The Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz is a 28 volume Magnum Opus from one of the leading minds in Jungian Psychology. Volume 1, released on her 106th birthday, is to be followed by 27 more volumes over the next 10 years. Volume 2 turns to the Hero’s Journey within fairytales.
The Hero’s Journey is about the great adventure that leads to a cherished and difficult to obtain prize. In these fairytales, the Self is often symbolized as that treasured prize and the hero’s travails symbolize the process of individuation. In its many manifestations, the hero embodies the emerging personality. “In the conscious world, the hero is only one part of the personality—the despised part—and through his attachment to the Self in the unconscious is a symbol of the whole personality.”
Von Franz’s prodigious knowledge of fairytales from around the world demonstrates that the fairytale draws its root moisture from the collective realm. This volume continues where Volume 1 left off as von Franz describes the fairytale, “suspended between the divine and the secular worlds (…) creating a mysterious and pregnant tension that requires extreme power to withstand.” The resistance of the great mother against the hero and his humble origins, as well as the hero freeing the anima figure from the clutches of the unconscious are universal archetypal patterns. The spoils retrieved by the hero symbolize new levels of consciousness wrested from the unconscious.
Please enjoy this brief video introduction to Volume 1 of “The Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz” – Archetypal Symbols in Fairytales, by Dr. Steven Buser.
Chiron Publications is honored to publish the newly translated volumes of the Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz, one of the most renowned authorities on fairytales.
Von Franz amplifies a variety of fairytale motifs to show that the magical realm is alien to the profane and mundane realm of ordinary daily life. She was one of Analytical Psychology’s most original thinkers and here she presents a lucid, concise exploration of the archetypal symbols found in fairytales.
Fairytales, like myths, provide a cultural and societal backdrop that helps the human imagination narrate the meaning of life’s events. The remarkable similarities in fairytale motifs across different lands and cultures inspired many scholars to search for the original homeland of fairytales. While peregrinations of fairytale motifs occur, the common root of fairytales is more archetypal than geographic. A striking feature of fairytales is that a sense of space, time, and causality is absent. This situates them in a magical realm, a land of the soul, where the most interesting things happen in the center of places like Heaven, mountains, lakes, and wells.
Please enjoy this brief video biography of Marie-Louise von Franz, presented by Dr. Steven Buser.
At the age of eighteen, while still in high school, Marie-Louise von Franz met Carl Jung at his Bolingen Tower. She later described this as the most decisive encounter of her life. She entered analysis with him months later, completed her doctorate in classical philology and began seeing her first analysands soon after. She was wholeheartedly dedicated to the unconscious, both in her own life and that of her analysands. She developed a far-reaching expertise in fairytales, alchemy, synchronicity and numbers. She is estimated to have personally analyzed over 65,000 dreams. She was a prolific writer and a highly sought-after teacher.
Listening to von Franz lecture was a numinous experience. I thought God was speaking. She seemed to know everything. In an amazing fashion and without a text, she ranged over history West and East, mythology, philosophy, anthropology, and a host of other specialized areas. Never in my training had I heard such far-reaching and profound reflections. (Murray Stein, PhD)
For award-winning authors Connie Berry and Grace Topping, as well as renown literary scholar and mystery novelist Prof. Susan Rowland, the process of writing detective novels has a “quest” vibe to it. It highlights the protagonists as heroines and shows how the detective genre may have some kind of “mission” to accomplish. Our notable guests will discuss the inspiration behind writing cozy/traditional mysteries, why and how these mysteries are written, what effect the process of writing them has on the author, and the heroines in their novels.
Grace Topping:
Grace Topping is an Agatha Award finalist and the USA Today bestselling author of the Laura Bishop home staging cozy mystery series. She’s a recovering technical writer and IT project manager accustomed to writing lean, boring documents. Let loose to write fiction, she’s now killing off characters who remind her of people she dealt with during her career. She is the former VP of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime, the Membership Guppy of the SINC Guppy Chapter, and a member of Mystery Writers of America. For more info on Grace’s work, please visit https://www.gracetopping.com/
Connie Berry:
Connie Berry is the author of the USA Today and Amazon best-selling Kate Hamilton Mysteries, set in the UK and featuring an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. Like her protagonist, Connie was raised by antiques dealers who instilled in her a passion for history, fine art, and travel. During college she studied at the University of Freiburg in Germany and St. Clare’s College, Oxford, where she fell under the spell of the British Isles. In 2019 Connie won the IPPY Gold Medal for Mystery and was a finalist for the Agatha Award’s Best Debut. She’s a member of Mystery Writers of America, the Crime Writers’ Association, Sisters in Crime, and is on the board of the Guppies and Buckeye Crime Writers. Besides reading and writing mysteries, Connie loves history, foreign travel, cute animals, and all things British. She lives in Ohio with her husband and adorable Shih Tzu, Emmie. You can learn more about Connie and her books at her website www.connieberry.com.
