For decades I searched a place 
where I could be close to nature.
I had mountains or lake shores 
in mind. I never found anything.
All was either too 
expensive, or too far away.
It was never right. Then,
 Prof. Jung's son said to me:
I've heard that in Bollingen, 
someone is selling his land.
I don't know him 
well, only his name."
I drove up here that very afternoon 
and went to see the man. He said:
"Yes, yes, right away! 
I want to get rid of that whole lot."
Then he showed me the place. 
And I found it enchantingly beautiful.
I thought "This is it." 
Then I told Prof. Jung about it.
He said: "Let's have a look!"
We jumped into the car 
with Miss Bailey, his lady companion.
And as we were standing here, 
he put his hand on my shoulder and said:
"Go tell the vendor immediately 
that you are buying it. Reserve it!
This is the right place."
This is how it got this place.
 I never regretted the purchase.
It is the 'genius loci'. 
It is the place where I feel at home.
Q: Have you rediscovered 
anything from your childhood here?
The scenery is completely different, 
but I rediscovered my childhood in that sense,
that I grew up in a large garden 
where I mostly played alone
and developed a great love 
for plants and animals.
Afterwards, I lived in rented 
rooms for many years,
always longing
for a piece of land,
for this contact with nature. 
This is what I rediscovered here.
Then, in the third or 
fourth night that I slept here,
I dreamed of monkeys,
blissfully romping around the house.
The animal soul could live again. 
The animal ancestors came back to life.
The feeling one has when one is
in nature, an animal among other animals.
It is completely different here.
The common element is 
nature and the solitude of nature.
Just to be alone with the animals 
and plants, that's what does one so much good.
After Jung had encouraged
me to buy this land,
he said to me, as 
we were driving down:
"I hope you won't build one of these
stupid concrete-glass houses here.
You must build a
genuine tower as well."
This made me very happy, since I'd never have
dared to imitate him. So I built a square tower. 
His is round.
And then another strange
thing happened to me:
In one of the first nights alone in the tower, 
I dreamed of an identical tower in the hereafter,
in which I experienced all 
sorts of things. Jung said:
"How strange. I dreamed my 
tower had a replica across the lake."
This means that this tower is 
but an earthly image of an eternal idea.
The Self, for the tower is a symbol 
of the Self, belongs to the world beyond.
Because I had so enthusiastically
built the tower in this world,
the unconscious reminded me,
that the real tower stands in the other world.
Since then, I have periodically 
dreamed of being in the other tower.
Shortly before his death, Jung dreamed
that now, he could move house,
into the tower on the 
other side of the lake.
Q: How did you get to know Prof. Jung?
I went to school with a nephew 
of Prof. Jung's friend, Toni Wolff.
And one day, Jung 
told this young man:
"I hardly know 
your generation.
Bring some young people along
with you. I invite you all to Bollingen."
And thus I got invited,
along with seven boys.
The eight of us spent 
an entire day in Bollingen.
There, Prof. Jung spoke so 
memorably of the reality of the soul,
that I was deeply impressed 
when I went home. I told myself:
"Now, you will need 10 years to digest 
everything this man told you today.
And then I heard, that he lectures at the ETH
(Swiss Polytechnic U)
And so I went to hear the lectures.
But I was too shy to greet him.
I told myself: "If he greets me, 
that's great, but I won't do it first."
And indeed, he approached me in a 
most cordial manner: "How do you do?"
And naturally, I was rather 
thrilled that he still recognized me.
Q: And how did your collaboration begin?
He told me later, that when
we first met, he immediately
had a hunch that I had 
something to do with alchemy.
When I later asked him whether 
I could enter analysis with him,
but that I had no money, he said
that he'd take me as analysand, if
as compensation, I would translate 
Latin and Greek texts for him,
his own knowledge of these 
languages had become a bit rusty.
Which was true, at 
least in the beginning.
But it came back very quickly, when 
he started practicing again regularly.
