1935 23 Oct. LECTURE 2 Zarathustra Seminar
Prof Jung:
We come now to the chapter called “Chastity.”
I love the forest. It is bad to live in cities: there, there are too many of the lustful.
As the title of this chapter denotes, Nietzsche is now going to talk of sexuality.
For those who were not here last term, I must repeat again that the series of chapters consist of a series of images.
He starts with a certain picture or a thought-a thought picture-and then towards the end of the chapter he usually arrives at the possibility df a new picture; a new problem opens up which will form the contents of the next chapter.
So the whole of Zarathustra is a string of pictures, each one a problem, and all hanging together with one logical undercurrent.
We were concerned before with the “Flies in the Market-Place.”
Now, how do you suppose Nietzsche arrives at this chapter about chastity?
Mrs. Crowley: You were speaking about his dream of a toad in the last discussion.
Prof Jung: Yes, we have decidedly a cue in that worm, which referred to his dream that a toad was sitting on his hand, spoiling his beautiful system.
But the toad had to do with his infection, and that alone would not explain why he arrives at this chapter.
Mrs. Baumann: I thought he was running away from people to escape that infection-in order to find chastity through solitude and so avoid the toad.
Mrs. Crowley: I would not have thought it was to escape infection, but rather that the presence of other people made him more conscious of it.
Prof Jung: One of the personal reasons for his peculiar sensitiveness might well be the feeling that he was somewhat marked by fate by his syphilitic infection; that would probably give him a certain amount of self-consciousness.
Or of course it might link him up instead with the lower strata of mankind; people often don’t mind and don’t become particularly self-conscious on account of such an infection.
In Nietzsche’s tremendously sensitive structure, we could expect that it would have that effect, however.
But we should know just what problem was raised concerning the “Flies in the Market-Place,” which would lead Nietzsche to this new aspect.
In how far would the development in the former chapter make it almost necessary that a chapter on chastity should follow?
Mrs. Baumann has already referred to something.
Dr. Bertine: The marketplace is the place of the collective, and sexuality is the bond of the collective; he rejects collectivity and therefore he rejects the cohesiveness of it.
Mrs. Fierz: It is running away from the lower man.
Prof. Jung: Yes, one can also put it like that.
You see, flies would mean an extraordinary collectivity of small beings, and Nietzsche
never tires of speaking of ordinary men as being sort of vermin whose only excellence is their remarkable fertility; practically the only quality he gives them is that they are many, a multitude of vermin.
So he excludes himself and is a Superman who has overcome that awful crowdman.
This we shall see even more clearly towards the end of Zarathustra when he rejects the “ugliest man.”
The man that makes for growth is the ugliest man, the inferior man, the instinctive collective being, and that is exactly what he loathes the most.
You see, to lift himself out of that layer of the ordinary collective man would mean reaching a height which is superhuman, and how can man be above man?
Inasmuch as he is a living man he is just man. So what is bound to follow in such a case?
Miss Hannah: An inflation.
Prof. Jung: Well, he has an inflation already-therefore he bounces in the air like a balloon.
One needs an inflation to rise, and one can stay in the heavens by the fact of that inflation.
But then what is the mental condition of such a person?
Mr. Allemann: He is torn to pieces.
Prof. Jung: He might explode, but that would be schizophrenia.
Prof. Fierz: He becomes neurotic.
Prof. Jung: Nietzsche was neurotic of course, but when you analyse the dreams of such a case, suspended above the earth in the super condition, what will you find?
Mrs. Crowley: The earth problems coming up.
Prof Jung: You find probably the earth problems, the earth man, heavy like lead, absolutely identical with the lowest things.
And since it is one and the same man, there must exist a bond between the two. And what is that bond?
Where is the connection, the umbilical cord between the body, the lower man, and the balloon up there?
Mrs. Fierz: Conflict?
Prof. Jung: But what would the conflict be?
In the end of Zarathustra you find the interpretation very nicely.
Because it is a self-analysis, it comes out.
Miss Taylor: Is it not sexuality itself? That would function as a sort of bond, because it is very deep.
Prof. Jung: Well, the lower man, being deprived of that part which went off in a balloon, is left to his instincts only, and so he can only express a lowdown sexuality.
