Marie-Louise von Franz
| Marie-Louise von Franz | |
|---|---|
| Born |
4 January 1915 Munich, German Empire |
| Died | 17 February 1998 (aged 83) Küsnacht, Switzerland |
| Nationality | Swiss |
| Fields | Psychology |
| Known for | psychological interpretation of fairy tales and of alchemy |
| Influenced | Jean Dalby Clift |
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.
Marie-Louise Ida Margareta von Franz was born in Munich, Germany, the daughter of a colonel in the Austrian army.
After World War I, in 1919, her family moved to Switzerland, near St. Gallen. From 1928 on, she lived in Zurich, together with her elder sister, so that both could attend a high school (gymnasium) in Zurich, specializing in languages and literature. Three years later, her parents moved to Zurich as well.
In Zurich, at the age of 18, in 1933, when about to finish secondary school, von Franz met the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung when, together with a classmate and nephew of Jung's assistant Toni Wolff, she and seven boys she had befriended were invited by Jung to his Bollingen Tower near Zurich. For von Franz, this was a powerful and "decisive encounter of her life", as she told her sister later the same evening.
At the meeting, Jung and the pupils discussed psychology. When Jung commented on a "mentally ill woman, who [actually, not to be taken symbolically] lived on the moon" M.-L. von Franz understood, that there are two levels of reality. The psychological, inner world with its dreams and myths was as real as the outer world.
In 1933, at the University of Zurich, von Franz started studies in Classical philology and Classical languages (Latin and Greek) as major subjects and in literature and ancient history as minor subjects.
Due to her father's major financial loss in the early 1930s, she had to finance study fees by herself, which she achieved by giving private lessons as a tutor in Latin and Greek for gymnasium and university students. In the years after finishing her studies, she continued this to support herself, working on fairy tale texts.
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