MARIE-LOUISE VON FRANZ
There are people who cannot risk loneliness with the experience. They always have to be in a flock and have human contact.
Remark: I would not deny the efficacy of prayer when I and God work together, but that involves not just myself and God but also people with whom I live, my family and what have you, in relation to God, the Holy Spirit.
Dr. von Franz: There you mention the main thing but the Holy Spirit bloweth where it listeth, where it will. You, the theologian, identify with a conscious position and take that as absolute.
From that standpoint you can talk about everything, but you don’t notice your unconscious identification.
If you question your conscious standpoint long enough, I am sure the Holy Ghost will one day whisper something to you about it.
For us, there is always only the individual and his or her experience of God and all the rest is secondary.
In therapy it is not we who connect the individual with God, even that would be a megalomanic presumption of the psychotherapist-though many do presume to do so, and by that they have already become hidden theologians again.
If you are with an analysand the only way you may perhaps help is by always saying: “I don’t know, but let us ask God.”
By that you prevent the analysand from drawing rash conscious conclusions or seducing you into making them, and therefore every religious experience becomes a unique event.
God in every experience is experienced in a specific and unique form and that includes even the red sulphur, which means that if you put the question of the red sulphur before God, God will give His unique answer in each case. ― Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, Page 141
Why is it that so few people follow their own star? Why is the star such a heavy burden?
Because 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 50
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 77
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. . ― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, Page 51-52
Depressions and melancholy are often a cover for tremendous greed.
At the beginning of an analysis there is often a depressed state of resignation-life has no meaning, there is no feeling of being in life. An exaggerated state can develop into complete lameness. Quite young people give the impression of having the resignation of a bitter old man or woman. When you dig into such a black mood you find that behind it there is overwhelming greed-for being loved, for being very rich, for having the right partner, for being the top dog, etc.
Behind such a melancholic resignation you will often discover in the darkness a recurring theme which makes things very difficult, namely if you give such people one bit of hope, the lion opens its mouth and you have to withdraw, and then they put the lid on again, and so it goes on, back and forth. ― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales, Page 37-38
The little open door of each individual’s inferior function is what contributes to the sum of collective evil in the world.
It is a fact that if an impulse from one or the other sphere comes up and is not lived out, then it goes back down and tends to develop anti-human qualities. What should have been a human impulse becomes a tiger-like impulse.
For instance, a man has a feeling impulse to say something positive to someone and he blocks it off through some inhibition. He might then dream that he had a spontaneous feeling impulse on the level of a child and his conscious purpose had smashed it. The human is still there, but as a hurt child. Should he do that habitually for five years, he would no longer dream of a child who had been hurt but of a zoo full of raging wild animals in a cage.
An impulse which is driven back loads up with energy and becomes inhuman. This fact, according to Dr. Jung, demonstrates the independent existence of unconscious. ― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales. Page 58-59
Everything which is malevolent or profane always results in giving the thing that “nothing but” attitude.
In intellectual discussions there are people who seem to want the last word; there is a sharp kind of drive in their argument which is not necessary in an intellectual formulation.
When not used as an instrument, the intellect becomes autonomous and dynamic and one can be sure that a man with such an attitude is driven by his anima, otherwise he would discuss in a quiet, detached way.
There may be a certain supplementary aspect which has not been seen as yet.
Scientists of the nineteenth century always claimed to show the absolute truth; they had the idea of “now we now” and not the kind of open attitude of modern scientists, who say:
“What we observe leads us to this conclusion.”
This leaves the thing open for whatever decisions may be reached, there is always the idea not of the absolute truth, but only of a relative truth― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs Fairy Tales, Page 114
One has to consider what effect it would have on one to have to accept the fact that God was not the friendly guardian of kindergarten!
Even the Christian dogma says that God has an incomprehensible side, and if you can realize this then you can grow away from the idea that if you are well behaved then you will be happy.
This man got out of his infantile mechanism, becoming more earnest and sad consciously, but less bitter and melancholic.
Through realization of the dark image he acquired a certain wisdom.
Hitherto also he had been very critical of human reactions, but through the realization of the dark side of God, and the precarious situation of man, he became more tolerant and understanding, realizing that we are all poor devils struggling with a difficult fate, the beginning and end of which we do not know.
