Marie-Louise von Franz – Quotations with Citations from Many Books

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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 speaking, lived frugally for many years, supporting herself as a tutor of Latin and Greek for gymnasium and university students, working on fairy-tale texts. ~Marie-Anne Von Franz Homage to MLVF, Page 136

Professor Jung had seen that my sister found it difficult to pursue all of her professional and scholastic commitments while managing a household as a single woman. Knowing both women rather well, he suggested to them one day that they join and try at least to set up a common psychotherapeutic practice. ~Marie-Anne Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 136

Dear Chungliang Al Huang, Thank you for your kind note.  I am OK but packing for the big journey. Love, Marie-Louise von Franz ~Chungli Al Huang, Homage to MLVF, Page 143

God is Consciousness, with no discursive content. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 163

“In death, I shall join all of my other selves.” “In death, we shall have eternity and ubiquity.” “something must remain after death,” “but it is so difficult to figure out!” ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 165

“Numbers thus serve chiefly to make visible the circumstantial individual aspects of the cosmic unity or whole.” Chinese numbers also contained an essential relation with time: “In China, numbers signify organizations which vary in time, or transient ‘ensembles’ of inner and outer factors within the world-totality.” ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 180

[number] may well be the most primitive element of order in the human mind . . . thus we define number psychologically as an archetype of order which has become conscious.” ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 180

Numbers then become typical psychological patterns of motion about which we can make the following statements: One comprises wholeness, two divides, repeats and engenders symmetries, three centers the symmetries and initiates linear succession, four acts as a stabilizer by turning back to the one as well as bringing forth observables by creating boundaries, and so on. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 180

“I was able to take this up to the number four. Then it became too complicated, and at that point I also hit my head on the ceiling,” just as Jung, too, had hit his head on the ceiling prior to turning the project over to her. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 182

Apart from Jung himself, no one has had a greater influence on the reshaping of my view of the world than Marie-Louise von Franz. ~Charles R. Card, Homage to MLVF, Page 183

Getting old is certainly not for pansies. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 231

Sometimes you are in harmony with the anima, at other times you’re not. Hence life is a dance where you meet the inner partner and then part again. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Pages 239

Dear Georges, I think I have found the solution: One must struggle very hard in order to avoid attaching oneself to the image-memory of the deceased. The image-memory has become an empty mask. One must search for an image of the deceased person as he or she is in the beyond, and then try to establish contact with this otherworldly image. With all my best thoughts, ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 271

The last vision of Brother Claus clearly shows that it is not the intention of the unconscious to destroy Christian symbolism but to extend and augment this symbolism with that of the feminine and that of the common man.” ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 443

if I didn’t have contact with someone because of his or her shadow, well, there would be no one left. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 468

Not everyone should become an analyst, but rather take what they learn from their analysis back into their lives and try to integrate it. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 469

“Parkinson’s usually lasts for seven or eight years, mine has gone on for eighteen. . ..” ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 556

I hope that these attempts at a psychological interpretation, which are often only tentative suggestions, have conveyed to the reader the following: that this novel of Apuleius is a highly important “document humain” which one can even put next to Goethe’s Faust . . .. It leads into the deep- est problems of Western man and points symbolically to developments which today we still have not realized in consciousness. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 544

It takes a strong consciousness, which is flexible and modest enough, to be able to accept what the unconscious-the gods-has to say to us, and to realize the will of the gods, of the god who manifests himself_ to us, and to put us into his service, without forgetting the individual limits of our human nature.  ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Homage to MLVF, Page 544

Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz

The text of the ßall ar-Rumuz with my commentary is only an hors d’oeuvre for the meal to come. We decided to call the whole text-collection Corpus Alchemicum Arabicum (CALA). ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 12

It is the unique merit of C. G. Jung to have shown that alchemy in its origins was not only the beginning of chemistry but was also a kind of religious yoga and that we also find in it the prehistory of modern depth psychology. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 15

I recommend reading S. Mahdihassan’s book Indian Alchemy or Rasayana. The author still ‘believes’ in alchemy and with it that certain substances have a soul. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 16

A great amount of alchemical symbols cannot be seen any longer in material processes but they can be found within us. The non-chemical, symbolic content of alchemy is thus of eminent importance for the history of depth psychology. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 16

Jung has independently rediscovered a similar method, which he called active imagination. This is a disciplined creative use of imagination, which has nothing to do with fantasizing. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 16

This immortalization was simultaneously a complete regeneration of the dead personality: a rebirth not out of the womb of a woman, but out of Nun, the primordial waters of the universe. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 17

He [Zosimos] explicitly mentions that the process must be accompanied by a specific form of meditation, which has a decisive influence on the chemical process. Zosimos belonged to the Gnostic-Hermetic sect which worshipped the God-man figure Poimandres. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 17

We see the same process in the East, for the word maya, building material, is also related to mater. We think of maya as illusion, deception, but it is also building material, illusion which becomes real. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 22

So Tantric philosophy even calls matter the distinctness of divine thought. The East starts inside and works outwards into outer reality; we begin, on the contrary, with outward reality and never ask ourselves about the inner processes from which material tangible objects spring. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 22

If we regard alchemy rationally, it seems complete nonsense, but it is exceedingly meaningful psychologically, the whole riddle or secret of the human psyche is to be found in it. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 22

Jung’s most outstanding observation that especially Tantra yoga resembles alchemy has since been corroborated by new facts: a Zosimos text has been discovered by Fuat Sezgin which contains pictures of the coniunctio of king and queen, sun and moon. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 22

Whatever their style of love was, these Islamic mystics developed an awareness of the anima as being an independent inner figure in man. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 23

Miguel Asin Palacios has collected a whole series of stories, which illustrate the encounter of the mystic with his anima. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 24

What we scornfully call magic is, however, nothing else but a more archaic form of religion which is characterized by treating matter as containing a divine and psychic element. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 30

Magic relates to matter instead of only manipulating it. It tries to influence matter, not by technological means, but by psychological means. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 30