So, he gave me a collection
of alchemical treatises,
'Musæum Hermeticum', and told me:
"Make translations and excerpts from 
everything you find symbolically interesting."
I replied: "But I need  
more guidelines than that!"
"Just use your intuition!"
So, in awe from this old 
folio from 1593, I took it home
And then, one evening,
I found the time to look into it,
so I washed my hands, and 
opened the book, where it read:
"Ye Brethren of the Golden Head and 
the Golden Cross, guard the secret!"
and so on – a pompous, baroque introduction.
I wondered: "Is that interesting? 
Must I include these parts?" I was very confused.
So I decided to do nothing
that evening, and to just read.
I opened a random page, 
and, to my utter consternation,
I found  e x a c t l y  what 
I had dreamed about, a year earlier.
My dream! A dream 
I had had stood there, in Latin.
I thought: "You turned crazy! 
You're hallucinating!"
I took a towel, poured
cold water over my head,
made myself a cold compress.
I told myself: "Go to bed, you're crazy!"
On the next morning, I said 
"What happened?" And then I remembered:
"Oh yeah, I went bonkers yesterday, 
and saw my dream in that book."
Very slowly, I rubbed my eyes. 
I told myself: "I am sober,
my name is Marie-Louise von Franz, 
I live on Dolderstrasse 107
and I feel altogether normal."
Then I went back to 
the book, but still:
There stood a big part 
of my dream – in Latin!
Q: So, you found your dream.
But what were you initially looking
for in those books, Jung and you?
Christianity never took matter seriously,
nor the human body, nor sexuality.
Today, that's common sense, almost trivial. 
We know Christianity failed there.
It was good at assisting the
 dying, but not the living.
How to live one's sexuality,  
how to deal with bodily drives,
we aren't at all well
instructed by the priests.
There is that huge gap
in the Christian tradition.
Most alchemists were either physicians
or natural scientists.
They took a stand for 
the neglected feminine principle,
and for the unconscious as well,
because the unconscious 
psyche is linked to
the physiological body, and 
functions in close relation to it.
Thus, Jung soon saw, how alchemy 
compensates and complements
that which in Christianity was too 
one-sided, spiritual and patriarchal.
It is, so to speak, an 
underground counter-movement,
not in the sense of fighting, 
but of complementing Christianity
by dealing with questions that 
Christianity couldn't answer, ignored,
or brushed away with a 
theological sleigh of hand.
Those questions were at the 
center of the alchemists' interest.
Thus, they anticipated modernity,
where everything switched 
around: sexual libertinism,
crass materialism, 
over-reliance on the natural sciences.
Alchemy laid the ground for 
all that. So alchemy is also the
mother of all modern devilry. 
And that's why we must study alchemy,
because it holds everything 
we're unconscious of and
would have to 
reconcile with Christianity,
if we want to arrive at a 
comprehensive world view.
Q: Hasn't Alchemy begun 
already before Christ?
Yes, alchemy has its roots
in pre-socratic philosophy,
where the Greeks began to 
reject mythological thinking
in favor of a theory of matter.
One thinks mainly of the atomists, 
Leucippus and Democritus,
and Heraclitus, with his world energy theory.
The mindset of scientific inquiry
came from pre-socratic Greek learning.
The practical, chemical technique 
comes from Egypt, especially
from the mummification ritual. 
You see, the main part of the mummification is
the bathing of the corpse in a caustic soda solution.
Soda is 'n-t-r', which means 'god' – 
so it was a 'god-solution'.
That's the essence of alchemy: 
conceiving of matter as something divine.
That comes from Egypt. They saw 
matter as something divine, or mysterious,
like they do today in places where
primitive magic is still alive. There, the stones
and the plants and chemical 
substances have mysterious,
divine qualities that affect people.
 They aren't just seen as
dead matter, as we see it today.
Through the process of mummification,
the Egyptians wanted to produce an  
eternal, that is, a 'resurrection body',
to immortalize the 
identity of the deceased person.
