Frances G. Wickes


Frances Wickes was a psychologist and writer.

Biography

A graduate of Columbia University, Wickes was a teacher, writer and playwright for children and teenagers in New York but later became interested in becoming a Jungian therapist, especially for artists, and visited Zurich several times after meeting Carl Jung in 1920s, with whom Wickes maintained a correspondence.
Wickes kept a diary of dreams and made conferences, especially at the Analytical Psychology Club of New York. Wickes had a husband, Thomas Wickes and a son, Eliphalet Wickes. Wickes lived also in California and Alaska.
Jung wrote the preface to her second book on the psychological world of children, where Wickes supported the autonomous presence of the child in the collective unconscious, according to the idea of a participation mystique, which Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in 1910 had theorized to exist within primitive societies, Wickes's comparing a child to an individual in training and giving more place to intuition and feeling than attention to the real or rational. The book was translated into German, French, Dutch, Italian and Greek.
In coming decades Wickes helped found Spring, which bills itself as the oldest Jungian journal, and lectured at various branches of the Jung Institutes.
Among Wickes's correspondents are preserved letters to Muriel Rukeyser, Henry Murray, Eudora Welty, Mary Louise Peebles, Martha Graham, Lewis Mumford, Thomas Mann, May Sarton, Robert Edmond Jones and William McGuire. At death without heirs $1–1/2 million of her $2-million estate was given to the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and the rest to the Frances G. Wickes Foundation.

Works

;Non-fiction
;Shorter pieces and fiction