But towards the end of his [Jung] life, mainly by studying synchronistic phenomena, it became more and more probable for Jung that the objective psyche relates somehow to inorganic matter, as if it were so to speak its inner psychic aspect. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 30

Therefore Jung postulated an unus mundus, a unitary world, which when observed from outside appears as matter and when observed from inside appears as the collective unconscious. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 30

Dr Abt is now in the possession of a valuable collection of Arabic alchemical manuscripts, which we intend to publish. A look at their content shows that they constitute the missing link within the mystical branch of alchemy, between the Gnostic-Hermetic Greek alchemy and that of the mystical Latin alchemy in Europe. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 11

When I lectured on alchemy in the late 1960s at the Jung Institute in Zurich, I expressed my anger that I could not get an answer from the Hyderabad Library (India) where Stapleton indicates that they have many manuscripts of Ibn Umail. Even C. G. Jung could not get an answer. A student, Dr Abt, picked up the thread and offered to go to Hyderabad. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Symbols Kitab Hall ar-Rumuz, Page 11

Many people discover relatively soon in life that the realm of their inferior function is where they are emotional, touchy and unadapted, and they therefore acquire the habit of covering up this part of their personality with a surrogate pseudo-reaction. For instance, a thinking type often cannot express his feelings normally and in the appropriate manner at the right time. It can happen that when he hears that the husband of a friend has died he cries, but when he meets the widow not a word of pity will come out. They not only look very cold, but they really do not feel anything! They had all the feeling before, when at home, but now in the appropriate situation they cannot pull it out. Thinking types are very often looked on by other people as having no feeling; this is absolutely not true. It is not that they have no feeling, but that they cannot express it at the appropriate moment. They have the feeling somehow and somewhere, but not just when they ought to produce it. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Lectures on Jung’s Typology

Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales:

The animus fosters loneliness in women, whereas the anima thrusts men headlong into relationships and the confusion that accompanies them. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 55

Woman needs life, relationships with people, and participation in meaningful activity. Part of her hunger comes from an awareness of dormant, unused aptitudes. The animus contributes to her unrest so that she is never satisfied; one must always do more for an animus-possessed woman. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 55

If she can stand for her human rights without animus, and if she has a good relationship with the man she loves, she can tell him things about feminine psychology which will help him to differentiate his feelings. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 55

Woman needs life, relationships with people, and participation in meaningful activity. Part of her hunger comes from an awareness of dormant, unused aptitudes. The animus contributes to Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 9

In our Christian civilization, as I mentioned, the image of the woman is incompletely represented. As Jung has said, she has no representative in the Upper Parliament. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 10

In a matriarchal structure, such as in South India, women have natural confidence in their own womanhood. They know their importance and that they are different from men in a special way, and that this does not imply any inferiority. Therefore they can assert their human existence and being in a natural way. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 10

The source of evil and of things going wrong in women’s lives is often a failure to deal with and to get over hurt feelings, for hurt feelings open the door to animus attacks. The source of things going wrong, and of evil in women, in a tremendous number of cases, is that archetypal reaction of not getting over a hurt, or resentment, or a bad mood, through being disappointed in the feeling realm, and then being overpowered by the animus. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 35

If you can get back to the origin of the hurt and where you have not worked it out, the animus possession will stop; for that is where it jumped in, and that is why in animus possession there is always an undertone of the reproachful hurt woman. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 35

Animus possession in a woman annoys men madly; they go up in the air at once. But what really gets the man’s goat is this undertone of lamenting reproachfulness. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 35

Men who know a little more about this know that eighty-five percent of animus possession in women is a disguised appeal for love, although unfortunately it has the wrong effect, since it chases away the very love that is wanted. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 35

Underneath the animus there is a feeling of reproach and at the same time of wanting to get back at the one who has hurt you. It is a vicious circle, and arguing develops into a typical animus scene. Thus the ignored femininity which plays up in a woman’s anger is something archetypal.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 35

If the woman is in Tao and functioning according to the inner laws of her being, she can afford that kind of feminine nastiness, and it is not animus possession. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 43

There is the expression “a typical lovers’ quarrel.’’ We would call it an anima-animus quarrel, the sword crossing of animus and anima, which consists in a most horrible way of hurting each other in the most vulnerable spots. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 55

Just where the man has a most uncertain delicate feeling, the woman places the thorn of her animus; and where the woman wants to be understood or accepted, the man comes out with some anima poison dart. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 55-56

A world in which nothing on the harsh side is ever allowed, is not on the side of life, and here we come to a typically feminine problem. The more feminine a woman is, and the less aggressive her animus, the more she will tend to be overrun by her surroundings. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 65

So we have a marvelous picture of the annoying and irritating side that a woman’s animus can produce. It shows how a grownup, intelligent woman can entangle herself in such a silly idiotic quarrel or discussion. The irritated animus loses his sense of humor and is ungrateful and full of power. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 66

But usually there is a projection of the woman’s destructive animus onto the man. Even if there is no man on the outside to torture her, the woman will get it from within, for when she is alone her animus assures her that she is lonely and nobody and nothing and will never get anywhere—the sadist within tells her that ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 70

In every couple relationship there are actually four figures involved: the man and his anima, and the woman and her animus. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 76

I have often observed that women who make a first attempt to use their mind, say at the university, show an animus especially inclined to mix up the instrument of the mental work and its meaning. It is typical for a kind of half-baked animus. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 78

As soon as she touches anything on the side of life activity she may fall into animus possession or a power drive and become as cold, ruthless, and brutal as her father was. All she can do is to keep right out of the life of the spirit.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 88

The animus is a kind of primitive man, just as the anima in men is a kind of primitive woman who overdoes things and then collapses. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 88

That is the tragedy of such women, but they can get to the turning point, and in the second half of life have their hands healed and can stretch them out for what they want—not from the animus or from the ego, but, according to nature, simply stretch out their hands toward something they love. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 97

