wikipedia entry on Marie-Louise von Franz

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Marie-Louise von Franz
Born	January 4, 1915 Munich
Died	February 17, 1998
Nationality	Swiss
Fields	Psychology

Marie-Louise von Franz (January 4, 1915 – February 17, 1998), the daughter of an Austrian baron and born in Munich, Germany, was a Swiss Jungian Psychologist and scholar. In her native Switzerland, she was known by a pet form of her Christian name, Malus ^[1]. She worked with Carl Jung, whom she met in 1933 and knew until his death in 1961. It was Jung who encouraged her to live with fellow Jungian analyst Barbara Hannah, who was 23 years von Franz’s senior. When Hannah asked Jung why he was so keen on putting them together, Jung replied that he wanted von Franz “to see that not all women are such brutes as her mother,” and also stated that “the real reason you should live together is that your chief interest will be analysis and analysts should not live alone.”^[2] The two women became lifelong friends.

Von Franz founded the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. As a psychotherapist, she is said to have interpreted over 65,000 dreams, primarily practising in Kusnacht, Switzerland. Von Franz also wrote over 20 volumes on Analytical psychology, most notably on fairy tales as they relate to Archetypal or Depth Psychology, most specifically by amplification of the themes and characters. She also wrote on subjects such as alchemy, discussed from the Jungian, psychological perspective, and active imagination, which could be described as conscious dreaming. In Man and his Symbols, von Franz described active imagination as follows: “Active imagination is a certain way of meditating imaginatively, by which one may deliberately enter into contact with the unconscious and make a conscious connection with psychic phenomena.”^[3]

Von Franz, in 1968, was the first to publish that the mathematical structure of DNA is analogous to that of the I Ching. She cites the reference to the publication in an expanded essay Symbols of the Unus Mundus, published in her book Psyche and Matter.^[4] In addition to her many books, Von Franz recorded a series of films in 1987 titled The Way of the Dream with her student Fraser Boa ^[5].

Carl Jung believed in the unity of the psychological and material worlds, i.e., they are one and the same, just different manifestations. He also believed that this concept of the unus mundus could be investigated through research on the archetypes of the natural numbers. Due to his age, he turned the problem over to von Franz.^[6] Two of her books, Number and Time and Psyche and Matter deal with this research.