golden city, and in Western culture by the image of Eden divided into four parts, by the temenos, the fortress and the round vessel all feminine symbols. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 145

“The dream discloses a thought and a premonition that have long been present in humanity: the idea of the creature that surpasses its creator by a small but decisive factor. This “small but decisive factor” is consciousness. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 168

Through his investigations into the principle of synchronicity Jung prepared the way for an eventual alliance between depth psychology and microphysics, and therewith for the use of his ideas by contemporary natural science. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 254

We ought not to underestimate the psychological effect of the statistical world-picture: it thrusts aside the individual in favour of anonymous units that pile up into mass formations. Instead of the concrete individual, you have the names of organizations ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 254

The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 254

The fact that historically collective consciousness is probably older and more important than ego-consciousness is relevant here; the ego-consciousness of the individual appears to be a late acquisition and even today is a very labile factor in a great many people. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 256

Mass-degeneration does not come only from without: it also comes from within, from the collective unconscious. Against the outside, some protection was offered by the droits de l’homme which at present are lost to the greater part of Europe, and even where they are not actually lost we see political parties, as naïve as they are powerful, doing their best to abolish them in favour of the slave state, with the bait of social security.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 258

But most religions have compromised with the world and with the State to such an extent that they have become creeds, that is, collective institutions with general convictions instead of a subjective relation to the irrational inner powers. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 260

The State takes the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship….  ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 260

Western man, however, has fallen under the spell of the ideal of community, and for some time now the churches have been making every effort to encourage “group experience” and to attract the public to every sort of social “come-on,” from marriage and job bureaus to pop concerts, instead of doing their job, which is to speak to the “inner spiritual man.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 261

The contemporary division of society into a “right” wing and a “left” wing is nothing but a neurotic dissociation, reflecting on the world stage what is happening in the individual modern man: a division within himself, which causes the shadow that is, what is unacceptable to consciousness to be projected onto an opponent, while he identifies with a fictitious self-image and with the abstract picture of the world offered by scientific rationalism, which leads to a constantly greater loss of instinct and especially to the loss of caritas, the love of one’s neighbor so sorely needed in the contemporary world. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 265

When I once remarked to Jung that his psychological insights and his attitude to the unconscious seemed to me to be in many respects the same as those of the most archaic religions for example shamanism, or the religion of the Naskapi Indians who have neither priest nor ritual but who merely follow their dreams which they believe are sent by the “immortal great man in the heart” Jung answered with a laugh: “Well, that’s nothing to be ashamed of. It is an honor!”  ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 13

Hegel’s weakness lay in what Jung calls “the attempt to dominate everything by the intellect” including the unconscious. In order to avoid the necessity of admitting that one is exposed to uncanny autonomous psychic influences from the unconscious, and thereby to circumvent the experience of these influences, one interprets them in an “artificial … two-dimensional conceptual world in which the reality of life is well covered up by so-called clear concepts.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Page 44-45

They were perfect creatures of God, for He created only perfection, and yet they committed the first sin…. How was that possible? They could not have done it if God had not placed in them the possibility of doing it. That was clear, too, from the serpent, whom God had created before them, obviously so that it could induce Adam and Eve to sin…. Therefore it was God’s intention that they should sin. ~Marie Louise Von Franz, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 159

Marie-Louise Von Franz, Jung and Pauli

He [Pauli] wrote to me . . . [and] made it clear that he did not want analysis; there was to be no payment. I saw that he was in despair, so I said we could try. The difficulties began when I asked him for the associations which referred to physics. He said, “Do you think I’m going to give you unpaid lessons in physics?” . . . He wanted something, but he didn’t want to commit himself. He was split. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Jung and Pauli, Page xxxiv

Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF

It’s the ordinary people, often quite poor people and the quiet ones who sow seeds. – Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page xx

The problem is that the opposites are too close to each other in me. When I do something evil, good may come out of it and then I no longer know whether I should stop it or continue. And when I do something good, evil may come out of it and then I no longer know whether I should save it. It is a paradox. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page xxix

I asked whether this made her sad. She answered, “No, because I try to see the criminal in me. My criminal [shadow] is to think that when I say something, this is of some use . . .. Hence my problem with speaking.”  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page xxix.

“It is amazing how the unconscious never ceases to confront one with one’s own shadow right up to the very end . . . until one dies a miserable death [verrecken] on the way.” ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page xxxiv

In her passport-even as late as 1979-she declared her profession to be a “language teacher” with no mention of being a psychoanalyst. ~Homage to MLVF, Introduction, Page xlii

I have the painful duty of informing you of the passing away of our honorary member Marie-Louise von Franz, Ph. D. January 4, 1915-February 17, 1998

Symbolic thinking is a form of loving understanding, a light that does not dispel the god Eros. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLFV, Page 58.

Jung once said that what is happening now is forever. So when we sit here now it is transient, and at the same time it is the Self-we will sit here together forever. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz,, Homage to MLVF, Page 66

Marie-Louise von Franz was born in Munich on January 4, 1915, during the First World War. Our father served in military campaigns in western Russia and in the Dolomites while our mother stayed for the duration of the war with her own mother in Upper Bavaria. ~Marie-Anne Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 133

That is, Marie-Louise finished high school in 1933 and completed her doctorate in classical philology and classical languages (Greek and Latin) seven years later. (Our father, however, had lost the greatest part of his money in the early 1930s, so when we started our university studies, he told us that we had to earn the entire matriculation fees and expenses ourselves.) ~Marie-Anne Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 135

Marie-Louise left home when she was twenty-five and lived in a single room, first on Jupiterstrasse and later on English viertelstrasse in Zurich. The 1930s were economically difficult years, and the war then added to these problems. After the sudden death of our father in the autumn of 1940, our mother eventually had to sell the house. ~Marie-Anne Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 136

Marie-Louise then moved to a small apartment herself in 1944 and, generally speaki