It is typical for the animus that, statistically seen, he is generally right, which is why we fall for him. But he is not right in the actual situation. You might say to such a lonely woman that she should introvert more, sink into her loneliness. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 99

A woman who always gives advice irritates a man. It needs a veiling of the inner face of her animus. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 99

The head is a wonderful image of the animus, with its opinions and musings going on all the time. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 111

The moon god is another beautiful animus figure but different from the head in the sea because he is not the single ghost of a dead person but the generally recognized god of the tribe, a god to whom the Eskimos do not show much love but to whom they pray for luck in hunting. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 115

I have seen analysands again and again cheat themselves in this way. They fight with animus and anima, abreact the emotion, then think they do not need to talk about it. But this is an illusion! ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 135

Women, much more than men, especially if they do not have a strong animus, vegetate in an amazing way. They can live ten or twenty years like plants, without either a positive or a negative drama in their lives. They just exist. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 159

When women have an undeveloped animus, when they have not worked on the animus, their mental functions often remain fixed on gossip and thinking about their neighbors. They get interested in a divorce in the neighborhood and want to know how. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 174

And it is very true that if women live alone for a long time without being in touch with men, they generally fall into the hands of the animus. It is very difficult to stand loneliness without getting overwhelmed by the unconscious, and in a woman’s case naturally by the animus. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 193

Jung said that to be in a situation where there is no way out or to be in a conflict where there is no solution is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution; the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. . . If he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally, because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page VI

Marie-Louise Von Franz “Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche”

In the present-day women’s liberation movement, the animus plays a very prominent role. Often the tyrannical boss that women are struggling against is not so much an external man as the tyrannical animus within themselves, which they have projected onto him. Such women even seem to attract the tyrants in their environments or to choose them as partners.  They fail to see that this is connected with their inner worship of their own animus, which is suppressing their femininity. The same thing also sometimes holds true for men.  They become woman-scorning homosexuals and never see that the cold, inconsiderate, and tyrannical behavior that they criticize in women is seated within themselves. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 220-221

Thus when a woman feels she needs to assert herself in some respect vis-à-vis the man, she finds herself face to face with the problem of a “two-front war”—against the man, on one hand, and against her own animus, which spoils her plan, on the other. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 145

This masculine spirit is the animus of the woman, mentioned earlier, which now, however, no longer manifests purely as affect, impulse, and vital force, but has become human, can express itself in words and deeds on a human level. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 148

The prince can be looked at as an animus figure within the woman, and in this case it would mean that when a woman makes an effort to develop the masculine side of herself, she inevitably passes through a temporary phase in which she behaves arrogantly and unskillfully by way of compensation for her otherwise yielding feminine nature. (History shows this, for example, in the behavior of the first feminists before the First World War.) ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 149

Jung tried to prove in his life’s work that behind the animus and anima in the unconscious of man and woman, a still mightier content dwells hidden, the true “atomic nucleus” of the psyche, which he called the Self to distinguish it from the ordinary everyday ego. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 153

Women, for example, often confuse the rigid opinion of their own animus with the much softer divine inner voice, which is why the French are wont to remark sardonically, “Ce que femme veut, Dieu veut!” ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 154

Beyond those, it seems to have been chosen by nature to serve the development of consciousness and the realization of the Self; for without a deep psychic relationship and interaction with a member of the opposite sex, one cannot become conscious of one’s animus or anima. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 155

Jung pointed out in his work that the tendency exists for both animus and anima to be projected onto a human partner, or in the framework of the Christian tradition to be projected onto the dogma. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 209

The projection of anima and animus onto religious figures was in many ways quite useful, because it protected people from overvaluing and deifying the opposite sex, the result of which was that there was more room for straightforward, realistic personal relationships. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 220

Today the religious symbols that could have served as a vehicle for the projections of anima and animus have lost their meaning for many people. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 220

Anima and animus have fallen back into the unconscious of men and women, where, as Jung showed, they create complications in people’s relationships. To this we can ascribe the enormous number of shattered marriages we see around us today. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 220

When men and women get to know more about their own anima or animus, they get along better with the opposite sex and also redeem these figures within themselves. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 221

The animus, however, does not express itself so often in women as an erotic fantasy or mood, but rather as “sacred” convictions. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 279

One can seldom contradict the animus, for it (he) is always right; the only problem is that his opinion is not based on the actual situation. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 279

The animus appears in many myths, not only as death, but also as a bandit and murderer, for example, as the knight Bluebeard, who murdered all his wives. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 280

The animus then embodies those half-conscious, cold, unscrupulous thoughts that many women permit themselves in the “quiet hours,” especially when they are neglecting matters that are obligations from the feeling point of view—thoughts about the division of the family inheritance, manipulative plans in which they go so far as to wish other people’s death. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 280

Like the anima, the animus, too, consists not only of negative properties. It too has an extraordinarily positive and valuable side, in which it, like the anima, can form a bridge to the experience of the Self and perform a creative function. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 281

The animus frequently appears, as it does in this dream, as a group of men, or as some other collective image. Thus also the pronouncements of the animus possessed woman usually begin with “one should” or “everyone knows” or “it is always the case . . . ,” etc. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 281

Many myths and fairy tales tell of a prince, who has been turned into an animal or a monster by sorcery, being saved by a woman. This is a symbolic representation of the development of the animus toward consciousness. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 281

As the anima does with men, the animus also creates states of possession in women. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 282

Through her suffering, the animus (for both the demon and the savior are two aspects of the same inner power) can be gradually transformed into a positive inner force. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 282

In real life, too, it takes a long time for a woman to bring the animus into consciousness, and it costs her a great deal of suffering. But if she succeeds in freeing herself from his possession, he changes into an “inner companion” of the highest value, who confers on her positive masculine qualities such as initiative, courage, objectivity, and intellectual clarity. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 282

The creative courage in the truth conferred by the animus gives a woman the daring to enunciate new ideas that can inspire men to new enterprises. Often in history women have recognized the value of new creative ideas earlier than men, who are more emotionally conservative. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 282

