I try to pray that it may not happen–that a miracle happens.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
WAGNER: What is your own feeling about it, the world situation?
VON FRANZ: Well, one’s whole feeling revolts against this idea but since I have those notes in a drawer, I don’t allow myself to be too optimistic.
I think, well, we have always had wars and enormous catastrophies, and I have no more personal fear much about that.
I mean at my age, if you have anyhow soon to go–so or so egocentrically spoken.
But the beauty of all the life–to think that the billions and billions and billions of years of evolution to build up the plants and the animals and the whole beauty of nature–and that man would go out of sheer shadow foolishness and destroy it all.
I mean that all life might go from the planet.
And we don’t know–on Mars and Venus there is no life; we don’t know if there is any life experiment elsewhere in the galaxies.
And we go and destroy this. I think it is so abominable.
I try to pray that it may not happen–that a miracle happens.
WAGNER: Do you find that young people that you see now are aware of that? That it’s in their consciousness?
VON FRANZ: Yes, it’s partly in their unconscious and partly in their consciousness, and I think in a very dangerous way, namely, in a way of giving up and running away into a fantasy world.
You know, when you study science fiction, you see there’s always the fantasy of escaping to some other planet and begin anew again, which means give up the battle on this earth, consider it hopeless and give up.
I think one shouldn’t give up, because if you think of Answer to Job, if man would wrestle with God, if man would tell God that he shouldn’t do it, if we would reflect more.
That’s why reflection comes in.
Jung never thought that we might do better than just possibly sneak round the corner with not too big a catastrophe.
When I saw him last, he had also a vision while I was with him, but there he said, “I see enormous stretches devastated, enormous stretches of the earth.
But, thank God it’s not the whole planet. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, A Matter of Heart.
