Marie-Louise von Franz (4 January 1915 – 17 February 1998) was a Swiss Jungian psychologist and scholar, renowned for her psychological interpretations of fairy tales and of alchemical manuscripts.
My God, these Feeling types!. . . Sensitive people are just tyrannical people - everybody else has to adapt to them.
In one African myth the word for God is even identical with skill and capacity. 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.
Synchronicity. . . means a 'meaningful coincidence' of outer and inner events that are not themselves causally connected. The emphasis lies on the word 'meaningful'.
Number, as it were, lies behind the psychic realm as a dynamic ordering principle, the primal element of which Jung called spirit. As an archetype, number becomes not only a psychic factor, but more generally, a world-structuring factor. In other words, numbers point to a background reality in which psyche and matter are no longer distinguishable.
If you notice an unconscious fantasy coming up within you, you would be wise not to interpret it at once. Do not say that you know what it is and force it into consciousness. Just let it live with you, leaving it in the half-dark, carry it with you and watch where it is going or what it is driving at.
As physics is a mental reconstruction of material processes, perhaps a physical reconstruction of psychic processes is possible in nature itself.
The child is an inner possibility, the possibility of renewal.
Number is therefore the most primitive instrument of bringing an unconscious awareness of order into consciousness.
One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power. . . If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn't use it, the psychic energy turns to sheer poison. That's why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities.
We could all be mediums, and all have absolute knowledge, if the bright light of our ego consciousness would not dim it.
Dreams are like letters from God. Isn't it time you answered your mail?
The passionate reactions of people to a painting, the exclamation, 'Oh, this is wonderful,' may, even if meant in a positive way, entirely destroy the chiaroscuro, the mystical hidden weaving of fantasy which the artist needs.
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.
Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished.
It is as if something somewhere were 'known' in the form of images - but not by us.
The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth. . . . People living in cultures more securely rooted than our own have less trouble in understanding that it is necessary to give up the utilitarian attitude of conscious planning in order to make way for the inner growth of the personality.
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 a man devotes himself to the instructions of his own unconscious, it can bestow this gift [of renewal], so that suddenly life, which has been stale and dull, turns into a rich unending inner adventure, full of creative possibilities
The mathematical forms of order which the mind of a physicist manipulates coincides "miraculously" with experimental measurements.