As mentioned, the woman’s animus can lead to courage, a spirit of enterprise, truthfulness, in its highest form, to spiritual depth and intensity; but this only happens if beforehand she musters the objectivity to call her own “sacred” convictions into question and to accept the guiding messages of her dreams, even when they contradict her convictions. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 283

For this reason Jung says that the integration of the shadow is an apprentice’s work, but the integration of the animus and anima is a masterpiece. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 319

In the Middle Ages, the negative animus of women was embodied in the devil (the witch trials), the positive animus in Christ. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 320

Marie-Louise Von Franz “The Problem of the Puer Aeternus”

It is just the same but one layer further in. You could say that with a woman the animus always anticipates what she has to do later in reality. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 16

If she has a puer aeternus animus, she generally has a creative problem, and the cure for women is unfortunately exactly the same as for men: it is also work. When you say that, do you include having children? ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 16

In private life it is the animus of the devouring mother who takes the lead for the sheep-son.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 44

The devouring animus of the mother feeds on the innocence and the best and most devoted feelings of the son. And there too the sheep have been eaten by the shepherd. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 44

With a woman, it is the animus who whispers something at the back of her mind, some kind of “nothing but” remark. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 85

In the case of a woman, it is the animus who engineers things, and he is always a professional pessimist who excludes the tertium quod non datur. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 149

The animus says to the woman that he knows there are only so many possibilities; he says the thing can only go in such and such a way, thereby blocking off any possibility of life producing something itself. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 149

Like so many women who feel unloved, in her bitterness she has sold herself completely to the animus. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 208

The pretension of knowing all the answers is exactly what the father-animus produces in a woman: the assumption that everything is self-evident—the illusion of knowing it all. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 209

The two typical disturbances of a man who has an outstanding mother complex are, as Jung points out, homosexuality and Don Juanism. In the case of the former, the heterosexual libido is still tied up with the mother, who is really.  the only beloved object, with the result that sex cannot be experienced with another woman. That would make her a rival of the mother, and therefore sexual needs are satisfied only with a member of the same sex. Generally such men lack masculinity and seek that in the partner. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 7

Generally great difficulty is experienced in adaptation to the social situation and, in some cases, there is a kind of false individualism, namely that, being something special, one has no need to adapt, for that would be impossible for such a hidden genius, and so on.

In addition there is an arrogant attitude toward other people due to both an inferiority complex and false feelings of superiority.

Such people also usually have great difficulty in finding the right kind of job, for whatever they find is never quite right or quite what they wanted.

There is always “a hair in the soup.”

The woman also is never quite the right woman: she is nice as a girlfriend, but—. There is always a “but” which prevents marriage or any kind of definite commitment. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Problem of the Aeternus, Page 7-8

The healing hero, therefore, is the one who finds some creative way out, a way not already known, and does not follow a pattern. Ordinary sick people follow ordinary patterns, but the shaman cannot be cured by the usual methods of healing. He has to find the unique way, the only way that applies to him. The creative personality who can do that then becomes a healer and is recognized as such by his colleagues. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 112

Marie-Louise Von Franz “Wisdom of the Dream” .

In July 1933, Jung’s long-time associate Toni Wolff had begun to worry that his new fascination with alchemy was drawing him away from the issues of the day.

Thinking that it would be good for him to spend time   with bright young people, she asked her brother to bring a group of college students for a picnic lunch at Jung’s vacation tower in Bollingen, on Upper Lake Zurich. The group included von Franz, a beginning student in classical philology.

Many years later, she told an interviewer:

I was eighteen years old so I thought he was a Methuselah, or old bear or something.

But I was very deeply impressed.

I hesitated for half a year and then I went to his lecture and one day I wrote him a letter and asked him to take me in analysis.

I read one of his books and I thought: I cannot judge what this man says without having [the] experience myself.

He’s talking about inner facts and if you don’t know the facts, you can’t learn it by theory.

He said laughingly ‘So you want a teaching analysis.’

I didn’t know what that was so I said anxiously ‘No, I’m crazy enough for the real thing.’  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Wisdom of the Dream: The World of C. G. Jung. Boston 1990, Page. 11

Marie-Louise Von Franz “Dreams”

Women usually accept any new spirit of the times more quickly than men, and accept it with their animus, which is a logos spermatikos, because frequently they are less skeptical. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Dreams, Page 89

When a woman stays alone, she often falls into the animus. The Arabs say of a woman who leads a lonely life that a djinn has captured her in the desert! ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Dreams, Page 105

Animus Personification of the masculine nature in the unconscious of a woman. The animus is often recognized in projection onto spiritual authorities; in this way, a woman’s inner image of masculinity finds expression. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Dreams, Page 193

Marie-Louise Von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

There the wolf becomes an attribute of a dark feminine goddess and of dark nature. In the dreams of modem women the wolf often represents the animus, or that strange devouring attitude women can have when possessed by the animus. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, Page 255

Even if one watches one’s shadow or one’s animus, if one is not constantly on the alert, these figures get one in a moment of fatigue or in an abaissement du niveau mental. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, Page 321

In general, the extraverted man has an introverted anima, while the introverted woman has an extraverted animus, and vice versa. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, Page 30

People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients.

They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on.