Of course sexuality is not necessarily lowdown, but in this case it is lower because the higher part has gone and knows nothing of what is happening underneath; so a very inferior sexuality goes on as an expression of the lower man.
And the man in the clouds has some feeling of it, for that really binds him together with
the lower man and he feels the corresponding resistance.
But that resistance is to the sexuality of the lower man, only a connection through conflict.
If the lower man has a lustful kind of sexuality, the man in the clouds has the corresponding lustful resistance against it.
You see, whether you hate a person or thing, or love it, is in natural psychology exactly the same.
Of course, to the human being it makes all the difference in the world whether you like a thing or not, but in psychology it is the same; you are bound to a thing just as much by hatred as by love, sometimes even more, because the bad qualities in people are stronger than the good ones.
The real strength in a man is by no means his strength-it is his weakness, because weakness is much stronger than the greatest strength.
So Nietzsche loves the high mountains in order to be excluded from the lower man, and so he says it is bad to live in cities where there are too many of the lustful, But his own ordinary man is in the worst parts of the town.
Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer, than into the dreams of a lustful woman?
There you are! He doesn’t even live in towns, but in the dreams of a lustful woman. Now who is that famous lustful woman?
Mrs. Fierz: His anima.
Prof. Jung: Of course, because she always tried to persuade him to come down from the balloon and look after the inferior man; in such a case you can expect that kind of lust.
Later, we find a hymn to that anima.
And when he became insane he wrote a lot of erotic stuff which was so crude that his highly respectable sister knew no better than to burn it up.
We know definitely that he was filled with sexual fantasies, and there are some rather crude allusions in letters to his friends.
As is always the case when a man has gone up in a balloon, his anima is of course on the side of the shadow, the inferior person in himself: she is even married to that man, identical with his shadow.
You see, the idea is that he is very high and in danger of falling down naturally, and then he would land in the dreams of the lustful woman, his anima, who is the wife of that awful creature, the shadow.
But he does not know that he has a shadow because he has lost his body; he is a ghost and a ghost casts no shadow.
So he naturally thinks that the woman down there, whose touch he feels, is a strange woman who has nothing to do with him; she is perhaps the wife of somebody.
Because he does not recognize himself in his shadow she is projected and he has nothing to do with her.
Yet he feels her touch.
So the thing which always binds the two things together, the one above and the one below, is not exactly sex or the conflict over sex: it is the anima.
But the anima means a conflict.
Therefore, woman is always represented as a paradoxical being; very often she appears as split in two, an upper and a lower, a fair and a dark anima.
And that is so real that men fall in love accordingly; they fall in love with fair animas and with dark animas and they appear as real women on the stage of reality.
When Nietzsche notices that these terrible women are connected with men equally bad, he says:
And just look at these men … Keep in mind that this is his shadow, which is like all the rest of those flies in the marketplace!
their eye saith it-they know nothing better on earth than to lie with a woman.
That is the inferior sexuality of his shadow, but it is only inferior because he went away in a balloon; if he had stayed below, it would not be inferior.
For sexuality is always what the person is, not something detached from man, a thing in itself.
It is an activity in man and it is always what the man is.
Filth is at the bottom of their souls; and alas! if their filth hath still spirit in it!
Exactly.
His mind went away in the balloon, so naturally there is no mind in the filth; it would not be filth if the mind were down there, but would be a decent human body.
Would that ye were perfect-at least as animals! But to animals belongeth innocence.
That is perfectly true.
If he were a beast he would be completely unconscious; he would not have a mind and he would not have a chance to go away in a balloon.
Of course, if you have a mind you are tempted to identify with it, because consciousness is such an autonomous system that you can almost include yourself in it; with a certain amount of autoeroticism you can include yourself, defend yourself against surrounding
conditions and lock yourself up in your consciousness, to the extent that you become identical with it and at any time may fly away.
You see, this autonomy of consciousness is a great asset; if that were lacking we would not have will.
Willpower is the expression of the autonomy of consciousness: you can choose; otherwise, there is no freedom of choice.
You can only have free will-independent of environmental conditions of any kind-inasmuch as your consciousness is autonomous.
So the possibility that consciousness can detach itself from its basis is not an advantage if it does not go too far.
It is even a necessary condition for the existence of free will; inasmuch as consciousness is detachable from conditions, we have free will.