He thus began to accept the small happinesses of life, which you can enjoy much more if you know that life is difficult and dark, and he acquired a certain sense of humour which he had not formerly possessed. ― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales, Page 46-47
One has to be wounded in order to become a healer.
This is the local image of a universal mythological motif, which is described in Eliade’s book about the initiation of medicine men and shamans.
Nobody becomes either one or the other without first having been wounded, either cut open by the initiator and having certain magical stones inserted into his body, or a spear thrown at his neck, or some such thing.
Generally, the experiences are ecstatic – stars or ghost-like demons – hit them or cut them open, but always they have to be pierced or cut apart before they become healers, for that is how they acquire the capacity for healing others.” Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 111
Only by sacrificing what we have can we know what we have. Real sacrifice is made with the same definiteness and lack of bargaining that is involved in throwing something away We can do this only if we are forced by a greater power in us – a power stronger than the ego – that gives us the necessary strength. We experience this power as an inner imperative that tells us that we “must.” In Jungian psychology we understand that as a message from the Self, the regulating center of the pysche. The sacrificer and what is sacrificed are one and the same: it is always the Self. ― Marie-Louise von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales, Page 38
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
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.”
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.
This is why Dr. Jung introduced active imagination, as a means of talking to the complex: you ask the black dog into your room and talk to him, listening carefully to what he says.
You will see then that the overload disappears and is replaced by a relatively human being with whom you can talk and you find out that it is the wizard.
The human being has hitherto rejected the anima and the wizard has taken it out on her.
It is like killing the wife or the child to hurt the other person. You can say in such a case that the ego has somewhere blocked one complex by another; then one is bewitched as an act of vengeance. If it is a pagan Weltanschauung which is behind the anima, the man would have to ask and ascertain his own stand point: “Why do such ideas exist in my soul?” The influence on his anima will then stop and he will see that she is harmless in herself. ― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Fairy Tales, Page 43-44
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 the Americans on the average have far less sense than we do. The effect of this is a certain restlessness and suggestibility, an uncritical susceptibility to currents of fashion, and a tendency toward extreme reactions. Of course this also has a positive side, which expresses itself in the average American’s sense of enterprise and openness to the world. When one analyzes such people, sooner or later through their dreams the story of their ancestors up till the time of their emigration to the United States comes up for discussion.
At that point most of the analysands spontaneously feel the need to take a “sentimental journey” to the country of their ancestors. Renewed connection with the country of their forefathers usually contributes to a better self-understanding on the part of these analysands. Emigration or periods of living in another culture on the whole have quite peculiar psychological consequences. The English are familiar with the notion of “going native,” by which they mean the unconscious influence upon colonists and colonial officials, and the like, who are infected by the African mentality.
The influence is initially negative, taking the form of tardiness, uncleanliness, a tendency to make up fantastic stories, and so on, all attributes of which the whites routinely accuse the natives. This unconscious negative influence can, however, be transformed into something positive if the person in question does not look down upon the other culture but rather opens himself respectfully to it and takes its views and traits seriously. Then it has an enriching effect rather than an undermining one. This is, of course, true everywhere, not only in Africa. — Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, Page 16
Jung writes that women with a negative mother complex often miss the first half of life; they walk past it in a dream. Life to them is a constant source of annoyance and irritation. But if they can overcome this negative mother complex, they have a good chance in the second half of rediscovering life with the youthful spontaneity missed in the first half. For though, as Jung says in the last paragraph, a part of life has been lost, its meaning has been saved.
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. Though it is infinitely simple, it is extremely difficult, for it is the one thing the woman with a negative mother complex cannot do; it needs God’s help.
Even the analyst cannot help her — it must one day just happen, and this is generally when there has been sufficient suffering. One cannot escape one’s fate; the whole pain of it must be accepted, and one day the infinitely simple solution comes. — Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Page 84
When the prince appears after a hundred years, the thorny hedge growing around the castle blossoms suddenly into beautiful roses. The rose, says one medieval author, belongs to the goddess Venus and means love, for “there is no love without thorns.” They also say “Ubi mel, ibi fel,” where there is honey, there is also the bitter gall. You can refer the meaning of the thorn to the terrible involuntary hurts loving people always inflict upon each other. 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.