There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales Page 259

Marie-Louise Von Franz “Meaning of Redemption in Fairytales”

If I project my animus onto a man it is as though a part of my psychic energy would flow towards that man and at the same time I would feel attracted to him. This acts like an arrow, an amount of psychic energy which is very pointed. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz – Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales, Page 71

Unfortunately, possession carries the conviction that one is right. Just as Russian protagonists are convinced that the Western world is the destructive thing, so if the animus has you, you are sure that it is so. Marie-Louise Von Franz, Meaning of Redemption in Fairytales, Page 105

We always tend to keep within ourselves threshold reactions such as a little doubt, or a little impulse not to do something. If the impulses are not very strong we are inclined to put them aside in a one-sided way and by this we have hurt an animal or a spirit within us. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales, Page 58

The philosophical system with which we try to interpret contents of the unconscious is open to still more, and that is the way in which an interpretation will not have a destructive effect. One should keep to what is possible and infer at the same time that there is a lot more to it so that there is room for growth. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales, Page 113

A human being in a neurotic state might very well be compared to a bewitched person, for people caught in a neurosis are apt to behave in a manner uncongenial and destructive towards themselves as well as others. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales, Page 7

If you think the anima as being “nothing but” what you know about her, you have not the receptiveness of a listening attitude, and so she becomes “nothing but” a load of brutal emotions; you have never given her a chance of expressing herself, and therefore she has become inhuman and brutal. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales, Page 43

If you observe a content which then disappears for a short time into the unconscious, it is not altered when it comes up again, but if you forget something for a long time, it does not return in the same form; it autonomously evolves or regresses in the other sphere, and therefore one can speak of unconscious as being a sphere, or entity in itself. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales, Page 49

The great thing is to know that. Like most of my brothers and sisters, when I am possessed by the animus, I do not notice it I am convinced it is my own and not the animus’s opinion. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Meaning of Redemption in Fairytales, Page 105

When you are too much in the animus you cannot get out of it at once, so keep quiet. Go back into your room and say, “This is all wrong, there is something very suspicious about the state in which I find myself so I will not say anything for a few days,” and then afterwards you can thank God that for once you managed to keep it inside. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Meaning of Redemption in Fairytales, Page 105

Women in general have this tendency-to take up new ideas, new movements, because their mind (the animus in them) is less bound by tradition. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 41

Marie-Louise Von Franz “Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche”

Today the problem of projection of animus and anima onto collective religious figures has

become much less acute, and thus these contents exert pressure directly and immediately on the individual. Hence the vulnerability of marriages. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 320

One might well ask at this point why it should be necessary for a person to be in contact with his or her historical-spiritual roots. In Zurich we have the opportunity to analyze many Americans who come to the Jung Institute and thus to observe the symptoms and results of a hiatus in culture (emigration of their forebears) and a loss of roots. In that case we are dealing with people whose consciousness is structured similarly to ours; but when we bore into the depths, we find something that resembles a gap in the steps—no continuity! A cultivated white man—and beneath that a primitive shadow, of which the Americans on the average have far less sense than we do. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 16

Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales

The beard plays an enormous role in fairy tales. You know the story of Bluebeard, who killed his wives. Now he is a wonderful image of the destructive, murderous animus! There is also the tale of King Thrushbeard, which illustrates the transformation of the negative into the positive animus. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 18

When one is possessed by the animus, one has a holy conviction about one’s assumptions. But one must ask, “ls that what I really believe?” One must pin down the flow. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 19

Women cannot fight the animus by killing him-they can only (catch him by pinning him by the beard so they can then escape. The male hero in myths fights, overcomes, conquers the monster. The feminine follows the path of individuation by suffering and escaping. lt is enough if a woman can walk out into the human situation, rebuild human relatedness, relationship. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 20

If a woman hasn’t gone through the experience of being trapped by the demon animus, she has only unconscious thoughts. It is the demon who provides her.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 21

Such a woman becomes a vampire because she has no life in herself. But she needs life and so must take it where she finds it. The negative devil-animus kills every feminine aspect in life.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 23

The Div represents the darker, more archaic form or image of God. The daughter belongs to a particular civilization. The anima is usually one step behind, and therefore the animus is also represented by a very primitive, pagan God. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 31

The animus produces emotional, stormy arguments. Whereas the anima is subject to subtle moods that come out in spoiling remarks. The animus is prone to brutal demonstrations of his power-brute force. The anima has more cunning ways to get what she wants or to make her presence known.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 31

In dreams we often see disorderly hair, which shows animus confusion. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 32

The animus loves to create a misty atmosphere, an ambiance  which one cannot find one’s orientation. The spreading of a cloud over a country is also attributed to dwarfs and giants because they disturb consciousness. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 32

Animus possession may take the form of criticizing everybody and everything-and the damnable thing about the animus is that he is quite right’ but likely to be wrong in the specific situation.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 36

A way to stop the arguing and criticizing is for the woman to say to her animus’ “lf you are so terribly fanatical about what is wrong and what ‘should’ be’ let’s look at my shadow.”  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 36

if a woman has a strong animus, and can overcome her reluctance to knowing her shadow, she can develop a degree of male objectivity about what goes on in her and thereby become conscious’ She must learn to tell the difference between herself and her opinions, between her feminine ego and her masculine animus.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 36

Jung once said that where love is lacking, power jumps in. A woman with a strong animus has a prestige persona which she tries to protect. That is power. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 37

When a woman comes to grips with her animus, when she reflects on his influence in her life, he drowns in her reflections’ while she herself is saved from drowning. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 38

Women can be tortured by the animus, who tells them they are a complete failure, that their life is finished and now it is too late. The thing to do then is to say, “Okay, I am a failure; let’s not discuss it any more.” This is a sort of stepping out of it and thus one saves energy and can turn to something else. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 39

Every possession by the animus is a secret inflation, ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 39

If you check on the standards used by the animus in his constant criticism, you find that they are always a collective truth, something much beyond the individual.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 40

A genuine spiritual attitude which lacks the negative quality of the animus does not oppose real feminine life. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 40

Women are not committed to specific ideas (though their animus may be), and that is why they are able to contribute to the renewal of collective attitudes. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 42

The animus is frequently like this, too impatient: a woman feels she must make up her mind immediately, cut through a situation, act one way or another, instead of waiting for the pregnant psyche to bring forth the proper new development. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 43

Through this appeasement of the animus, one may find one’s true feelings and discover that it was all animus talk. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 44

Every animus conflict, if it is serious enough, seems to touch these deepest, archetypal layers of the psyche where there is an ongoing conflict between the light god and the dark god. That is why we should try to stand outside the conflict and at the same time watch it, try to realize it objectively. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 45