Now, free will is surely the basis of ethics; an ethical attitude is only possible inasmuch as consciousness is detachable or autonomous.
But if you go too far, if you increase the imagination, the autonomy of consciousness, by assuming too much responsibility, you go up like a balloon.
You think you can triumph over natural laws which are the real basis of your life if you follow them; you increase your responsibility for things over which man cannot and should not assume responsibility, and off you go above the clouds.
And then you are confronted with a situation like Nietzsche’s.
For whatever curses he shouts down from the stratosphere, they are simply curses about himself.
Those filthy beasts down there that sleep with each other are the other side of himself;
he has cleared that vermin out of his Superman’s consciousness and he imagines that he is well above it.
But he is far from it, for nobody can do that. He himself has a doubt here.
He says:
Do I counsel you to slay your instincts? I counsel you to innocence in your instincts.
Do I counsel you to chastity? Chastity is a virtue with some, but with many almost a vice.
You see what good advice he can give out of the clouds-from far away.
These are continent, to be sure: but doggish lust looketh enviously out of all that they do.
Even into the heights of their virtue and into their cold spirit doth this creature follow them, with its discord.
He confirms exactly what we were saying.
And how nicely can doggish lust beg for a piece of spirit, when a piece of flesh is denied it!
Ye love tragedies and all that breaketh the heart? But I am distrustful of your doggish lust.
Ye have too cruel eyes, and ye look wantonly towards the sufferers.
Hath not your lust just disguised itself and taken the name of fellow-suffering?
In this admonition or exhortation to the poor vermin down below, he unveils his own psychology; it all happens in himself.
The cruel eyes are very much his own eyes because he speaks out of the coldness of the mind, spying.
And as for that “look wantonly towards the sufferers,” well, who is a great sufferer? Who is pitying himself and taking care of himself, avoiding everything which could cause upset to his poor nervous system?
And also this parable give I unto you.
Not a few who meant to cast out their devil, went thereby into the swine themselves.
This is a very general and a very great truth.
There are many people who try to give good advice to other people, try to rescue them or to help them, and in the end they are drowned in the mire; that is eventually the place they were really making for under the disguise of pity, compassion, and understanding.
And it is Nietzsche’s own fate.
In the end of Zarathustra we come to passages which are very much on the line of the pathological eroticism he showed when his insanity came on.
Mrs. Crowley: You said in a former Seminar that a prophet has to have the collective experience in order to speak from his own experience. So that might be a natural cause.
Prof Jung: Quite so, but the prophet is a different case.
We are speaking now, not of the prophet but of the psychology of the man Nietzsche.
You see, I would be a Superman if I dared to speak of the psychology of the prophet.
I could not possibly do that.
I doubt even whether the prophet has a psychology-only man has a psychology.
Mrs. Crowley: But in this instance, as he assumes the role of the prophet, he has to go through this experience.
Prof. Jung: But that is Nietzsche’s psychology as a prophet.
Insofar as he has a prophet’s psychology he is bound to have that experience, sure enough.
If you assume yourself to be a prophet, then you are in a balloon; to be a prophet is of course his special balloon.
Zarathustra is his balloon.
To whom chastity is difficult, it is to be dissuaded: lest it become the road to hell-to filth and lust of soul.
Do I speak of filthy things? That is not the worst thing for me to do.
Not when the truth is filthy, but when it is shallow, doth the discerning one go unwillingly into its waters.
That is also a great truth.
Verily, there are chaste ones from their very nature; they are gentler of heart, and laugh better and oftener than you.
They laugh also at chastity, and ask: “What is chastity? Is chastity not folly?
But the folly came unto us, and not we unto it.
We offered that guest harbour and heart: now it dwelleth with us-let it stay as long as it will!”-
It is quite obvious that those wise ones who don’t know what chastity is are the brethren of Zarathustra; Zarathustra is one of those.
And here one sees where Nietzsche is identical with Zarathustra; that is the way in which the Superman-if such a thing did exist-would speak.
So you can say that this is the way in which the prophet Zarathustra speaks, and inasmuch as there is such a thing as a prophet, he has of course my permission to speak like that.
But inasmuch as the man Nietzsche speaks, what does it convey?
Prof. Reichstein: It is as you said, he makes now a lust of his chastity.