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. Such hedges of thorns in dreams refer to exaggerated touchiness, which is always combined with aggressiveness. If a very touchy analysand comes, I know that I shall get a lot of very bad stings, so I put on an armor. Touchy people are proud of their sensitiveness, by which they tyrannize others. An unkind word provides tragedy for months.
You cannot open your mouth because you might hurt the other person. They get into tempers over everything and sulk and are hurt in their wonderful delicate feelings; it is just plain tyranny. Such people usually have a very vulgar hidden power complex which comes out in the shadow—an infantile attitude toward life through which those around are tyrannized. What should be a receptive, loving attitude becomes a thorny hedge, where every man who tries to penetrate gets so torn that he just retires. — Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Page 47
Generally, great difficulty is experienced in adaptation to the social situation. In some cases, there is a kind of asocial individualism: being something special, one has no need to adapt, for that would be impossible for such a hidden genius, and so on. In addition, an arrogant attitude arises towards other people, due to both an inferiority complex and false feelings of superiority. Such people 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 is never quite the right woman; she is nice as a girl friend, but . . . There is always a “but” which prevents marriage or any kind of commitment. This all leads to a form of neurosis which II. G. Baynes has described as the “provisional life”; that is, the strange attitude and feeling that the woman is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about. If this attitude is prolonged, it means a constant inner refusal to commit oneself to the moment.
Accompanying this neurosis is often, to a smaller or greater extent, a savior or Messiah complex, with the secret thought that one day one will be able to save the world; that the last word in philosophy, or religion, or politics, or art, or something else, will be found. This can progress to a typical pathological megalomania, or there may be minor traces of it in the idea that one’s time “has not yet come.”
The one situation dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatsoever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the specific human being that one is.
There is always the fear of being caught in a situation from which it may be impossible to slip out again. Every just-so situation is hell. At the same time, there is something highly symbolic—namely, a fascination for dangerous sports, particularly flying and mountaineering—so as to get as high as possible, the symbolism of which is to get away from the mother; i.e., from the— Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Page 2
The anthroposophist Ernst Bindel has likewise explored the meaning of natural numbers in connection with the musical scale, a field I do not intend to consider in this book becauseit would lead too far from my main argument.
Nonetheless his exposition should be mentioned here in passing. The whole province of music and its relation to number seems to me to represent a feeling grasp of the same elements which I shall attempt to formulate consciously. Leibniz once made the significant remark that music was a hidden practice of the soul, which does not know that it is dealing with numbers …. In a confused and unnoticed kind of perception the soul achieves that which, in the midst of clearer perceptions, it is not able to observe.
If therefore the soul does not notice that it calculates, it yet senses the effect of its unconscious reckoning, be this as joy over harmony or as oppression over discord. Through the discovery of the unconscious it has now become possible to throw a clearer light on these hitherto vaguely surmised relationships.
If, following Jung’s suggestion, we admit that the unconscious participates in the formation of our representations of natural numbers, then all statements about them become recognizable as realizations of only partial aspects of the number archetype. In order to grasp the meaning of these aspects more closely we must first return to simpler facts, namely, to the individual numbers themselves, and gather together the sum total of thought, both technical and mythological assertions, which they have called forth from humanity. Numbers, furthermore, as archetypal structural constants of the collective unconscious, possess a dynamic, active aspect which is especially important to keep in mind.
It is not what we can do with numbers but what they do to our consciousness that is essential. Because of this my subsequent remarks balance to some extent on the razor’s edge between philosophical— mathematical and numerical-symbolical statements. But individual number, its unique and fundamental factual material, stands always at the center of my attention, because in the final analysis it has given rise to mankind’s most varied assertions. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Number and Time, Page 33-34
If you study the whole setup of such primitive situations you will see that they are just as likely as we to make the same mistake, i.e., to interpret something as psychological when it is physical and vice versa. There are doctor animals and ordinary animals, and they are uncertain as to which is which. This uncertainty as to what should survive seems to be a general human condition.
There exists a very deep-seated possibility of error and uncertainty as to the level on which certain impulses have to be lived and classified. It may happen that a primitive hunter shoots a bear and is afterwards horrified to discover that he has shot an ancestral ghost. He did not experience quickly enough the psychic implications.
