June 1998

C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time

Marie-Louise von Franz

(translated by William H. Kennedy)

1998: Inner City Books

Toronto, ON, 368 pp.

First published in English in 1975 by the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology of New York, C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, by Marie-Louise von Franz, was re-issued by Inner City Books early in 1998.

The re-issue now appears especially fortunate and timely, for Marie-Louise von Franz died in February of this year, at the age of 83. The intention of this review, therefore, is to commemorate two lives: to honor the life and work of C. G. Jung and the memory of this most accomplished disciple and scholar.

The book could well serve as a companion volume to Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Von Franz fills in the spaces omitted by Jung as only the soror mystica can illuminate the works of the master by adding her own personal reflections.

Von Franz had a long collaboration with Jung, and she obviously admired him and had a great affection for him. She variously describes him as a shaman, a healer, a romantic poet and medieval scholar, and then tempers the lofty descriptions by reminding us that he also possessed a jocular peasant’s soul. There is no mention here of the scandals that some recent books have bruited about Jung concerning his dalliances with Nazism and his extra-marital affairs.

The focus of the biography is the essential substance of Jung’s work: the mysteries of the unconscious. Von Franz gives a detailed study of the broad scope of Jung’s work and the influence it has come to bear in today’s society.

One of the mysteries Jung recognized early in his life was the dual aspects of his character, which he called personalities number one and number two. Later on he would give these two dimensions more sophisticated names, “morning knowledge” and “evening knowledge”. The author’s argument is that we too are subjected to divided loyalties. We are driven on the one hand by a rational hard-minded attitude that can be satisfied only by concrete facts; and one the other, those of us who have ventured into the subterranean world of dreams recognize the impulsive outbursts from the unconscious that attest to the power of complexes and we know that we are not masters in own houses.

We realize that forces greater than our egos are at play, day and night, in the fields of our Psyches and in the collective sphere as well. Thanks to pioneers like Jung and von Franz, we can appreciate the difficulty of entering the shadowy, liminal realms that reside in our personal psyches. Knowing that collective values are also founded upon deep unconscious layers of history and mythology, we are better prepared to confront the tough transitional times we live as we approach the new millennium.

Jung was struck by the immense power of dreams from a very young age. His earliest dreams and visions informed him about the fathomless depths of the unconscious. These numinous images left their lasting impressions on his daytime world. Von Franz shared Jung’s conviction that the objective nature of Psyche was as powerful as that of Nature itself.

The power of his early experiences led Jung to conduct research, both deeply personal and extensively scholarly, covering many fields. He formulated theories about psyche (Shadow, Animus/Anima, Projection, the Collective Unconscious, Extroversion/Introversion, the Transcendent Function, Archetypes, the Mysterium Coniunctionis); he read and wrote esoterically on alchemy; he speculated on difficult theological issues (Answer to Job, Psychology and Religion: West and East); and he even mused on subjects that have been taken up by new-age movements (synchronicity, flying saucers).

The complex nature of Jung’s life and work have been received with both great fascination and dark accusation. Perhaps it was the very nature of the subjects that Jung tackled that have made his accusers uneasy. In a darkly cynical age, one is not surprised that many find his ideas suspicious. Perhaps von Franz’s “angelic” glorification of the man is no more than an antidote to the demonic way many of us devalue those we cannot understand.

Many readers of Jung may be distressed by his incessant references to God. This is a difficult subject at the end of a troublesome, apparently godless 20th century, a time when materialism and science are in the ascendancy and faith is a fallen currency. Many theologians do not dare enter the treacherous waters as Jung did with his celebrated Answer to Job. But this intensely curious search for a psychologically grounded meaning permeated all his works.

Von Franz notes that Jung was willing to plumb the “depths of God” to find the answers to the most profound mysteries. She compares his struggling with theological questions to Jacob’s wrestling with the angel at the ford in the river. “He held fast to this dark mysterious Other until his grace was revealed.” This image is particularly compelling for this reviewer who is a descendant of the tribe of Israel. The name Israel means “he who wrestles with God.” Jung was never satisfied with dogmatic answers to the mysteries.

Jung’s quest was to wrest external values from his inner psychic turmoil. Some have considered his value limited exactly because his ideas tend to favor the subjective perspective over objective reality. Yet Jung seemed to make the link between inner and outer after a monumentally dark dream he had during the First World War, which led him to this life-altering conclusion:

It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone . . . From then on my life belonged to the generality … I myself had to undergo the original experience and, moreover, try to plant the results of my experience in the soil of reality … It was then that I dedicated myself to the service of psyche. I loved it and hated it, but was my greatest wealth.

Von Franz concludes her study of Jung with a final chapter on the mythic figure of Merlin. Legend has it that Merlin was the son of the Devil and an innocent virgin and was thus a darker and truer personification of modern man than his lighter counterpart Parsifal, who Jung believed possessed too much of a one-sided virtuous Christian spirit. Merlin’s existence in the world of imagination was no less meaningful for von Franz or Jung than the attraction of so many of today’s youth to the compelling story-telling magic of The X-Files, whose mythic appeal is that science and intelligence agencies are not the only sources of the truth that is out there.

The voice of Merlin, according to legend, continues to cry out to this world from beyond. Von Franz notes that Jung intended to carve le cri de Merlin onto the backside of a cubic stone, which, she parenthetically adds, he never did. Jung wrote:

... the secret of Merlin was carried on by alchemy, primarily in the figure of Mercurius. Then Merlin was taken up again in my psychology of the unconscious and remains uncomprehended to this day.

The unconscious remains a mystery to us and we must thank our lucky stars that we are humble enough to recognize that fact. Let the unknown remain unknown but let us take up von Franz’s challenge: “... to set out upon the great adventure of individuation, the journey into the interior.”

Marie-Louise von Franz first met C. G. Jung in 1933, when she was 18, and she began working with him the following year and did so until his death in 1961.

She became an acknowledged authority on the psychological interpretation of fairy tales, myths, dreams and alchemy, and the author of many books on the application of Jungian psychology. But although she did her utmost to further Jung’s message, she was not just a mindless follower: she put her own inimitable stamp both on Jungian psychology and on those she taught.

Daryl Sharp, the publisher and general editor of Inner City Books, shared his thoughts in an account of the Farewell Service held for Marie-Louise von Franz in an email he sent out in the “wake” of her funeral of February 26, 1998. Sharp reports that von Franz passed away peacefully on the morning of February 17, after a protracted illness but with a crystal-clear mind and a dignified spirit that did not fear Death.

Sharp and a number of his fellow analysts agree about the spirit which came through loud and clear in the works and life of this remarkable woman. Gary Sparks, a Jungian analyst practising in Indianapolis, paid tribute to the grand lady of soul on a web site dedicated to memories of von Franz:

She was saying, “Look at this civilization. Its story must be understood at depth to do the suffering human spirit justice.” ... It was the first time I ever felt authority really serve the essence of life. Above all I recall the intensity and humanity of her creative spirit which burned straight to the center, inspiring in me a re-evaluation of everything. This challenge is something I wanted to be a part of.

And Sharp echoes the sentiment, which I believe may be shared by a large number of readers of this newsletter.

“Yes, and me too.”

–Murray Shugar