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Psyche and Matter
Psyche and Matter
Psyche and Matter collects twelve essays — five published in English for the first time in this volume — in which marie-louise-von-franz addresses the relationship between psychic and physical ordering, the problem of time, number, and meaning, and the contemporary points of rapprochement between analytical psychology and the natural sciences. The volume gathers the apparatus by which she continued Jung’s late work on synchronicity after his death.
The central argument crystallizes in her reading of Wang Fu-Chih (1619–1692) — the seventeenth-century Chinese philosopher whose account of the I Ching provides her, as it had provided Jung, with the model of “a continuum which is ordered in itself. It has no manifest appearance and thus cannot be observed immediately by sense perceptions, but its inherent dynamism manifests in images whose structure participates in that of the continuum” (von Franz 2014). This continuum is the unus mundus: the one world beneath the apparent distinction of psyche and matter, the ground from which acausal orderednesses emerge.
The volume also reports Jung’s final methodological statement to her, the sentence she carried forward into her own Number and Time: “‘Now I have the feeling that I’ve hit my head against the ceiling. I can’t get any farther than this’” (von Franz 2014). Her project was to pass through that ceiling.