Prof Jung: Well, he makes a very particular point of it, even to the extent of asking what chastity is.
That means that he has no such problem at all; it means a superiority to his earthly being which is wellnigh impossible.
Dr. Bertine: It is a disembodied statement.
Prof Jung: Completely, and therefore exceedingly improbable.
Of course if the prophet speaks like that, it goes: there is no argument against what a prophet says, as you know.
But inasmuch as the man speaks, it is simply neurotic.
So there is very good reason for not identifying with the prophet.
Well, I am going rather quickly through these chapters because, though they are important inasmuch as the psychology of the man Nietzsche is concerned, they are to my mind not particularly interesting.
We come now to “The Friend”:
“One, is always too many about me”-thinketh the anchorite.
“Always once one-that maketh two in the long run!”
I and me are always too earnestly in conversation: how could it be endured, if there were not a friend?
The friend of the anchorite is always the third one: the third one is the cork which preventeth the conversation of the two sinking into the depth.
Ah! there are too many depths for all anchorites.
Therefore, do they long so much for a friend, and for his elevation.
Now how does he cross over the gulf from chastity to the friend?
Mrs. Fierz: The chapter on chastity was the anima aspect and now it is the aspect of the shadow; he and his shadow make the conversation.
Prof Jung: That is what one would hope for.
Mrs. Fierz: But it is very painful.
Prof. Jung: Yes, and therefore that conversation does not happen.
Mrs. Fierz: And therefore he needs another person and that would be the Puer Aeternus.
Prof Jung: Well, yes, in many cases.
You see, it is very obvious that he has rejected the relation to his anima because she is impolite enough to link him up with the awful men down below who do such terrible things.
And as the rejected relation to the anima is heterosexual, what remains is homosexuality, so he discovers the friend.
The real friend he would need would naturally be his own inferior man, and the conversation he should have would be with him; but that is excluded, so he is all the more in need of a human relation, which he hopes to find in the friend.
Now when Nietzsche was all alone in the Engadine, he had the experience of suddenly feeling double-it was he himself and Zarathustra-and he felt that it was almost like talking to a friend.
And now he says that “I and my self”-Zarathustra being the self as you know from a former chapter-are ever too hot in converse.
“I and me are always too earnestly in conversation; how could it be endured, if there were not a friend?”
To the hermit, a friend is ever a third because the hermit is double, and that he cannot stand, so he needs a human friend: “The third one is the cork which preventeth the conversation of the two sinking into the depths.”
That is, the self being greater than his consciousness, he is naturally drawn into the eternal abyss of that which is greater than man; through his own conversation he simply disappears.
He falls into a complete identity with the self, his consciousness gets a horrible inflation, and there is no chance whatever of any connection with the earth.
That is the psychology of a man who is completely isolated, and who therefore would naturally try to link up with the earth again.
But since the contact with the earth is infamous and poisonous, he cannot touch it, and the necessary link would be a man friend who would represent the heights over against the depths.
The self would draw him into the abyss of eternity whereas a friend would keep him in the surface reality.
Our faith in others betrayeth wherein we would fain have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer.
And often with our love we want merely to overleap envy.
And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.
Here he describes a very peculiar type of relationship to a friend, which is a system of many neuroses.
What do you think about it?
Prof. Reichstein: I think that Nietzsche is quite incapable of having a friend at all, and therefore he makes such a figure of it.
Prof Jung: Yes, he is obviously trying to create a fantastical friend, the friend he imagines he ought to have.
Naturally, if he is in the condition that we have described, he would need the friend that he imagines.
But no human being could be his friend under such conditions; that is well-nigh impossible.
Nobody can adapt to a double, and Nietzsche has in that case a double aspect: he is himself and he is identical with the self-on the one side the regrettable victim, and on the other side a very peculiar prophet.
How could an earthly normal man adapt to such a condition? Let us assume that a real man turns up, what would happen to him? Nietzsche had a friend, do you know anything about him?
Prof. Fierz: Peter Gast.
Miss Wolff: Peter Gast was an unimportant person. Nietzsche could not accept a man who was his equal as his friend; he was a human being who just needed to be alone. If he had such a friend, he was a rival at once, it was too much on the basis of competition.
Prof. Jung: The friendship with Peter Gast was rather an unhappy story.
Peter Gast felt terribly emptied and found it exceedingly difficult, and everybody else who had to deal directly with Nietzsche found it difficult.
You may remember that little anecdote about Nietzsche: Once when he was talking very enthusiastically about Italy in his lecture at Basel, he happened to catch the eye of one of the young men in his audience, and Nietzsche instantly imagined that there was a friend for him.
So after the lecture he said to him, “We will go together to Italy!”
But the young man had no money and naturally thought of his empty pocket. “But Herr Professor!” he stammered, and then the bottom dropped out of the world and Nietzsche simply made off disgusted.
That is Nietzsche.
He did not think of the reality, that the poor student had not the necessary money to take a trip to Italy, and of course he never would have thought of paying for him.
If the young man has said, “Yes, I am coming with you,” of course Nietzsche would
have been delighted, without thinking that the fellow had no money to do it; you see, the reality which presented itself at that moment was enough to put him off completely, and the man was simply lost to him.
That was his kind of friendship.
The friend ought to exist, and then in the right moment he ought to disappear, and then he should be there again-that is exactly what Nietzsche expected of him, and that of
course is the inevitable result if one is identical with the self.
“Be at least mine enemy!”-thus speaketh the true reverence, which doth not venture to solicit friendship.
If one would have a friend, then must one also be willing to wage war for him: and in order to wage war, one must be capable of being an enemy.
One ought still to honour the enemy in one’s friend. Canst thou go nigh unto thy friend, and not go over to him?
In one’s friend one shall have one’s best enemy. Thou shalt be closest unto him with thy heart when thou withstandest him.
This is surely very wise and in a way very true, but it is again a truth which is too high.
It is so exaggerated and so paradoxical that it cannot be believed in a human atmosphere of human feeling; the ordinary feeling simply does not stand such a strain.
This is tremendously exaggerated because of the utterly overwrought feeling.
Thou wouldst wear no raiment before thy friend? Is it in honour of thy friend that thou show est thyself to him as thou art?
But he wisheth thee to the devil on that account!
Exceedingly true. Out of sheer politeness one should not show oneself as one is; it is always reckless and shocking.
Of course he means here not exactly as one is, because there are always two sides; everything has two aspects-one doesn’t consist of the worst side only.
But if you make it an ideal to show yourself as you are, you show the evil things definitely and not the good things, because you are deeply convinced that showing what you are must mean showing something unfavorable.
Whereas to show yourself as you really are would mean to show the two sides, one mitigating the other, the two things in one; then you could safely say friendship was only possible when you show who you are and what you are.
You should never use such terms as “going unclad” because that means naked, with the assumption that you are ugly, which is not true.
A man is not ugly when unclad, he may be quite beautiful, or at least he is as he is, not too bad, not too good.
But if the two aspects are torn asunder, if one part is in heaven and the other in hell, then naturally you needs must show the side that is in hell, which of course will be a bad side.
Therefore, Nietzsche says that you should be very careful to conceal yourself from your friend.
Then he feels afterwards this is very important:
He who maketh no secret of himself shocketh: so much reason have ye to fear nakedness! Aye, if ye were Gods, ye could then be ashamed of clothing!
He thinks that if he could show himself as the Superman, it would be of course acceptable, most agreeable, because that is the side of the God; but since we are not Gods, we would show our inferior side, which is too lowdown in his case.
So he is naturally quite reasonable not to show it.
Thou canst not adorn thyself fine enough for thy friend; for thou shalt be unto him an arrow and a longing for the Superman.
The German text is particularly characteristic: Du kannst dichfur deinem Freund nicht schon genug putzen.
You see, we never would use that expression sich putzen for a man, only a woman putzt herself–when she does her hair, and sticks a flower behind her ear, puts on some jewels, a nice costume, and so on.
So Nietzsche clearly has in mind a womanish sort of man-one could safely say a homosexual who even paints himself, puts rouge on his lips and cheeks in order to appeal sensually to his friend.
Here we see very definitely where Nietzsche is identical with the anima; this is the anima talking out of him, not the way in which a man would speak, but definitely feminine.
The idea that he should adorn himself for his friend is an idea which never enters the head of a real man.
