Marie-Louise von Franz – Confrontation with the Collective Unconscious – Quotations

Marie-Louise von Franz – Confrontation with the Collective Unconscious – Quotations

Marie-Louise von Franz – Confrontation with the Collective Unconscious, Psychological Perspectives

And I said [To a Patient], “Look here, this is your negative thinking. Somewhere you do think like he thinks, and you think this analysis is bullshit.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 311

Ah, you see how good that is, because you can’t analyze people really if you don’t know how they live. If you haven’t gotten a whiff of the country in which they live, if you haven’t gotten a feeling of the atmosphere in which they normally live, you can’t understand them. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Perspectives, Page 298

Yes, I believe there is such a thing as the demonic element, and it appears as the first impact of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Perspectives, Page 299

Now I always find that many of our pupils get stuck there, especially intuitives.

They can fantasize about anything, anywhere—one wild myth after another, one wild story after another.

They don’t hold on to Proteus to get to the stable point where the truth comes out; they go on from the lion to the water, from the water to the tree, and it goes on and on and on, and there is nothing doing.

Many think that even this is active imagination. It is not! ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 301

It’s fantasizing, and anybody who has a rich fantasy life, who is open to the unconscious, has a good intuition, can do that.

That is not active imagination, but I always see that this error is still very widespread.

These individuals don’t hold on onto Proteus till he is in his true shape, when they could actually talk to him and ask their question. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 301

This is what many people do in active imagination: They enter the fantasy with what Jung calls a “fictive ego”—an ego that isn’t their true ego. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 301

There you see how important it is to teach people that they should not simply do what the voices tell them to do, nor should they repress the voices as schizophrenic and crazy.

“My God, have you forgotten to talk to your anima?” He said, “Yes, I have.” I said, “Well, there you are!”

He apologized to his anima and his symptoms disappeared.

This case shows that if you promise something in an active  imagination, it is just the same as if you promise it to a real human being. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 302

Instead the patient needs to know this: “Rather, be more careful and do not go so far, but go alone and face it alone. That makes one a grown-up; only facing these things alone, having to wake up, make up one’s lonely mind or heart about what to do in a dangerous situation. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 304

A few years after I went into analysis with Jung, a younger generation came into analysis with him and was called “the younger group” in the Psychological Club.

The members of this younger group decided on their own one day to call themselves the “daughter corps of Jung” and began to talk about Jung as the “papa.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 304

I am personally convinced that great world catastrophes are imminent, and it will need a miracle to escape them, and that therefore those [apocalyptic] dreams have to be take partly, or nearly entirely, objectively.

How Don Juan describes dreaming is exactly, or to a great extent, similar to active imagination.

He even calls dreaming “controlled folly,” and Jung called active imagination a “voluntary psychosis.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 308

I think it’s the greatest merit of Jung that he has taught us how we can relate to this weird world of the deeper unconscious without breaking up our human relationships or our marriage or whatever our social situation is. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 309

We have a maid who is a medium and has heard voices all of her life. I have never touched her psychologically.

She is an anachronism. Her soul was born in the Stone Age and by mistake it got into the present age, and that was a rather difficult situation for her to cope with, but she managed very well.

Once she realized that she was having conversations with voices, she discovered on her own how to handle them. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 309-310

I’ve analyzed a lot of people who have done yoga. I’ve analyzed lots of people who did a bit of Zen meditation, you know, but one man in particular stands out: He has done meditation for four years and gotten some of the titles, but as far as I’ve seen, he is not a success.

This Zen man has become completely unspontaneous.

He seems to wear a mask. Even his handwriting—a very beautiful calligraphy—is completely artificial.

His wife got so annoyed with him that she ran away. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 310

I think each type has its own difficulty. For instance, it’s easy for intuitives to get into fantasy but very difficult to connect it with reality. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 311

Now for me, the feeling confrontation is difficult. I’m a thinking type.

So, I have the same difficulty with the inner world as with the outer world.

In the outer world my difficulties are related to the feelings and in the inner world too. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 311

When Jung was dying, he said to me, “When I shut my eyes, I see great stretches of the earth completely destroyed. Thank God it is not the whole planet.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 313

Jung once went walking with Miss Hannah and me, and there was a marvelous sunset, and he said, “You know, that sun, our sun system is based on something very unsafe. This sun is a very unsafe luminary or heavenly body. It could explode any minute, and if the sun exploded, every life on earth would be destroyed in twelve seconds. You count to twelve, and there’s nothing left. And that could happen at any minute because it’s unstable.” And then he added, “And, you know, to the psyche that would make no difference.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 313

But Jung very often used the expression, “His number was up.”

There is such a thing. Sometimes people’s numbers are just up. It’s not their fault.

It’s not anything gone wrong; death comes naturally once to everybody. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 314

I think that’s a very bad habit in certain Jungian circles if a member of the club or so dies early, then they say, “He or she must have that and that and that.”

I think that’s petty and not right. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 314

The unconscious is the saving thing and the demonic, the destructive thing.

That’s why Jung says, “It’s our task to hold those opposites together.”

That’s the wedding of the king and the queen, of this big dream.

That’s why we have to judge, because the unconscious is the highest—what the Hindu would call super-consciousness—and is utter ridiculous nonsense. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 314

You know, Jung even says schizophrenia is a healing reaction of nature gone wrong, because it’s probably an auto-intoxication.  I mean physically.

It has to do with a toxic state. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives, Page 317

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