Alicia in McCormack’s Stella Maris

She should not speak of such things to a rationalistic psychiatrist….

Carl Jung had several colleagues who worked with him on alchemy, but one of the most notable was Marie-Louise von Franz, a Swiss Jungian psychologist and one of Jung’s closest collaborators. She was particularly interested in alchemy and wrote several books on the subject, including Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology.


I imagine Von Franz had an Alicia in mind when she said in Alchemy…, I often say to schizoid people that their madness does not consist in what they see and believe, but in telling it to the wrong people. If they kept it to themselves it would be all right. I have, for example, a borderline case of a woman who goes to every psychiatrist and accuses them all of being idiotic rationalists who do not believe in God, and she tells them her visions. I think her only mistake is in telling these people, for that is simply being unadapted. Her visions in themselves are quite all right, and also what she thinks about them, but her extraverted feeling is inferior, she is socially unadapted. She should not speak of such things to a rationalistic psychiatrist who only wonders whether he should intern her!”