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C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time
C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time
C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time is marie-louise-von-franz‘s full-length study of carl-jung — not a biography in the conventional sense but a reading of Jung himself as a figure of the Lineage. First published in German as C.G. Jung: Sein Mythos im unserer Zeit in 1972, translated by William H. Kennedy and published in English by the C.G. Jung Foundation in 1975, the work treats Jung’s late preoccupations — alchemy, synchronicity, the unus-mundus, the Sapientia Dei — as the substance of his personal myth.
Von Franz traces the medieval and Neoplatonic sources Jung stood on. Hugh of St. Victor’s archetypus mundus — the model in the mind of God for his creation — anticipates the collective-unconscious (von Franz 1975). gerhard-dorn, the Paracelsian, names the completion of the alchemical work as “the union of the individuated self with this unus mundus in the mind of God” (von Franz 1975, citing Dorn); his Mercurius is “the original non-differentiated unity of the world or of Being.” The line runs from Dorn through Jung through von Franz as one continuous reading.
The book also situates Jung’s alchemical reception against the religious undercurrents — Shi’ite gnosis (Muhammad ibn Umail, “Senior”), Kabbalistic alchemy, the introverted cast of the Christian tradition that “became associated with those religious undercurrents… which were of an introverted cast and which were in search of direct experience” (von Franz 1975).
More than any other of her works, this volume states where she stands in the Lineage: not outside Jung looking on, but inside his late thought, continuing it.