VON FRANZ: I met him when I was eighteen. And I began in the year later in ’34: I began analysis with him.
We went out there to the tower, and out of the bushes suddenly–we were standing around, kind of, you know awkwardly, as one does, not knowing what was going to happen–and then out of the bushes came a man, and I was deeply impressed by him.
I thought he naturally, he was a Methuselah because when you are eighteen you ‘think a 58 year old is ready for the cemetery.
He told that story which you can read in the Memories about this girl who was on the moon and had to fight a demon, and the black demon got her.
And he pretended, or he told it in a way as if she really had been on the moon and it had happened.
And I was very rationalistically trained from school so I said indignantly, “But she imagined to be on the moon, or she dreamt it, but she wasn’t on the moon.”
And he looked at me earnestly and said, “Yes she was on the moon.”
I still remember looking over the lake there and thinking, “Either this man is crazy, or I am too stupid to understand what he means.”
And then suddenly it dawned on me, “He means that what happens psychically is the real reality, and this other moon, this stony desert which goes round the earth, that’s illusion, or that’s only pseudo-reality.”
And that hit me tremendously deeply. When I crawled, rather drunk into bed because he gave us a lot of Burgundy that evening, I thought, “It will take you ten years to digest what you experienced today.” ~Marie Louise Von Franz; Excerpt from “A Matter of Heart.”