“For thou shalt be unto him an arrow and a longing for the Superman,” means that he will adorn himself in order to appear to his friend as if he were the Superman and to instigate the same desire to be above the clouds in his friend, so that they shall not be bothered by the shadow.
That would of course be an utterly unreal relationship, which would not be possible for one minute; in the next minute something would happen and they would come down to earth.
Sawest thou ever thy friend asleep-to know how he looketh? What is usually the countenance of thy friend?
It is thine own countenance, in a coarse and imperfect mirror.
Therefore one does better not to see him asleep, one would say.
Sawest thou ever thy friend asleep?
Wert thou not dismayed at thy friend looking so? 0 my friend, man is something that hath to be surpassed.
In divining and keeping silence shall the friend be a master: not everything must thou wish to see. Here are his postulates and expectations.
The friend cannot be an ordinary friend, but must be a master in divining, always knowing ahead what Nietzsche is expecting of him. “And in keeping silence.”
He mustn’t even talk-of course not in the wrong moment-and he must
never say anything which is not pleasant.
Thy dream shall disclose unto thee what thy friend doeth when awake.
That means that one may dream of him when he is at his best, not otherwise.
Let thy pity be a divining: to know first if thy friend wanteth pity. Perhaps he loveth in thee the unmoved eye, and the look of eternity.
This is the eternal man again; only for his sake should there be friendship.
Let thy pity for thy friend be hid under a hard shell; thou shalt bite out a tooth upon it.
Thus will it have delicacy and sweetness.
Again terrible exaggeration. If you show the hard shell to your friends all the time, why the devil should they feel friendship for you? They don’t come to you in order to lose a tooth.
Art thou pure air and solitude and bread and medicine to thy friend? Many a one cannot loosen his own fetters, but is nevertheless his friend’s emancipator.
Art thou a slave? Then thou canst not be a friend. Art thou a tyrant? Then thou canst not have friends.
This is an exaggeration also, the pairs of opposites dissociated; either a slave or a tyrant, and where is the human being in between?
It is perfectly obvious that only the human being in between can be a friend, not the one above and not the one below.
Now he begins to question himself in a way.
Why is there such a separation of pairs of opposites? Why is there such a fuss about the friend, why all these expectations and demands?
Far too long hath there been a slave and a tyrant concealed in woman.
You see, he is going to make a discovery.
Not that he would realize it we must discover the anima for him.
The anima is the trouble-the womanish side of him is slave and tyrant.
It is the anima that separates the pairs of opposites, because the anima itself is a pair of opposites; it is fair and dark, tyrant and slave; it is She-who-must-be-obeyed and at the same time a prostitute, the victim of everybody.
On that account woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knoweth only love.
Instead of saying that the ordinary man who is not too high and not too low is capable of friendship, he says no, that cannot be, because he is not a Superman.
And then he projects the whole thing into the woman, not knowing that he himself is that woman.
He begins to discourse about the advantages and disadvantages of women, instead of
seeing that there is a woman’s side to himself and a hysterical woman at that, with a dissociation between the pairs of opposites.
That woman is the reason why he cannot have friendship or give friendship; he is always in danger, either of being in love with a friend or hating his friend, because he is a woman.
In woman’s love there is injustice and blindness to all she doth not love.
And even in woman’s conscious love, there is still always surprise and lightning and night, along with the light.
Here he describes his anima reactions.
He is an intuitive thinking type, so his anima would naturally hold the inferior functions feeling and sensation, and those two functions taken together would mean a valued
reality, a reality equipped with feeling.
You can have a reality without feeling, which is not differentiated, not chosen or characterized by feeling; but if the two functions are together there is a sort of feeling reality.
For instance, that anima side of him would choose a world consisting chiefly of personal relations, and inasmuch as he is introverted his anima would have an extraverted character.
So he would move in a world of very personal relations among real people.
Now, the real people in Nietzsche are suppressed, depreciated as the flies in the marketplace; therefore his anima would like to be a fly too in order to be able to move among those ordinary vermin.
That, of course, he simply cannot see.
But when he says, “In woman’s love there is injustice to all she doth not love,” he gives an exact description of what his feeling-sensation is doing.
You see injustice means giving the wrong values, and blindness means not to see things as they are.
As yet woman is not capable of friendship: …He is not capable of friendship; nobody is capable of friendship with him because he is dissociated, but he projects it into the woman. women are still cats, and birds.
