Man and His Symbols

Marie-Louise von Franz forms the conclusion around the assertion that the nature of the psyche and the archetypes within it is still vastly unknown. Jung’s theories and practices only scratch the surface. What is known is how crucial these archetypes influence every aspect of a person’s life. Von Franz states that archetypes exist in every facet of human activity as a sort of “dynamic background activity” (265).

She explains that the theories described in Man and His Symbols provide a gateway to investigation and possibility. She discusses how Jung’s work has contributed to various fields of inquiry, including literature and art, music, anthropology, and psychology. Jung’s theories also sparked new theories in the field of biology, where the question of how evolution occurs is developing new implications based on unconscious processes. Synchronicities occur in science frequently, notes von Franz, citing the example of Darwin and Wallace arriving at the theory of evolution simultaneously but separately. She further explains that microphysics is being impacted by Jung’s theories as well, arguing that the basic principles of physics were suggested by early Greek philosophers and suggest a human archetype embedded in the psyche that is just now becoming clear. The theory of the unconscious and its processes also implies that perception and scientific inquiry can never be objective and must always be taken as a most likely, rather than a guaranteed, result.

Von Franz compares the psyche and matter; both have elements of indescribability and immeasurability. She draws more parallels between Jung’s theories and modern physics, comparing Bohr’s theory of complementarity to Jung’s theory of the conscious and unconscious complementary relationship. Looking to the future, von Franz sees a union of physics and psychology, “a psychophysical one-ness of all life phenomena” (272). Jung calls this the “unus mundus (one world)” (272), and he bases his view on the existence of synchronicities. They appear to him to be a physical manifestation of a psychic event or archetype.

Von Franz goes on to state that mathematics seems to be a manifestation of archetypes, and that numbers have held significance for humans as long as history has been recorded. She concludes Man and His Symbols by acknowledging the potential to criticize Jung’s theories as vague or unprovable but offers that Jung’s greatest strength was in his willingness to see potential for new discoveries and new questions, and she looks forward to the ways in which his theories will inspire new interpretations. She ends on a note of hope that the reader will be inspired to further investigate their own unconscious. Such a result would fulfill the purpose of Jung’s work.