The animus figure appears here as a totem animal, the life principle of the girl’s tribe, the guarantee of their prosperity. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 58

It is important to understand this, because we can see it in people today who blindly marry an anima or animus projection, which then leads to a situation where the couple is not able to deal with the problem.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 58

Sometimes the relationship involves only the anima and the animus and not the human beings at all: anima and animus are attracted to one other, but when the two people are thrown together they may not be able to stand each other at all! ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 60

Animus and anima are not always happy to have this relationship-they lose part of their power when they are made conscious. They would prefer to remain gods and goddesses and keep their power.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 75

In the animus situation, his destructiveness takes the form of an inner argument, which makes it necessary to give him something to chew on. But for a man, if he goes into a place where the anima herself is, it would mean that here he takes a step into life. This has to do with the fact that the anima is an archetype of life, and the animus an archetype of death. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 77

The anima’s darkness is that she wants to entangle the man in the doubtful ambiguities of life, while the dark side of the animus is a demon who would pull women away from life, cut them off from it. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 77

Marie-Louise Von Franz, Psychotherapy

When you try to make the shadow conscious, or to become conscious of your own shadow, the inferior function will give the animus or the anima figure a special quality. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Psychotherapy, Page 89

For the animus what counts is insight or truth for truth’s sake over and against any admixture of sensuality or power craving. Only a woman who loves the truth for its own sake can integrate the animus, and then he becomes, like the anima, a bridge to the Self, that is, to the knowledge of the Self. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Psychotherapy, Page 183

Fashion, the film world, and the anima possession of men reinforce the temptation for women to play the puella role, just as the animus possession of mothers and women makes young men into “eternal youths.” ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Psychotherapy, Page 228

If one analyzes women who are identified with the Great Mother, they often seem like an imposing massa confusa of emotions, unconscious scheming, animus opinions, and so on, behind which, however, one finds a very small, sensitive, childish ego.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Psychotherapy, Page 229

Marie-Louise Von Franz, Aurora Consurgens:

…. the “secret” of alchemy, unlike certain other fields to which Jungian psychology can be applied, has never lost interest to me.

The secret has to do with the relation of the unconscious psyche to inorganic matter and the unitary reality which may be surmised as being their common substrate—that unus mundus which Jung describes in the last chapter of Mysterium Coniunctionis. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Aurora Consurgens, Page ix.

Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Dreams and Visions of St. Niklaus von der Flue

Animus possessed women often dream that they are imprisoned in a tower, they have imprisoned themselves in this neurotic defense mechanism and cannot get out of it. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Dreams and Visions of St. Niklaus von der Flue, Page 14

in a woman it is the animus which thinks: “One ought”, “It should be done”, “Everyone thinks so.” The animus of a woman is a doctrinarian, an announcer of collective rules and not of rules for one person and no one else. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Dreams and Visions of St. Niklaus von der Flue, Page 67

Marie-Louise von Franz, Lectures on Jung’s Typology

Practically, it is most helpful when one wants to find out the type to ask, what is the greatest cross for the person? Where is his greatest suffering? Where does he feel that he always knocks his head against the obstacle and suffers hell? That generally points to the inferior function. Many people, moreover, develop two superior functions so well that it is very difficult to say whether the person is a thinking intuitive type or an intuitive type with good thinking, for the two seem equally good. Sometimes sensation and feeling are so well developed in an individual that you would have difficulty in ascertaining which is the first. But does the intuitive thinking person suffer more from knocking his head on sensation facts or from feeling problems? Here you can decide which is the first, and which the well-developed second, function. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, Page 32-33

Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Way of the Dream

It is really their own masculine drive, their animus, that has estranged them from their feminine identity. It’s the result of social life in general and not of their husbands. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 133

In its negative form a woman’s inner man, the animus, is a power of evil destructive to human life. He separates a woman from her own femininity. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 154

But, you see, that is the essence of what one calls possession. When a woman is possessed by the animus, she thinks that the animus is herself. Only when, or if, she wakes up does she come to realize, “No, that’s not me.” ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 159

Now, the animus is the most frequent form of possession in a woman. She is suddenly entered by a mood of cold male determination, taken over by abstract, opinionated thinking, and driven by an impulse toward rash, brutal, determined action-none of which is at all in her feminine character. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 160

What Marilyn Monroe was to men, Valentino was to women. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 165

The positive animus is an innermost instinctive awareness of the inner truth, a basic inner truthfulness which guides the spiritual woman in her individuation, toward becoming her own self ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 176

A woman who has no animus has no pep, no enterprise, no intelligence, no initiative. She is a very poor creature. She is just a womb producing children and a hand cooking in the kitchen. A woman without an animus is nothing. So the animus is an exceedingly positive thing. It is the intelligence. It is the spiritual longing. The whole spirituality of women is connected with the animus. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 185

Following your own star means isolation, not knowing where to go, having to find out a completely new way for yourself instead of just going on the trodden path everybody else runs along. That’s why there’s always been a tendency in humans to project the uniqueness and the greatness of their own inner self onto outer personalities and become the servants, the devoted servants, admirers, and imitators of outer personalities. It is much easier to admire a great personality and become a pupil or follower of a guru or a religious prophet, or an admirer of a big, official personality – a President of the United States – or live your life for some military general whom you admire. That is much easier than following your own star. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 51

When people try to evade problems you first have to ask if it is not just laziness. Jung once said, “Laziness is the greatest passion of mankind, even greater than power or sex or anything. Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 54

Any lack of balance in this respect, either too far below or too far above the mark, has an irritating effect upon the surroundings. To know if one has an inflation, a person has only to see if he or she gets on other people’s nerves. If so, one is probably a bit overestimating one-self, or underestimating oneself for with an inflation a person may have feelings of either superiority or inferiority. Feelings of inferiority are just a veiled inflation. If one feels inferior, that’s really ambition; a person wants to be more than one is. One wants to be a great person and knows one isn’t. Inferiority is also inflation and, therefore, gets on people’s nerves.

