Shadow and evil von franz

Von Franz's most sustained treatment of the problem appears in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales (1974), where she approaches moral darkness not as an abstract theological category but as a living narrative force — the devouring stepmother, the dark brother, the troll — each figure carrying what the collective consciousness has refused to own. Her method is amplificatory: she reads the tale against its full archive of analogues until the archetypal grammar of the villain becomes legible, and what that grammar discloses is always the same structural fact: the shadow is not a deficiency but a substance, a genuine psychic reality that the dominant cultural symbol can no longer contain.

The theological background is Jung's refusal of the privatio boni — the Augustinian doctrine that evil is merely the absence of good. Jung found this doctrine not only philosophically circular but psychologically dangerous. Writing to Father Victor White on New Year's Eve 1949, he was characteristically blunt:

This privatio boni business is odious to me on account of its dangerous consequences: it causes a negative inflation of man, who can't help imagining himself, if not as a source of the Evil, at least as a great destroyer, capable of devastating God's beautiful creation. This doctrine produces Luciferian vanity and it is also greatly responsible for the fatal underrating of the human soul being the original abode of Evil.

Von Franz translates this historical phenomenology — which Jung develops at length in Aion — into the language of narrative image. Where Jung argues the case philosophically and theologically, she shows it in the fairy tale's concrete dramaturgy: the witch is not a privation of goodness but a positive force, autonomous and purposive, and the tale's resolution requires genuine encounter with her, not her dissolution into something more comfortable.

The shadow conflict she describes is structurally insoluble at the level of the ego. In Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, she stages this with characteristic directness:

One has to be crucified and make no move with the ego against the yes and no. It may last weeks or months; it is a tension of the opposites not to be decided by the ego, for such a creative solution of the shadow conflict means giving up the ego and its standards and conflicts; it means complete surrender to the unknown forces within one's psyche.

This is the key move in her reading: the shadow conflict cannot be resolved by moral effort, by choosing the right side, by becoming more virtuous. The Christian ideal, she observes, leads to a dead end — either martyrdom or hypocrisy, either living the imitatio Christi to its logical extreme or quietly cheating and looking away. The fairy tale proposes something different: endure the tension until the creative solution arrives from the unconscious, from the third figure nobody thought of, the unexpected turn that shifts the whole situation onto another level.

Neumann's Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949) runs parallel to this argument and illuminates it. His central provocation is that moral perfection is itself a form of collective violence: the repression required to sustain an unblemished persona generates the shadow projections that fuel scapegoat psychology and mass psychosis. The ostensibly good person becomes, in his formulation, an epidemiological vector of evil precisely through the disowned darkness that perfection demands. Von Franz's fairy-tale villains are the narrative embodiment of this dynamic — they are what the collective consciousness has expelled, returning with the autonomous force of everything that has been refused.

What von Franz adds to Neumann's ethical argument is the phenomenological texture: she shows how the shadow speaks in image, what it looks like when it enters the tale as the devouring mother or the trickster, and what the tale's resolution actually requires of the hero. The resolution is never conquest. It is always a form of relationship — a recognition, an unexpected alliance, a willingness to let the dark figure have its say. The shadow, in her reading, is not the enemy of wholeness but its necessary condition.

The aging king who appears in so many of these tales — the dominant that has grown tired, the ruling principle that can no longer contain the psyche's full range — is her image for the Christian aeon itself: a symbol that worked, that gave form to centuries of human experience, but that can no longer integrate what the unconscious keeps producing. The shadow figures in the tales are the psyche's effort toward a new dispensation, not a regression but a demand.

shadow — the concept in Jungian psychology, from personal darkness to archetypal evil
privatio boni — Jung's sustained argument against the Augustinian doctrine that evil lacks substance
Marie-Louise von Franz — portrait of Jung's closest collaborator and the principal voice in fairy-tale amplification
Erich Neumann — portrait of the analyst who extended Jung's shadow concept into a full ethical theory

Sources Cited

Jung, C.G., 1975, Letters Volume 2, 1951–1961
Jung, C.G., 1951, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1974, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales
Neumann, Erich, 1949, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic