Scope and Content Note
The papers of Frances Gillespy Wickes (1875-1967) span the years 1896-1996, with the bulk of the material dating from 1913 to 1968. The papers are organized in the following series: Family Papers , Correspondence , Writings , Subject File , Addition , and Restricted . They depict Wickes’s personal, professional, and literary achievements as a lay psychologist whose close association with notable figures in the fields of psychoanalysis and the arts is revealed in intimate correspondence and in the introspections of friends who shared with her their dreams and reflections.
Frances Wickes spent her early career as a settlement worker in New York City and San Francisco and as a teacher and writer of children’s literature. Material on this period of her life is sparse, but her first published works, 1915-1924, show evidence of the understanding of the unconscious imagination and subjective experiences of children which underlay her study, The Inner World of Childhood (1927). By this date Wickes had trained with C. G. Jung at his Zurich institute and had absorbed the ideas which would give the rest of her teachings and writings a Jungian framework. She remained active to the end of her life, publishing the last of her books, The Inner World of Choice (1963), while in her late eighties.
The small series of Family Papers primarily contains material concerning Wickes’s son, Eliphalet, who died in 1926 at the age of twenty-one, and letters and poems by other members of Wickes’s family. Other family papers are in the Addition .
The Correspondence series consists mostly of incoming letters. Since Wickes did not make copies of her own communications, her correspondence is limited to letters received, with the principal exception of a few early family letters and original correspondence added to the collection after her death. Among her correspondents are Sir Martin and Gay Charteris, George Dangerfield, Chauncey Shafter Goodrich, Martha Graham, Robert Edmond Jones, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Henry Alexander Murray. Correspondence with C. G. Jung is in the Addition , although one letter each from Jung and his wife Emma is located in the Correspondence Series. The papers do not contain any letters from James Agee, a friend reputed to have written significant portions of A Death in the Family in Wickes’s home.
The Wickes Papers reflect her professional activities as an analyst, writer, and lecturer. In addition to reports and speeches from the Analytical Psychology Club of New York and the New York Psychology Group, the collection includes writings given to Wickes by Gerhard Adler, Chung-Yuan Chang, Jung, Henry Alexander Murray, and other students of psychology and Eastern philosophy. Wickes also received poems and accounts of dreams from Martha Graham, Robert Edmund Jones, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Muriel Rukeyser, and others, and through Harriet E. Marks she obtained a series of children’s case studies including those of John Stevenson, son of Adlai Stevenson, and Peter Jung, grandson of the Swiss psychoanalyst. Her collection thus documents the work of Jungians here and abroad as well as her own insights and private development.
The major part of the Wickes Papers is devoted to jottings, writings, and other literary matter derived from her practice as an analyst. There are notebooks and rough drafts of memoirs she sketched late in life, testimonials which she rendered in tribute to Jung on various anniversary occasions, and notes and transcripts of lectures delivered by Jung at his Zurich institute in the 1920s. The Subject File contains dream records of Wickes and of those she analyzed as well as phantasmal drawings which, in her view, reflected the creative imagination of the unconscious. The papers also include a small file of tales and legends which she obtained from personal contact with folk cultures and from the observations of others. An item received as a result of her friendship with Martha Graham is a firsthand description by Eudora Welty of a “Pageant of the Birds” ritual witnessed in an African-American church in Jackson, Mississippi. Prominent in the Writings are drafts of an unpublished novel, “Susan: The Bridge Called Heritage,” and Wickes’s last book, The Inner World of Choice.
The Addition contains correspondence with C. G. Jung, forty letters from Jung to Wickes and forty letters of Wickes to Jung, most of which are photocopies. There are also several letters to Wickes from Jung’s wife, Emma. Also of special interest are the letters from Wickes’s husband Thomas. They separated in 1910 but appear never to have divorced legally. The Addition also includes correspondence with George Hogle, a member of the board for the Frances G. Wickes Foundation, general correspondence, and some financial material.