Sometimes people come in and say, “Oh well, you know, I can’t do it. How do you think I can do this? You know, I’m not capable, I’m so stupid, I can’t think,” and so on. Then I say, “Now stop that nonsense. Get on with your job.” They are really making a conceited dance out of calling themselves inferior and incapable. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 52

Marie-Louise Von Franz – Dreams A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures

The nigredo indicates a condition of depression and sadness, a condition of being driven by instinctive impulses, passions (the appearance of wild animals), emotions, etc. Shadow and animus or anima appear in this stage in a destructive form. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz – Dreams A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures, Page 109

Marie-Louise Von Franz, Creation Myths

It was a borderline situation, a woman who, in complete animus possession, had smashed up her relationship with a man to whom she had a terrific transference. She was a walking animus and had nothing but her animus to live on. Complete destruction of her feminine personality had gone on for many years (a schizophrenic disposition), and she was within an ace of going off her head.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Creation Myths, Page 17

Marie-Louise von Franz, Lectures on Aion

The animus is very partial to argument, and he can drive an originally clear-thinking man to such despair that he can even become the animus of his own anima and argue just like a woman himself. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Lectures on Aion, Page 20

It is – as mentioned before much easier to gain insight into the shadow than into the animus and anima. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Lectures on Aion, Page 21

Although the ancient Greeks saw them more plastically, the animus and anima are not missing in Christianity; in fact they occupy the highest place as Christ and his bride, the church. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Lectures on Aion, Page 22

The animus and anima stage is correlated with polytheism and the Self with monogamy. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Lectures on Aion, Page 119

Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption

One should not forget that Jung was the first to show a way and to promote it, long before there was Women’s Lib and such things; showing that we now have to try, for the first time in history, to establish a real relationship between men and women beyond the blind attraction through the projection of animus and anima. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption, Page 93-94

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

~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection

In the case of a powerful love projection (that is, a projection of the inner partner-images of animus and anima), a double process sometimes takes place and one experiences it both as being struck by an arrow (invasion by a complex) and as loss of soul, as utter dependence on the presence of the other.

Inwardly one feels as if invaded by a passionate disquiet and fantasy activity, and at the same time as if one’s own life has flowed out to the other in the outer world.

This explains a curious mythological motif that has so far gone unexplained.

For the most part we assume that when a man falls in love with a woman as a result of a sudden anima projection, he looks upon her as the sender of love’s arrow, not the god Amor.

In antiquity, however, such a man felt that he had been shot by the god Eros or hit by the mater saeva cupidinum, that is, by Venus.

The flare-up of or invasion by passion is separately experienced as something inner, while the lost soul-fragment is considered as something different, attached to the outer figure. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 32

Seen from the point of view of woman’s psychology, Eros in Apuleius’ fairy tale is also a pre-form of the god Osiris; in woman he is the “spirit who shows the way,” in the original meaning of the word (psychopompos)} that is, her positive animus.

One can study his destructive aspect in the very impressive medieval reports of possession by the devil, but here he is the positive animus-daimon in the role of mediator to the Self, which for a woman could be seen in the goddess Isis; Isis was also officially invoked as “Isis of women” in Egyptian religious texts.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 134

The animus as divine puer aeternus on the other hand, appears as a creative spirit who can inspire a woman to undertake her own spiritual achievements. This spirit is a spirit of love, that is, of her own living inner mystery, which comes into realization in the Eros between man and woman. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 134

It appears to be in the nature of the animus to lure the woman away from reality  now and again. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 135

In both cases anima and animus effect an alienation from reality, because the empathetic projections of the anima are of an illusory nature and the judgments of the animus are very often simply beside the point. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 135

Just as in the case of Apuleius the mother-anima figure appears differentiated into a form close to the human (Charite) and two divine forms (Psyche and Isis), so Perpetua too is guided in her visions on the one hand by animus figures that are symbolized by men from her environment and on the other by the divine shepherd and fencing-master, who are wholly transpersonal. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 136

If we compare the two great daimons, Anima and Animus, as they are depicted in our two examples, it becomes clear that, for Apuleius, Isis would be the anima, whereas she would represent the Self for a woman, just as the cosmic shepherd appears as animus in Perpetua’s visions but as the personification of the Self in texts that recount the inner experiences of men. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 139

Anima and animus, as we have come to know them in the form of lsis and the shepherd (Hermes-Psychopompos) in the two examples discussed above, appear in the alchemistic tradition as king and queen. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 140

If we compare the projections that issue from the shadow complex with those proceeding from the anima-animus complex, we may say that insight into one’s own shadow projections means first of all a moral humiliation, intensive suffering. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 141

Insight into projections originating in the anima or the animus, on the other hand, demands not so much humility as level-headedness and commonsense self-observation and reflection, which demand a certain wisdom and humaneness, because these figures always want to seduce us away from reality into rapture or pull us down into an inner world of fantasy.

Whoever cannot surrender to this experience has never lived; whoever founders in it has understood nothing. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 141-142

We should be skeptical about attempts to relate some of these “souls” or “daimons” to the Jungian concepts of shadow, anima, animus, and Self.

It would be a great mistake, as Jung himself often emphasized, to suppose that the shadow, the anima (or animus), and the Self appear separately in a person’s unconscious, neatly timed and in definable order.

In the reality of everyday practice it is much more likely that a person in depth psychological analysis will first meet with something psychically “absolutely other” in himself, a dark, chaotic something, appearing to him in complicated dream images in which, little by little, he begins to discover his alter ego.  ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 144-145

If we look for personifications of the Self among the daimons of antiquity, we see that certain daimons are more like a mixture of shadow and Self, or of animus-anima and Self, and that is, in fact, what they are.

