Swiss Jungian analyst, classical philologist, and the closest of Carl Jung's younger collaborators; over a fifty-year career she produced the most substantial body of work in the Jungian tradition after Jung's own, and she is the principal figure through whom his methods for reading fairy tales, alchemical texts, dreams, and the problem of meaning in individual lives were transmitted to a second generation of analysts and a wider educated public.
Von Franz met Jung in 1933 at the age of eighteen, when she visited his home in Küsnacht with a group of students from her Zurich Gymnasium; the encounter was decisive, and from 1934 until Jung's death in 1961 she worked with him as analysand, collaborator, and translator of Greek and Latin alchemical texts that formed the documentary basis of his late work. She co-authored the final section of his Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56) and, after his death, completed his unfinished work on the Aurora Consurgens, an anonymous 15th-century alchemical treatise she edited and translated with a book-length psychological commentary (Aurora Consurgens, 1957).
Her own writing developed two lines. The first is a long sequence of books on the psychological reading of fairy tales — The Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1970), Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales (1974), The Feminine in Fairy Tales (1972), Individuation in Fairy Tales (1977) — in which the tale is treated as a compact and relatively undistorted document of the psyche's standard processes, more useful than the longer literary forms for studying what Jungians call the individuation process. The second is her work on alchemy and on the figure of the trickster and the puer, and her late and widely read books on number, synchronicity, and divination (Number and Time, 1970; On Divination and Synchronicity, 1980), which attempt to extend Jung's late suggestion that the psyche and matter share a deep structural ground.
Von Franz was a founder and longtime teacher at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, and she is the Jungian most often cited by writers outside the psychoanalytic world who want a responsible interpreter of Jung's reading of myth, religion, and symbol. Where Jung himself was often oracular, her prose is patient, classically trained, and organized around textual close reading; much of what is now durable in Jungian clinical practice is in the form she gave it.
Von Franz belongs here because the graph's interest in religion, symbol, and moral imagination is followed into the Jungian tradition through her work, not through Jung's own. Her readings of fairy tale and alchemy are the practical form in which Jungian attention to the unconscious meets literary and religious interpretation.