Susan Rowland:
Susan Rowland’s first detective novel will be published in 2022 as The Sacred Well Murders. It offers three marginalized women as sleuths who are challenged to their core by a group (mis)using Celtic religion to save the world from climate change. Previously Susan published two scholarly studies of mysteries by women: From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell (2000) and The Sleuth and the Goddess: Hestia, Artemis, Aphrodite and Athena in Women’s Detective Fiction (2015). Susan is core faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute and has published other books on Jung, the arts, feminism and the novel.
Roderick has a BA and MA in Classics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Religious Studies from Lancaster University. He joined the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex (formerly the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies) as a visiting research fellow in 1997 and was appointed as a lecturer in 2000, senior lecturer in 2007, and full professor in 2011. He has had many roles in the department, including Course Lead for the MA Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies between 2002 and 2009 and Director (i.e., Head of Department) between 2008 and 2012. He is currently Director of Education as well as Director of the Centre for Myth Studies. From 2014 to 2016 he was seconded to a University role as Deputy Dean (Education) in the Faculty of Social Sciences.
Roderick’s teaching and research mainly focus on the work of Carl Gustav Jung, especially in relation to religion, mythology, literature, and society. His publications have engaged in particular with Jung’s concept of synchronicity and include the books Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal (Routledge/Princeton, 1997; edited), The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture (Brunner-Routledge, 2004), and Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience (SUNY, 2007).
In the area of myth studies he is co-editor (with Leon Burnett and Sanja Bahun) of Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (Karnac, 2013). From 2016 to 2018 he was the Principal Investigator on an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project titled One World: logical and ethical implications of holism, which resulted in his two most recent books (co-edited with Christian McMillan and David Henderson): Holism: Possibilities and Problems (Routledge, 2020) and Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole (Routledge, 2021).
About the Zurich Lecture Series
The ZLS was established in 2009 for the purpose of presenting annually a significant new work by a selected Jungian psychoanalyst or scholar who has previously offered innovative contributions to the field of Analytical Psychology by either: bringing analytical a psychology into meaningful dialogue with other scientific, artistic, and academic disciplines; showing how analytical psychology can lead to a better understanding of contemporary global concerns relating to the environment, politics, religion; or expanding the concepts of analytical psychology as they are applied clinically.
For the Series the selected lecturer delivers lectures over a two-day period in Zürich based on a previously unpublished book-length work, which is published by Chiron Publications.
ZURICH LECTURE SERIES – Postlude October 2-5, 2021
You are invited to participate in three days of Postlude events following ZLS, which includes an Excursion on Saturday, October 2, and lectures by ISAP analysts on Monday and Tuesday, October 4 and 5, at the International School of Analytical Psychology in Zurich.
-Excursion: Guided Tour of the Haus C.G. Jung Museum – Saturday, October 2
Postlude Lectures
Monday, October 4
Dr. Brigitte Egger
Complementarity Creatively Relates Diversity and Unity
Diversity is the lot of the manifest world, unity rather a transcendent principle, and complementarity expresses their inherent bond. Pursued in the manifest world, unity imbued with identity supremacism – excluding the different and the opposite – is a dangerous illusion doomed to lead to polarisation if not open warfare. Cultivated instead in the light of complementarity, it generates humanism and authentic creativity; this path requires utmost respect for, and integration of, the other, and self-limitation. Examples from biology, psychology (individuation), politics and dance.
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Luis Moris, MA
Toward a Weltanschauung: Jung’s thoughts on soul and death after the Red Book
“My works,” Jung writes in his autobiography “…are fundamentally nothing but attempts, ever renewed, to give an answer to the question of the interplay between the ‘here’ and the ‘hereafter.'” This lecture explores these attempts in Jung’s private and scholarly writings from 1916 to 1934.
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Tuesday, October 5
Scott William Hyder
Disinformation’s Shadowy Enchantment of Undoing: The Myth, Meaning, & Metaphysics of Cultural Manipulation & Exploitation
What forces are involved and benefit from disinformation and how do those affect the psyche? Does this reflect cultural complexes, or merely personal ones? How does the manipulation of media and information serve autocracy and do a disservice to the differentiation necessary for individuation, either individually or collectively?
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The Self: Center and Circumference – Open Seminar
The panelists will address the issue of individuation: is the goal to achieve individual realisation only or also to contribute to community? The panelists include Dariane Pictet, Nathalie Boëthius-de Béthune, and Paul Brutsche. Moderation: Murray Stein.
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Releasing today, The Best of James Hollis: Wisdom for the Inner Journey is a collection of excerpts from the writings of James Hollis, PhD, Jungian psychotherapist and author. These selections, compiled by editor Logan Jones, span across his body of work from The Middle Passage (1993) to Prisms (2021) organized into different topics ranging from the psychological concepts of Carl Jung to the everyday tasks of our living and callings.
Hollis’s wisdom will challenge readers to find their own path, to be who they are called to be, to take the risks to trust their soul, and thus live a life worthy of their unique gifts. Hollis’s writings ask us to live a deeper and more authentic life.