I think this must have to do with the fact that we do not consciously grasp our threshold instinctive reactions; 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
If you take it on the psychological level, you can say that in this light of recognition there is a nuance of a ”nothing but” attitude. It makes a world of difference if I say “this is this” or if I say it is “nothing but this.” If something is in a growing process and I say, “It is this,” then it can still change, but if I say it is “nothing but,” this attitude limits and stops transformation and the possibility of further growth. If the intellect does not say, “It appears to me that way,” but is accompanied by that subtle psychological attitude which says, “
I know it is just this and not more,” then the “nothing but” nuance brings in what is devilish or Luciferian and destroys everything, especially the growing thing. What is already petrified is no longer important. If I think in this way of a railway, that is not harmed, but if I think I know all about plant life and that it is only this and that chemical process, then I block off any possibility of saying more.
All contents of the soul have to come back to the other motif of the swan wing they all have an aspect which is not yet recognized. 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
Dr. von Franz: Certainly, that is why you have again to solidify the spirit! You have to do both. It is what the Zen Master said: “At the beginning of the process water is water and mountains are mountains and streams are streams” that is the taste of a good steak, but for the ego, and that is no good. You have to go into a state where mountains are no longer mountains, streams no longer streams, and water no longer water, which means you see them as similes.
But at the end of the process mountains are again mountains and that would involve resolidifying the spirit. To get stuck in the middle, this way or the other, is bad. The process needs both movements so as not to become destructive, and that is so beautifully illustrated in alchemy. The body has to be spiritualized and the spirit has to be incarnated, both things must take place.
You see here, in this document, an example of what Dr. Jung says, namely that alchemy compensates the one-sidedness of Christian spiritualization; it is that underlying movement which is not anti-Christian but completes it by bringing the opposites nearer together, by bringing physical life and such things more into the field of observation and attention.
Remark: I have often observed in Jungian analysis that there is a danger of intellectualizing the spirit.
Dr. von Franz: Yes, and then it becomes awfully thin! The spirit turns into intellectual concepts and loses its original emotional and gripping quality, and then there happens exactly what you say. That is the great danger, for then the spirit becomes thin and bottled.
“Question: Couldn’t one say that whenever there is a real spiritual experience it should become manifest?
Dr. von Franz: There is no ‘should’ about it. I think a real spiritual experience I don’t know exactly what you have in mind when you say that does become manifest. Mythos means communication. If you are overwhelmed by a spiritual experience it itself wants you to communicate it, i.e., manifest it; that is the meaning of the word mythos. There is no religious experience where there is not the need to tell of it; that is natural, but one need not add the word ‘should.’ If it is true, it will become real, its natural flow will be into reality. — Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: Symbolism and the Psychology, Page 260-261
Last time I left a point unsolved. I put a question about a human being who had been bewitched and turned into a tiger and said that the human instinct would not be to behave like a tiger. Therefore what would it mean if an impulse appeared in a dream as a wolf or a tiger? Here a psychological content has been wrongfully pushed into the body side and perverted so that it is no longer typically human.
No one has seen what the unconscious is; it is a concept, not an ectoplasmic reality somewhere in space. If something comes into my mind from my unconscious, a moment later it can fall below the threshold of consciousness: I know the man is Mr. So-and-So, a minute later I have forgotten the name, and afterwards I may remember it again. Therefore, one can assume that what is unconscious is that which is not associated with ego consciousness.
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 Redemption Motifs in Fairytales, Page 59
As you know, there was a famous quarrel between Max Planck and Einstein, in which Einstein claimed that, on paper, the human mind was capable of nventing mathematical models of reality. In this he generalized his own experience because that is what he did. Einstein conceived his theories more or less completely on paper, and experimental developments in physics proved that his models explained phenomena very well.
So Einstein says that the fact that a model constructed by the human mind in an introverted situation fits with outer facts is just a miracle and must be taken as such. Planck does not agree, but thinks that we conceive a model which we check by experiment, after which we revise our model, so that there is a kind of dialectic friction between experiment and model by which we slowly arrive at an explanatory fact compounded of the two. Plato-Aristotle in a new form! But both have forgotten something- the unconscious.
We know something more than those two men, namely that when Einstein makes a new model of reality he is helped by his unconscious, without which he would not have arrived at his theories…But what role DOES the unconscious play?…either the unconscious knows about other realities, or what we call the unconscious is a part of the same thing as outer reality, for we do not know how the unconscious is linked with matter.— Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy, Page 36
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 73
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