In other words, they represent the still undifferentiated ”other,” unconscious personality of the individual. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection, Page 145

The heretic Girard di Monteforte (near Turin) even interpreted God as the primordially existing mind, or spirit, of man (!) and the Son as the spirit (animus) of man(!) beloved by God, but the Holy Spirit as the understanding of Scripture. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection & Re-Collection, Page 49

The animus as divine puer aeternus on the other hand, appears as a creative spirit who can inspire a woman to undertake her own spiritual achievements.

This spirit is a spirit of love, that is, of her own living inner mystery. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection & Re-Collection, Page 134

Whereas the anima usually appears in the form of a fascination, an allurement that draws the man into life, the animus often appears as a spirit of death; indeed there are even fairy tales in which a woman marries a handsome, unknown stranger who is revealed later on as death personified, · a revelation that brings about the death of the woman herself. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection & Re-Collection, Page 135

This is tied to the fact that, as a projection-making factor, a man’s anima produces mainly passive, that is, empathetic, projections that bind the man to objects; the animus, on the other hand, produces more active, that is, more judgmental, projections that tend to cut the woman off from the world of objects. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection & Re-Collection, Page 135

The shadow or the animus and anima can infuse a person with curiously distorted thoughts about himself, but only that reflection which proceeds from the Self, the inner center, could be correctly described as genuine moral reflection. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection & Re-Collection, Page 168

Marie-Louise Von Franz -The Feminine in Fairy Tales

That would be the symbol of such shirts, and that is one of the highest achievements of the feminine process of individuation—the attainment of that subtle rightness which makes Vasilisa a queen. The latter symbolizes a model of femininity for the new age to come. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Page 194-195

People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients.

They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on.

There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales Page 259

There are people who cannot risk loneliness with the experience. They always have to be in a flock and have human contact. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, Page 140

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

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

Carl Jung remained faithful to his wife Emma in one way only serious scholars can understand: He promised never to talk or write about the Grail Legend, as 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

Marie-Louise von Franz, A Woman’s Way an Interview

Yes. I could not have had children because my health was very, very precarious all my life. When I was young, I would have liked to marry and have children, yet I know now in retrospect that it would have probably killed me. So I can see that although I wanted children, it was not my destiny. – Marie-Louise von Franz, A Woman’s Way, Page 118

Donna: With today’s technological advances, many women make their decision regarding children on the basis of available birth control or abortion instead of doing that inner search. Marie-Louise: Each is an individual case. Every woman should listen within and she will know whether to have a child, even if illegitimately, or whether for her the answer is not to have this child. – Marie-Louise von Franz, A Woman’s Way, Page 118

PP: How do you feel about the issue of family planning and elective abortion in particular?

Marie-Louise: Once again, it is an individual matter.

One woman could err in not having an abortion when her individual situation says she should.

Another woman could err by having a child when she should not.

One must stay close to feeling to know what one should do in this matter of having or not having children. – Marie-Louise von Franz, A Woman’s Way, Page 118

Nietzsche is the prototype of modern man having an inflation because of not believing any more. It is the madness of not only Europe but also China and America. When people do away with religious tradition, they fall into the Superman fantasy. – Marie-Louise von Franz, A Woman’s Way, Page 103

For instance, Nietzsche says in Zarathustra, “If you go to the woman, take the whip with you.” That is completely true for the inner life. A man should whip his anima. That means, he should be able to criticize his anima when it is appropriate to do so. – Marie-Louise von Franz, A Woman’s Way, Page 103

Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales

Jung once said that the strongest passion in humans is not hunger, sex or power, although these are quite strong; the very strongest passion is laziness. The longer I study human beings, including myself, the more I am inclined to agree. Laziness is the strongest passion. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, Page 43

Jung says that the unconscious process of individuation results in an incredible hardening of the individual against others, while consciously working on the problem of individuation and the problem of transference leads to humanization, to greater consciousness, wisdom and relatedness. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, Page 64

We know from experience that when a daughter has a close positive tie to her father, this gives her an active spirituality and an aliveness of the mind, with mental and spiritual interests. As Jung pointed out, such women are not like others who do things only to please men. They really do these things on their own. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, Page 77

As you know, Jung says of Western alchemy that it was not an anti-Christian movement but rather a compensatory undercurrent which preserved many things that were discarded, forgotten or underestimated in the developing Christian world-view. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, Page 124

In China, the two great movements were Taoism and Confucianism. In the conscious social world it was Confucianism that took official precedence over Taoism. Confucianism was the philosophy on which most of the outer civilized life of China was based, while Taoism has a more complicated history. In fact, at times Taoists had to go underground because of persecution. et Taoism always constituted that undercurrent which kept contact with the living development of the collective unconscious, as opposed to surfacing in conscious rules of behavior. That is why its ideas have been preserved in folklore and linked with alchemy. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, Page 124-125

The animus of the mother especially seems to have such a destructive, inhibiting effect on creativity. Jung himself told us once that when he was a student of sixteen, he became very excited about something chemistry or physics and he drew enormous charts in his room. He put them all up on the wall. Then his mother came in, looked at them suspiciously and said, “Is that of any use?” And Jung was so upset by this that for three days he couldn’t go on with the project. Finally he pulled up his socks and said, “Damn it all, I’m not going to be hindered by her remark,” and went on again with his charts and figures. But for three days he was completely lamed by that remark, “Is that of any use?”  ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 153

Jung even went so far as to say that senility was to a great extent a facultative curse. In other words, it could be avoided. If old people restricted themselves to a small rhythm of life and concentrated on doing everything slowly and carefully, they could avoid becoming senile. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 170

Schopenhauer once said that the sense of humor is the only divine quality in humans. Jung often quoted this saying. Once he told me that he made it a great point to see if his patients had a sense of humor. People who have no sense of humor are very difficult to treat, and if they are psychotic they are practically incurable. On the other hand, even severely psychotic people sometimes have a sense of humor. f those, Jung would say, “Oh, take them, they have such a sense of humor. You might not cure them, but you can keep them afloat.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 183