Marie-Louise von Franz was a German-born Swiss analytic psychologist and fairy-tale expert who collaborated with Carl Jung for more than 30 years. Her research revealed the similarities between tales from many cultures and connected the tales' themes with situations in daily life.
Background
Ethnicity:
Her father was of Austrian descent and her mother was German by birth.
Marie-Louise von Franz was born on January 4, 1915 in Munich, German Empire (present-day Germany) to Baron Erwin Gottfried von Franz and Margret (Schoen) von Franz. In 1919 the family moved to Rheineck in the canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Education
Marie-Louise studied at primary school in Rheineck and Freies Gymnasium. In 1933, von Franz entered the University of Zurich, where she studied Classical Philology and Classical languages (Latin and Greek) as major subjects and literature and ancient history as minor subjects.
Von Franz also occupied herself with Jungian psychology. She attended Jung's psychological lectures at the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School in Zurich (now the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and his psychological seminars. In 1940 Marie-Louise received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in classical philology with great distinction.
Career
Von Franz is remembered for her work with pioneering Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, which included work interpreting dreams, fairy tales, and myths. Although she was devoted to Jung's theories, she encouraged others to not become Jung, but to follow his counsel to become the unique individual each person is meant to be.
Marie-Louise met Jung in 1933. For a time, she was his patient and then began working with him. Although she met Jung at the age of eighteen, she did not begin to practice analysis until she was forty-one. In 1948, von Franz became a co-founder of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich and served there as a teacher. She also found time to lecture at universities and colleges worldwide. In all she worked with Jung for twenty-eight years until his death in 1961 and then continued his work.
It's also worth noting, that, from 1941 to 1944, von Franz served as an associate member of the Psychological Club, Zurich.
In 1974, von Franz together with her pupils founded the "Stiftung für Jung'sche Psychologie" (Foundation for Jungian Psychology). The aim of this foundation is to support research and promulgation of the findings in the field of Jungian depth psychology.
After 1986 von Franz turned to a more introverted life at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland.
It's worth mentioning, that, during her career, Marie-Louise von Franz wrote or edited numerous books, including Man and His Symbols (with Jung and others), Number and Time: Reflections Leading Toward a Unification of Depth Psychology and Physics, A Psychological Interpretation of the Golden Ass of Apuleius, The Problem of Puer Aeternus, Problems of the Feminine in Fairytales, Patterns of Creativity in Creation Myths, An Introduction to the Psychology of Fairy Tales, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, and Time: Patterns of Flow and Return. Von Franz wrote about Jung himself in books such as C. G. Jung und die Theologen (with Ulrich Mann and Hans-W. Heidland) and C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time. She also finished The Grail Legend about England's King Arthur, begun by Emma Jung, wife of the psychiatrist.
Views
Von Franz's interpretation of fairy tales bases on Jung's view of fairy tales as a spontaneous and naive product of soul, which can only express what the soul is. Every fairy tale is a relatively closed system compounding one essential psychological meaning which is expressed in a series of symbolical pictures and events and is discoverable in these.
The fairy tales' hero and heroine are taken as archetypal figures representing the archetypal foundation of the ego-complex of an individual or a group.
Quotations:
"The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth."
"Number is therefore the most primitive instrument of bringing an unconscious awareness of order into consciousness; from it you can best tap the unconscious constellation. This probably why it is used in most mantic methods."
"Our whole tradition has trained us to think always of God as being outside the world and shaping its dead material in some form."
"Always at bottom there is a divine revelation, a divine act, and man has only had the bright idea of copying it."
"The Godhead is defined as that thing which appears in man as the mystery of an unusual skill or capacity. It is something divine, a spark of the divinity in him, not his own possession or achievement, but a miracle."
"In other words, the idea of the philosopher's stone of the alchemists is identical with the idea of the glorified body."