Similarly, the idea of 
the philosophers' stone
is actually the idea of 
an immortal individuality,
of a soul core, that is immortal.
However, what's most striking, is that 
alchemy comes with an incredible variety
of grotesque symbols, which correspond 
exactly to the dreams of modern people.
That is why Jung published the 
dreams of a famous physicist, Pauli,
where you can see plenty of 
alchemical motives appear.
Modern natural 
scientists, in fact all people
who have a scientific 
world view, they dream of
alchemical symbols. And we can
therefore not understand the dream symbols,
unless we research this entire 
tradition and the meaning of these symbols.
Q: Which ones, for example?
– The hermaphrodite. The stone, the meaning of the stone.
The meaning of plantal imagery.
Christian symbolism has also handed us down
these things. You see that on the cathedrals,
where you find depicted an 
entire, rich unconscious symbolism.
But it is always interpreted in a 
Christian sense: "The stone is Christ."
And that is too shallow an interpretation, 
seeing it only through the Christian lens.
Whereas the alchemists tried to
say what a stone is, in and of itself.
Is a stone something dead? Something living?
What kind of divine secret does it hold?
For the alchemists, nature needed explaining. 
For medieval Christians, it was already explained.
They believed the world 
was created in seven days,
the meaning of 
everything was self-evident,
Whereas the alchemists 
tried to penetrate the dark,
as modern physics and modern 
scientists do, with little or no preconceptions.
They really went after
the secrets of nature.
They came up with wild phantasies. 
And when 'strict' chemistry developed,
gradually, in the modern sense
of the word, in the 17th century,
one naturally discarded
all those old phantasies.
The Enlightenment
came, and declared
all that to be primitive
superstition, nonsense even.
Jung went through the
paper bin of world history,
salvaged these symbols, and 
showed they have psychological validity.
Not chemically. It makes no sense 
to say of a metal that it is a hermaphrodite.
But hermaphrodites still 
appear in modern dreams. They still matter.
Q: How did you become a therapist?
It wasn't my original intention.
I was a schoolteacher for Latin and Greek, 
and giving private lessons on the side.
But one fine day, an 
elderly lady approached me,
and insisted on 
doing analysis with me.
I felt, naturally 'tout feu, tout flamme' – 
full of therapeutic enthusiasm, and very honoured.
So I asked Jung if he would oversee 
it, and if I should take her.
And he said: "Yeah, I know her – she is 
already so crazy, you can't ruin her further. 
You can give it a try."
It went very dramatic, 
but ultimately turned out fine.
And then gradually, 
more and more people came.
At first, I did it just on the side,
but then it became an avalanche.
Until finally, I stopped teaching 
and ended up in this profession.
Q: And how many dream have 
you analysed, approximately?
I once calculated, two dreams per session, 
so and so many sessions per year,
so and so many people, 
makes around 60.000 dreams.
Q: Among all those dreams, 
did you ever find identical ones? 
I mean, do different people dream identical dreams?
No, among those 60.000 
dreams, none were identical.
However, there 
are similar motifs.
That's what Jung based his archetypal theory on –
recurring basic structures.
No dream is 'en détail' 
identical with another,
but one can identify certain common 
themes: Love, or being chased,
or looking for something,
certain basic structures keep recurring.
These basic patterns are what Jung
calls 'archetypal structures of the psyche'.
Through them, you access 
the collective layer in man.
Even a mentally ill person 
has this layer intact.
The collective layer is, so to speak,
the instinctual layer
common to all humans.
And when you succeed in 
reconnecting people to it,
then they recover, and 
reconnect socially as well.
That is why knowing these 
structures is so useful.
Besides that, I have also 
studied fairy tales and alchemy,
which has helped me a lot
with understanding dreams.
The art of dream 
interpretation is twofold.
One must discern and identify 
the archetypal structures,
and convey them in such a way,
that it doesn't get stuck in the intellect,
but genuinely impresses the analysand,
so that their feelings become again 
rooted in the depth of their being.
