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 City, 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 were given to the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and the rest to the Frances G. Wickes Foundation.

Works

Non-fiction

  • , 1927; New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1931
  • . New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1938
  • . New York: Harper and Row, 1963

    Shorter pieces and fiction

  • , 1915
  • "The Christmas Jest," , 1916
  • , 1917
  • , illustrated by Gertrude A. Kay, 1921
  • , 1924
  • , 1925 by Wilhelmina Seegmiller
  • "Mother Spider," in , Ada M. Skinner and Eleanor L. Skinner, 1925
  • "A Question," in Spring, 1941, pp. 107–109
  • Receive the Gale. A Novel. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1946
  • "The Creative Process," in Spring, 1948, pp. 26–46
  • , Stories to Dramatize, Winifred Ward, Stories to Dramatize, 1952
  • , Nora Kramer, 1960
  • Wilhelmina Harper, ''Ghosts and Goblins: Halloween Stories for 1965''