Summary
Carl Gustav Jung: Nietzsche's Zarathustra Volume I
Seminar held 1934 - 1939 Volume I (May 1934 - March 1935) In May 1934, at the Psychological Club in Zurich, Dr. Jung began a seminar on Nietzsche's work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His listeners – about eighty men and women of different nationalities and professions, doctors, analysts, students in training – insisted that his topic be exactly that author and that very work. The moment in which the seminar was held - those five years between 1934 and 1939 in which Jung "wrestled and danced" with Nietzsche's enigmatic book - will prove to be tragic for European civilization. It was held in English, recorded and initially transcribed for internal use only. It will not appear in print until 1988, without losing any of its original liveliness. As a young man growing up around Basel, Jung was fascinated and moved by stories of Nietzsche's genius, eccentricity, and eventual descent into lifelong psychosis. The four volumes of these seminars (of which this is only the first part) reveal the fruits of his youthful curiosity: Nietzsche's works, which he read as a student at the University of Basel, left a deep impression on him and never ceased to influence his thought. Here we see Jung - a mature man who talks about a thinker whose works not only overwhelmed him with a depth of understanding of human nature, but were also the philosophical source of his numerous psychological and metapsychological ideas. He succeeds in showing how the exceptional book Thus Spoke Zarathustra simultaneously illuminates Nietzsche's genius, as well as his neurotic and psychotic tendencies. Considering that during the seminar, no one even dreamed that the notes from it would be published, Jung made jokes, spoke "without a hair on his tongue" about people and events that irritate and anger him, and without hesitation commented on the political, economic and social events of his time.
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