Dreams prepare people for a 
coming phase in their lives.
Every life has these thresholds.
Puberty, for example, is 
such a well-known threshold,
then, stepping into marriage, 
the entering of the second half of life,
the female climacterium – 
all these are transitional periods,
that require a new adaptation 
to life, a recalibration of attitude.
And that is being 
facilitated by the dreams.
Even when death is coming nearer, 
dreams prepare the dreamer for that.
But it is not the end. I have collected 
some 50 dreams of moribund people,
and not even one suggests,
that existence ceases,
but rather suggests a change, 
a voyage, a transformation.
Or the great marriage, 
the great consummation.
Q: And how do they 
imagine life after death?
Naturally, only
in symbolical form.
People dream about life after death 
very similarly to what the religions teach.
Either, one comes
to a pleasure garden,
or one rests in eternal 
embrace with the person one loves,
But also negative, agonizing journeys 
across ice and snow, or volcanic rock.
There are good and bad dreams,
post-mortal existence isn't
only pleasant, apparently.
I like Jungian therapy, 
because of its minimal interference.
We have no theory about 
how one 'ought' to be,
we don't even say one should become 'normal'.
 If one prefers to stay neurotic, fine!
Jung once told me: "Everyone
has the right to stay neurotic,
if they prefer that. 
This is a free country!"
We only help people uncover, what 
their own dreams try to tell them.
The dreams that their 
own souls have produced.
Their own dreams may then tell them,
that they are lazy, but not us.
We just try to educate people
to listen to their own interior.
Jung's idea was that of
individuation, of becoming oneself.
When people speak about 
self-realization these days,
what they really 
mean is ego-realization.
Jung meant something 
completely different:
discovering your own depth, 
innate predisposition or destiny.
The ego might, on occasion,
even strongly object to that.
That is what one feels that one 
should become, at times.
But not realizing that divine 
destiny makes people neurotic.
That's what we mean
by individuation.
We even get complaints, that
someone is less adapted, after analysis.
But he is himself then, and 
that is what ultimately counts.
Living one's individual destiny.
Then, people become also become
more humane, less criminal, less destructive.
Q: You authored more than20 books
 in German and English.
What are the main topics?
It all started with alchemy.
When I met Jung, he immediately felt 
that I was his collaborator for that,
because of my language skills.
So, he gave me an old text, 
called Aurora Consurgens, to decipher.
I had to learn palaeography,  
because it was written in a medieval script.
I prepared a transliteration,
looked up all bible quotes,
for a scholarly edition.
One day, he said: "What a waste 
that it just lies there, and catches dust.
You should add a commentary, 
so you can get it published."
That took me 15 years altogether.
It is one of my main works, the Aurora Consurgens.
It is a text from, I assume, 
the end of the 13th century.
Traditionally attributed
 to Tomas Aquinas,
which, of course, no 
modern scholar took seriously.
It is primarily interesting from a 
psychological perspective,
not so much from a 
strictly chemical viewpoint.
You realize instantly, that this 
alchemist was a mystic,
and tried to describe an inner 
mythical experience,
not so much a chemical operation.
That is why he garnished 
his text with biblical quotation.
It was obviously a cleric. 
Probably a Dominican, who wrote it.
And I personally believe it may 
indeed have been Tomas Aquinas' last work.
But of course, that is impossible 
to prove in any real sense.
Around the same time, my 
occupation with fairy tales began.
And also in response to a request. 
A lady had begun a book about fairy tales,
but found she was
unable to write it herself.
So, she paid me to 
finish the book for her.
It turned into a huge work, 
over a thousand pages.
An interpretation of fairy tales 
through the Jungian lens.
I worked nine years on that.
That started my
infatuation with fairy tales.
I wasn't read any fairy tales in my youth. 
The only ones I knew were by Andersen.
But I didn't really like them, 
they always made me so sad.
