Nietzsche made far greater use of the intuitive source and in so
doing freed himself from the body of the intellect
INTRODUCTION
In the Spring of 1934, Dr. C. G. Jung brought to a conclusion a seminar at the Zurich Psychological Club which had been running since October 1930.
The subject matter with which Jung and his studentspracticing analysts, those training to be analysts, and selected analysands-had engaged themselves was visions, more especially the remarkable painted visions of an American woman, Christiana Morgan.
As this final term drew to a close, the question arose as to what the next seminar should center upon, for by now the importance-almost the necessity-of such a lecture/discussion series was well established.
Before Visions, there had been the Dreams Seminar, and so on back to 923-perhaps even earlier-whenJung started this kind of teaching for a very particular audience.
In 1934 the group apparently had little hesitation in deciding upon Nietzsche as their new topic, and more particularly Nietzsche’s strange and wonderful Thus Spake Zarathustra.
And so it was that when the group, some of whom had dropped out and been replaced by others, convened in May, it was to hear their mentor’s warning that they all had an uphill and rocky path before them, for not only was Nietzsche’s mind highly convoluted and devious, but his Zarathustra particularly so, with a style invented for this very purpose-whatever that was!
But nothing daunted, they set to, and as in previous seminars, the excitement grew as their leader (who loved mountains) began to ready them for ajourney that was destined to end before its natural culmination, drowned out by the alarms of
war as the fateful summer of 1939 approached.
By this time another feature of the seminars was also familiar: the recording of the lectures and discussions.
A professional secretary had been engaged to take notes, which in turn were edited by Mary Foote with the help of various members of the group, virtually all of whom
were taking their own notes.
Bound multigraphed copies of these notes were then made available to the participants, and to others associated with Analytical Psychology, but each “volume” bore a warning that the report was intended for the exclusive use of “members of the Seminar with the understanding that it is not to be loaned and that no part of it is to be copied or quoted for publication without Prof. J ung’s
written permission.”
An important reason for this restriction was undoubtedly Jung’s not having edited the notes, at least not beyond giving a quick run-through and answers to questions Miss Foote had, perhaps about a proper name not caught by the secretary.
But for all the explicit prohibition, copies were made, and the multigraphed copies began to appear in cities all over the world, especially where C. G. Jung Institutes were established, for the word got out that here was something special-indeed,
unique.
For those who had never been present at a lecture, these typescripts afforded an opportunity to get acquainted with Professor Jung, speaking extemporaneously and with considerable informality, fielding questions and observations (by persons who were in most instances themselves highly intelligent and knowledgeable students of
human nature), not worrying if the discussion meandered some distance from the main path, offering suggestions for further reading, alluding to contemporary political and economic happenings, telling jokes.
In 1957 Jung gave permission for “going public,” and the appearance in 1984 of Dream Analysis, edited by William McGuire, inaugurated a project to publish most of J ung’s seminar notes. 1
Jung’s recommendation to the Seminar of the Nietzsche text would have been no surprise to those who knew him well.
Already in his early works, Jung had discussed Nietzsche, and most of his associates must have heard him attest to the importance this German philosopherpoet-
psychologist had had for his own intellectual coming-of-age.
In the chapter “Student Days” of his autobiography,Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
we readJung’s account of how in medical school, he’d had to curtail his philosophical readings:
The clinical semesters that followed kept me so busy that scarcely any time remained for my forays into outlying fields.
I was able to study Kant only on Sundays.
I also read Eduard von Hartmann [famous then for his Philosophy of the Unconscious] assiduously.
Nietzsche had been on my program for some time, but I hesitated to begin reading him because I felt I was insufficiently prepared. 2
At that time he was much discussed, mostly in adverse terms, by the allegedly competent philosophy students, from which I was able to deduce the hostility he aroused in the higher echelons.
The supreme authority, of course, was Jakob Burckhardt, whose various critical comments on Nietzsche were bandied about.
Moreover, there were some persons at the university who had known Nietzsche personally and were able to retail all sorts of unflattering tidbits about him. (p. 1 o 1/ 105)
All of this whetted Jung’s appetite, and yet he “was held back by a secret fear that I might perhaps be like him” (p. 102/ 105).
Still, curiosity got the better of him and he plunged with enthusiasm into the early collection of essays called Thoughts Out of Season (or Untimely Meditations) and then on to Zarathustra, which “like Goethe’s Faust, was a tremendous experience for me.”
Yet there remained the feeling that this was very dangerous territory, from which he retreated to the safer ground of empirical studies.
Medical school completed, he had gone to Zurich’s Burgholtzli Hospital as resident psychiatrist.
Then came the historic meeting with Freud. Jung must have been surprised at this well-read man’s admission that he had never read Nietzsche.
Indeed this seems to have planted in the younger man’s mind the seed of suspicion, one that grew into a later conviction, that Freud’s heavy emphasis upon eros and his neglect of the power drive could be better stated as “Freud versus Nietzsche” than as “Freud versus Adler” (MDR. p. 1531I5o).
After the break with Freud in 1913 and during the enforced isolation of the war years, Jung began a closer reading of Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, Genealogy of Morals, and of course Zarathustra.
Now he was even more strongly impressed with how powerfully Nietzsche’s case illustrated his own growing understanding that one’s most basic beliefs have their roots in personality and in turn one can discover much about an author’s own personality from his writings.
In Psychological Types (I 921) he recognized Nietzsche as a highly introverted
intuitive, with a strongly developed thinking function, but with serious weaknesses in sensation and feeling. In contrast to the intellectualistic Bergson, Jung wrote,
Nietzsche made far greater use of the intuitive source and in so doing freed himself from the body of the intellect in shaping his philosophical ideas …. If one can speak of an intuitive method at all, Zarathustra is in my view the best example of it, and at the same time a vivid illustration of how the problem can be grasped in a
non-intellectual and yet philosophical way. (CW 6, par. 540)
~James Jarret, Zarathustra Seminar, Introduction, Page ix-xi
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