Around here, Von Franz takes care to dispel popular misconceptions about alchemy, which she blames on the Freemasons and Rosicrucians. Or for that matter the Kabbalah's initiation process, where the literal answers to the different challenges encountered on the ascent up the Tree of Life are secondary to the respective faculties of the human mind mastered in the process. Same message as the Arthurian Grail Quest myths, where whatever the Grail is happens to be less important than the wisdom necessary to find the Grail in the first place. The later lectures explain the underlying metaphysics of alchemy, which in the Christian era constitutes an esoteric compensation to the lacunae in conventional Christianity by preserving the holistic worldview underlying the pre-Christian Egyptian and Greek religions as well as the methods for enacting that metaphysical system in practice.Ī central insight in alchemy, Von Franz points out, is that the skills necessary to complete the transmutation process is more valuable than the literal turning of lead to gold. One important point is that for the ancient Egyptians, blacksmithing and construction were religious activities like any other ritual as say a funeral or a wedding, as a result of having a resolutely non-dualistic worldview as a basis for their culture with no distinction between the material and the spiritual. The first lecture alone, whose transcript is roughly 20 pages long, contains tons of information about similarities and differences between ancient Egyptian and Greek religions' metaphysics, how they manifested in the craftsmanship and architecture of those cultures and so on. This, however, is on a whole different level. Jung such as those chapters of ”Man and His Symbols” I found by far the most lucid. I know her largely for the interesting but frustrating "Puer Aeternus" and her collaborations with C. 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."Ī collection of transcripts of Marie-Louise von Franz' lectures on alchemy. She also wrote on subjects such as alchemy, discussed from the Jungian, psychological perspective, and active imagination, which could be described as conscious dreaming. 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. In The Way of the Dream she claims to have interpreted over 65,000 dreams. 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. She cites the reference to the publication in an expanded essay Symbols of the Unus Mundus, published in her book Psyche and Matter. Von Franz, in 1968, was the first to publish that the mathematical structure of DNA is analogous to that of the I Ching. Two of her books, Number and Time and Psyche and Matter deal with this research. Due to his age, he turned the problem over to von Franz. He also believed that this concept of the unus mundus could be investigated through research on the archetypes of the natural numbers. Jung believed in the unity of the psychological and material worlds, i.e., they are one and the same, just different manifestations. Von Franz worked with Carl Jung, whom she met in 1933 and knew until his death in 1961. Marie-Louise von Franz was a Swiss Jungian psychologist and scholar. Jung Institute in Zurich, the book opens therapeutic insights into the relations among spirit, soul, and body in the practice of active imagination. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at the C. In particular, she shows that the alchemists practiced a kind of meditation similar to Jung's technique of active imagination, which enables one to dialogue with the unconscious archetypal elements in the psyche. In this book, Marie-Louise von Franz examines a text by the sixteenth-century alchemist and physician Gerhard Dorn in order to show the relationship of alchemy to the concepts and techniques of analytical psychology. Jung discovered in his study of alchemical texts a symbolic and imaginal language that expressed many of his own insights into psychological processes. A leading Jungian psychologist reveals the relationship between alchemy and analytical psychology, delving into the visionary work of a sixteenth-century alchemistĪlthough alchemy is popularly regarded as the science that sought to transmute base physical matter, many of the medieval alchemists were more interested in developing a discipline that would lead to the psychological and spiritual transformation of the individual.
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