So, I didn't discover folk 
fairy tales until I was in my 20s.
I became so infatuated with them,
they became the topic of my lectures,
of which many were recorded 
on tape, and later got published.
Thus, I'm mainly known for 
my commentaries on fairy tales.
Jung always supported me, 
because it exemplifies archetypal theory.
You really see, how 
archetypes operate.
Jung once said: "Fairy tales give us a 
comparative anatomy of the collective psyche."
We see all the archetypes 
represented, and how they operate.
Fairy tales are the one thing 
that's most collectively human.
Because they were passed 
on by ordinary people,
they have few deliberate add-ons, 
but are genuinely unconscious material.
Q: Is there a link between alchemy, 
and your work in 'Number and Time'?
Yes. In Alchemy, 
according to our modern view,
a large part of that which  
we today call the unconscious,
was projected into matter.
Since the 17th century, matter got
studied more on its own terms, per se.
Most of the psychological 
projections were withdrawn.
But that didn't explain the
relationship between psyche and matter.
The modern question of 'mind and matter' 
– 'Mind over matter'? 'Mind under matter'?
The problem of how inner experience 
– conscious and unconscious –
relates to matter and the basal
physiological events in the body,
and finally, to the nuclear
and subatomic processes.
That is now the huge topic; you could 
even say, that is modern-day alchemy.
Jung had put that
topic aside at first,
in favour of of a purely 
experiential approach,
and didn't concern himself with possible
neurological, let alone physical correlates.
But at the end of his life, he became 
increasingly struck by the fact that
nuclear physics, and his discoveries 
about the collective unconscious
had caused strikingly similar conceptual 
shifts, as in nuclear physics,
and lead to similar results, 
which became impossible to ignore.
The psychologist drills through the psyche,
and at the deepest point, hits onto matter.
The physicist drills through matter, and
at the deepest point, hits his own mind/spirit.
That is where these 
two disciplines meet, the tunnel breakthrough.
Like digging a 
tunnel from two sides.
And now, we are at the 
exciting threshold of the tunnel breakthrough.
One of the last concepts that
Jung coined, was that of the psychoid.
Meaning that the archetypes may,
at times, structure material processes.
And that is where
science needs to focus.
There is still so much to do!
The idea of the psychoid, of 
archetypes influencing matter,
suggested itself initially because
of the phenomenon of synchronicity.
This uncanny observation,
that when the psyche is strongly aroused
down to its 
unconscious archetypal layer
– physicists would 
say: "is in an excited state" –
Then, we frequently see 
synchronistic events, meaning
in the external world 
something happens, a "miracle",
that corresponds conceptually to that 
excited internal state.
For example, having an inner vision, a dream, that gets replayed in the outer world the next day.
Or something happens, that echos 
the dream in another meaningful way.
Q: Is that the origin of divination?
Looking back, it is obvious that 
that must have been the origin of divination,
why the Romans practiced augury
before political or military decisions,
or the Chinese, the Aztecs... all in fact,
believed that certain external 
realities reveal psychological states.
This idea isn't even really new, 
already Leibniz and Schopenhauer
believed in a coincidence 
of interior and exterior,
– or rather, witnessed it –
and constructed 
a system around it.
However, they falsely saw 
them as regular phenomena,
assuming something akin to
a scientific, causal explanation.
But one can't do that.
They are not regular, 
one can not predict:
"When I dream of an eagle owl, 
an eagle owl will visit my room the next day."
If that happens, that is a synchronicity, 
but it will not always happen.
The de-facto existence of 
synchronicity is incredibly irritating
for us who equate 
science with predictability.
But one can't predict synchronicity 
scientifically, only divinatorally.
Q: And that is your main
occupation, nowadays?
No, my work proceeds
very unpredictably.
Fairy tales, alchemy, modern alchemy, i.e. 
related to nuclear physics and the time problem
it is all interrelated, like in a plaid.
They disappear, and come back up again.