Well, those animals are hostile to each other; the birds are the victims of the cats, so that means a dissociation.
The spiritual form of the anima is a bird up above, and the other is a cat living down below on the earth.
Or at best, cows.
That is the only middle ground, as if, when you put a cat and a bird together, it made a cow.
Now this is hardly probable.
So he depreciates his anima as one would expect him to do, because the anima is the weight of his feeling sensation that pulls him down to the real man whom he despises; therefore, she must needs be depreciated.
As yet woman is not capable of friendship. But tell me, ye men, who of you are capable of friendship?
There you have it, men are not capable of friendship either.
Oh! your poverty, ye men, and your sordidness of soul! As much as ye give to your friend, will I give even to my foe, and will not have become poorer thereby.
If he gives to his friend what he gives to his foe, it is a pretty bad bargain.
I would not wish for a friend who gave as much to his foe as he gave to me.
There is comradeship: may there be friendship!
Thus spake Zarathustra.
I must say I should prefer comradeship, because that is just and generous and human above all; I care not at all for a friendship that is such a hysterical and unvalued thing.
You see, this chapter allows us a rather interesting view into the soul of the neurotic.
Miss Wolff: Of course he tried to have reasons for his projections onto women. He put too much feeling into his men friends so he wanted a woman friend, but she had to be a disciple. He always wanted to be accepted with his ideas. That is of course why it did not work with women; they didn’t want to be mere disciples.
Prof. Fierz: Did he have any experience with women of society, a worldly friendship?
Prof. Jung: I happen to know a woman who tried to get at him, but I always thought she was trying to catch him just as a cat catches a bird; she was after his biography.
Miss Wolff: That was Lou Salome; she told him she would be a wonderful disciple; he wrote and tried to give her his ideas.”
Prof. Jung: Well yes, but she had nothing of the sort in her mind, she was trying to catch a bird.
Mrs. Jung: I think one should consider the time in which Nietzsche wrote, I think it was not merely his own psychology. That was the time when everybody left too much to the persona and did not realize the shadow side, and Nietzsche was the first to point to this background. In this chapter on friendship, there is a lot of ordinary psychology and I think it was very important that somebody said it.
For instance, where he speaks of the woman here, I think it is because she, the anima, represents the relating function, and when he speaks of friendship he must have this function, so he has to bring in this anima psychology here.
Prof. Jung: That is surely true.
He could not form any kind of relation without considering his anima: that is the conditio sine qua non.
Therefore, he had to consider this psychology which was unknown in his days, as you rightly say.
The psychology of the eighties when he wrote Zarathustra consisted of bourgeois ideas, of persona ideas-it was all on the surface-though I should say it was known before that time that man had a shadow.
But the nineteenth century began to forget it because the intellect became so all-powerful through the development of science and technique; consciousness attained to such autonomy that it really could walk off the earth and leave the shadow behind ape a sort of perfect man with perfect ideas-until that whole fantastical show broke down utterly with the world war.
But to the people of that time it was a valid psychology.
Mrs. Jung: Then I also wanted to point out that it appears to be somewhat prophetic, as in Germany now friendship between men plays such a role.
Prof. Jung: Yes, it looks exactly as if Nietzsche had anticipated a great deal of the future of his people, and that he faced problems which were the problems of his nation.
It is a most remarkable characteristic of modern German psychology that the Puer Aeternus motif plays a much greater role than the anima.
Very characteristic literary manifestations have appeared representing both kinds of psychology.
In the West, Benoit’s L’Atlantide is the most conspicuous example of anima stories, but there are lots of others, such as Rider Haggard’s in the English language.
There are certain anima figures in German literature naturally, but none is any way comparable to the English or French examples.
But one finds there very conspicuous examples of the Puer Aeternus psychology-Das Reich Ohne Raum, the kingdom without space, by Goetz, is the most characteristic one I have come across.
Then that psychology is marvelously organized in the school of Stefan George, the poet, which is imbued with a kind of homosexuality.
For the Puer Aeternus always contains homosexuality, real or imaginary: it is the psychology of the enterprising youth.
The woman only plays a role as wife and mother and appears to be thoroughly unproblematic.
While in the West woman is most problematic, and the friendship between men seems to have attained the unproblematic level-I mean as a social phenomenon, not as a personal problem or phenomenon.
