The Fountain of the Love of Wisdom: An Homage to Marie Louise Von Franz
Title: The Fountain of the Love of Wisdom: An Homage to Marie-Louise Von Franz
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I have been pondering death in the wake of my dear friend Lee's departure on March 27. He had been gone in many ways for the past two years - to addictions and the pursuit of his own escape and redemption on the streets and alleys of Denver. But Lee was many things, as all of us are. He was a musician, an artist and a seeker of meaning. He had the kinds of dreams that showed clearly the true nature of his soul - the kinds of dreams that awakened him in a wash of tears over the beauty and terror of himself and nature. He also had a way of looking at people and things with a humor that I envied and so often learned from. He could shake me out of my seriousness and make me laugh my way out of whatever tight corner I was in. My sadness is that he couldn't do the same for himself.
Now that he's gone from the world of body, bone and breath I want to believe that he is free and exploring the mysterious worlds we always talked about - the betwixt and between that he was always reaching for.
In my search for support with my grief I have been turning to books by Marie Louise von Franz. She died February 17, 1998 and was a true adventurer in the field of dreams; an exemplary model of how a life can be lived in conscious relationship to the mysterious worlds of psyche, nature and human culture. She too had a profound sense of humor that came from her love of life. I have also been reading a homage to her - a collection of eulogies and personal anecdotes that yield yet another dimension of appreciation for her remarkable life and work. Here is a piece from the Obituary written by Chuck Schwartz in The Fountain of the Love of Wisdom, pp.35-36:
"When von Franz was forty-one, Jung permitted her to take on her first client. The client was a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Von Franz was naturally eager to make a success of her first case, but the harder she tried to prop the woman up, the worse the woman became. In despair she turned to Jung who advised her to let the client have her nervous breakdown. Von Franz backed off and stopped straining to help, and the woman soon made a full recovery.
She said that this was the most important lesson she ever had on therapeutic technique, showing her the limitations of willpower and the ego, and the role of the unconscious at the center of the personality.
She likened this to Galileo's discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun, and not vice versa. Like the Earth, the ego is an important satellite revolving around a much larger and more powerful center. Galileo's discovery got him excommunicated by the ruling establishement, and Jung has suffered a similar fate at the hands of the scientific establishment.
For Jung, the structure of the psyche's center was made up of what he called "archetypes," the fundamental building blocks or anatomy of psychic life. Like every other part of the human anatomy, the archetypes were common to all people; this commonality he called the collective unconscious.
Some years ago, von Franz predicted that, like Galileo's discovery, future generations of researchers would discover these selfsame psychic structures without any reference to or acknowledgment of Jung. This she felt would be only right and proper. From the fact that they made this discovery independently would prove that Jung's work was not at all hypothetical but was based on the objective facts of psychic life.
In the last few years a whole new breed of evolutionary psychologists have indeed rediscovered these selfsame structures and rechristened them in such terms as "mental modules" often without any reference to Jung's work.
Working on this archetypal level, von Franz soon realized that, for her at least, the only effective and decent way to work with a client was to work on the material of her own life - both inner and outer - in other words, to set her own house in order.
Her model for therapy therefore, which she imparted to all of her pupils, was not at all modern or even postmodern. It was as simple as it was disconcerting: "Work very hard on your own psychic life, and hope for a synchronistic happening in the client's. In this way everything is kept open and alive and there are no set rules."
That is except perhaps one rule. Von Franz counseled that it would be wrong to become a Jungian. If you do that, you miss the whole point of his psychology, which was to become the one unique individual you are meant to be.""