How these three fields are connected,
I think I could even explain that in theory,
but they are three living streams, 
that re-appear again and again, and trade places.
I now have finished a book 
about dreams of the dying.
And what my own dreams 
now suggest I should take on,
although I'm not entirely sure yet, 
but that's at least how it looks now,
is a work about the relationship 
of the unconscious to the landscape.
And there, synchronicity 
would become relevant again,
in the sense of a 
geography of the soul.
However, I still have to wait
for my unconscious to approve.
I myself am very enthusiastic, 
but let's see what the ghosts have to say.
Q: So is it your dreams,
that direct your creativity?
Dreams are the 
origin of all creativity.
When you let your dreams 
direct you, you make less detours.
All creativity comes from the unconscious,
it is the same stuff dreams are made of. 
And dreams inspire.
We often read of poets 'dreaming up' 
entire scenes before writing them down.
A famous example is the 
story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Stephenson dreamed the 
entire first part of the novel.
Whenever I'm in the process of writing, 
or otherwise creative, I also dream more.
The unconscious gets 
passionately involved.
And whenever I lose direction in my 
writing, my dreams become negative.
I do believe that every creative person, knowingly 
or not, creates through their unconscious.
♫ Everybody sing: ♫ 
 "She's a lumberjack, in her own way...
♫ ... she dreams all night,
 and reads Jung all day." ♫
(Sorry! 
I couldn't resist.)
Q: Are there connections between alchemy
and today's women's movement?
That hangs directly together.
Christianity was rather
transcendental and patriarchal,
and alchemy represented
the complementary tradition.
Alchemists were interested 
in the 'mater natura' – Mother Nature!
They venerated goddesses, 
mater natura, mater alchemia.
Matter is divine. It is, 
in one sense, a goddess.
The papal declaration of
the 'assumptio mariae'
– that Mary was taken up to 
heaven with her physical body –
that is a hallowing of matter, 
and of the feminine principle.
These are all secular movements, transformations, 
in the collective unconscious.
Our age is one of movement, away 
from patriarchy, towards matriarchy.
Where the emphasis shifts away from 
mind/spirit, towards matter.
And this balance 
must be found.
The danger is, of course, 
that it simply switches,
and becomes,
again, one-sided.
That is why Jung spoke so much 
about the 'mysterium coniunctionis',
the uniting of the male and female 
principle, in a state of balance.
The fact that women's liberation 
happens at this point in time,
and not already 2000 years ago,
where women had even better reason
Women had reasons to revolt
all along, but only now, they do it.
That is because only now, 
the archetype of the feminine,
of the goddess, is constellated
in the collective unconscious.
That is why everywhere, these 
various movements flare up,
that insist on a re-appreciation of 
matter, of the natural, of the irrational,
of eros, of sexuality, 
of the bodily aspect of existence.
All that hangs together.
And with that, the higher
valuing of women's personality, and her values,
the valuing of eros and
of feeling-relationship.
Q: What message would you like
to bring across through your work?
That is very hard to convey
in a few short words. But I would say,
I have, like everyone else, the
impression, that our culture, our civilization,
has entered a final phase, a stage of 
deterioration and decay
And I believe that either, we find a way of 
rejuvenating our culture,
or that will be the end.
And this rejuvenation, I only see coming
from that which Jung discovered,
a positive contact to the creative ground of being, 
to the unconscious, and to our dreams.
These are our roots. A tree can only 
renew itself through its roots.
Thus, my message to people is, to 
direct their attention back onto those roots.
That is the only place, where one
could find new, constructive proposals
for how to deal with our enormous  
dilemma, the atom bomb, overpopulation,
where all those seemingly unsolvable 
questions could possibly find a solution.
The greatest danger in today's 
civilization is that of 'massification'
and the levelling and 
suppression of the individual.
Then, the individual 
becomes malicious.
Terrorism, and related 
phenomena, are reactions of the individual.
Only by again valuing the individual
might we be able to find a way forward...