Miss Wolff I think many women have almost a Puer Aeternus psychology; they are men’s comrades or friends, but they are not women, but sort of boys.
Prof Jung: Those are more modern developments.
Miss Wolff: Yes, there is a great difference between the women in the time of Nietzsche and women of today.
Mrs. Sigg: It seems to me that Nietzsche had very good friends, at least until he was thirty-five. He wrote Zarathustra in ’83, which was before his friendship with Peter Gast, when of course he was in a terrible state of mind. But before that his relation was very good with Overbeck, and with the two friends of his youth, Wilhelm Pinder and Gustave Krug.
Prof. Jung: If you study those friendships carefully you will see that they were very far away; they wrote nice letters to each other.
Overbeck always handled Nietzsche with gloves; I knew him.
He was a typical, refined historian, a very learned man, and in all his ways exceedingly
polite and careful not to touch anything that was hot; he appreciated the great genius in Nietzsche, but the man Nietzsche he handled most carefully.
Of course Nietzsche called anybody a great friend of his, and people were very polite naturally, but they could not touch him.
For instance, I knew a man whom Nietzsche considered one of his great friends.
He was a professor of internal medicine, a highly educated man, very musical, and Nietzsche would often go to his house-one never knew exactly when; he would appear suddenly and sit down at the piano and play for hours on end.
He spoke to nobody and nobody could speak a word to him.
And then he went away and said what a nice evening it had been.
Exactly like those two men from the Canton Grison who had not seen one another for twenty years: they said, “Ciao” and made a movement suggesting that they might go to the inn, so they had their wine together and stayed until twelve o’clock, speaking not a word, till when they left one could not help saying, “Wasn’t it a nice evening?”
So if you surrounded Nietzsche with care and let him enjoy himself, you were a great friend, but woe unto you if you had some impulse of your own.
Overbeck was really a loyal friend: he went to Turin when he heard that Nietzsche had gone over the border and fetched him back to Basel; he was the only one who took any care of him.
But in his personal relation I am quite certain that he had to be very careful with him.
So I think those good friendships are doubtful though there was a great deal of appreciation.
Prof. Fierz: It is said that Nietzsche’s psychology is expressive of his time, and I suppose Richard Wagner’s was also.
He ruined his milliner, did not pay his debts to Meyerbeer, wrote a most impertinent letter when he wanted his five hundred francs.
He was the Superman and he was a most disagreeable fellow.
Prof Jung: Oh yes. For instance, when he invited friends, they had to bring the wine, and woe unto them if they did not.
And he adorned himself-had a long correspondence with a milliner in Vienna about
pink silk ribbons for his nightgown.
You know, when Wagner was composing that aria where young Siegfried is forging his sword with a hammer and anvil, he was sitting in his study on silk cushions with millions of ribbons, in a silk dressing gown and a velvet cap.
The air was filled with perfumes and he was adorned exactly like a woman, the most grotesque sight you could imagine.
That was his reality, he was completely identical with the anima, he was a transvestite which means a man who conceals himself in women’s clothes, enjoying playing the role of a woman.
There is no English term for that I think.?
Prof. Fierz: In an article published in Basel about five years ago, it was said that over his bed in Paris Wagner had a silk canopy with roses and a mirror in which he could look at himself. And he never paid for it; Meyerbeer had to pay for it. Then five weeks later Wagner wrote Das Judentum in der Musik.
Prof Jung: Isn’t that marvelous?
Well, Nietzsche also had a peculiar mannerism: he sort of imagined himself a lord.
You see, in those days it was thought that all Englishmen who came to Switzerland were
lords, and that they always wore grey top hats and grey gloves and spats and so on.
Also they usually wore a veil round the hat to denote that they were travelling and apt to get suddenly into a tropical climate; and they were always queer-nobody could understand them.
That is the way Central Europe understood the psychology of the English race; very few people could speak English then.
So Nietzsche walked about in Basel with a grey top hat.
He did not wear a veil, but otherwise he was a complete English gentleman from the storybook, a perfectly ridiculous sight.
That was adorning himself!
For nobody in Basel ever dreamt of walking about like that.
It was the time when they had very sloppy neckties and collars and horrible trousers like accordions. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 619-637
