Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales by Marie Louise von-Franz (September – November)

[Hannah]

Our first book will be Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales by Marie Louise von-Franz published in 1974.

The Author

Marie Louise von-Franz was born on January 4th, 1915 in Munich, Germany. After World War I, her family moved to Switzerland, where she grew up in Rheinfelden and Zürich. From a young age, she developed a love for languages, literature, and mythology — interests that later informed her work in psychology and symbolic studies.

Von-Franz studied classical philology at the University of Zürich, specializing in Latin and Greek. In 1933, at just 18 years old, she met Carl Gustav Jung at his famous retreat on Lake Zürich. This encounter deeply shaped her life: she became one of Jung’s closest students, collaborators, and later one of the foremost interpreters of his analytical psychology.

After completing her doctorate in philology, she dedicated her life to Jungian psychology.
She became an analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, where she taught, practiced, and wrote extensively. Von-Franz was renowned for her ability to make Jung’s theories accessible, especially through the interpretation of myths, alchemy, and fairy tales.

She saw fairy tales as the “purest and simplest” expressions of archetypal processes.
Her books, including The Interpretation of Fairy Tales and Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, are classics in Jungian studies.

She worked closely with Jung on alchemical symbolism, which he saw as a symbolic map of individuation (psychological wholeness). She continued his work after his death, publishing significant studies on alchemy and its psychological meaning.

Fascinated by the relationship between psychology and mathematics, she co-authored Number and Time with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, exploring synchronicity and numerical archetypes.

Von-Franz was known as deeply intelligent, rigorous, but also approachable in her teaching.
She combined scholarly precision (as a philologist) with psychological insight, making her writings both accessible and profound.

She lived much of her life in Switzerland, and in later years she shared a home with long-time collaborator Barbara Hannah, another Jungian analyst.

She passed away on February 17, 1998, in Küsnacht, Switzerland, after a long illness.

Her legacy endures in Jungian psychology, depth psychology, and comparative mythology.

Reading Schedule:

Ch. 1: "The Concept of the Shadow" (9/1 – 9/7)

Ch. 2: "The Execution" (9/8 – 9/14)

Ch. 3: "The Anima between the Heroes" (9/15 – 9/21)

Ch. 4: "Faithful John the Mediator" (9/22 – 9/28)

Ch. 5: "The Stone or the Statue" (9/29 – 10/5)

Ch. 6: "Primitive Levels of Evil" (10/6 – 10/12)

Ch. 7: "Possession" (10/13 – 10/19)

Ch. 8: "Taboos" (10/20 – 10/26)

Ch. 9: "Hot Evil" (10/27 – 11/2)

Ch. 10: "Cold Evil" (11/3 – 11/9)

Ch. 11: "The Magical Contest" (11/10 – 11/16)

Ch. 12: "The Nucleus of the Psyche" (11/17 – 11/23)

[Hannah]

For those interested in astrology, here is the birth chart of Marie Louise von-Franz:

Her Sun, Mercury, and Mars are conjunct in Sagittarius.

Her Moon is on the MC in Cancer, aspecting Saturn and Uranus.

Venus is in Scorpio, aspecting Neptune.

Both Uranus and Neptune are angular.