“[W]e shall draw on the insights found in Jung’s Seminar on Zarathustra (1934-39), which despite being (or perhaps because it is) incomplete, stands as a major exercise in the analysis of Nietzsche’s work; an exercise which has been recognized as ‘legendary’ by Katharina Grätz in her own recent volumes on Zarathustra in the Nietzsche-Kommentar, even if one might take issue with her description of Jung’s reading of Zarathustra as ‘not searching for philosophical insight, but trying to break down residues of the collective unconscious in analytical interpretations.’⁹
After many years when it was only available in typoscript volumes to readers undergoing Jungian analysis or training, the notes of the Seminar were finally published in 1989 in two volumes edited by James L. Jarrett (1917-2015), Professor of the Philosophy of Education at the University of California, Berkeley; and subsequently in an Abridged Edition in 1998. (This Abridged Edition makes a good starting point for anyone wishing to explore the seminars, although some significant passages were, for one reason or another, omitted from it.) The reluctance to publish the Seminar on Zarathustra made it almost as well-kept a secret as Jung’s Red Book, which itself was not published until 2009 (and in a Reader’s Edition in 2012). Now that The Red Book has been published, the relative lack of attention (within and outside the Jungian community) which the Zarathustra Seminar has since received—albeit with notable exceptions—means that, in some respects, it is more of a secret than ever, and it remains a remarkable study of an even more remarkable work which has itself the notion of the secret at its very core.¹⁰”
⁹ NK 4/1, 53. [NK, 4/1 and 4/2 = Katharina Grätz, Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Also sprach Zarathustra” I und II and Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Also sprach Zarathustra” III und IV [Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vols. 4/1 and 4/2] (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2024).]
¹⁰ For a fuller discussion of the Seminar, see Paul Bishop, Jung’s Seminar on Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra”: Birth of an Archetypal Hermeneutics (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
~Paul Bishop, Ph.D., Jung and the Epic of Transformation, Volume 3: Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and the Challenge of Transformation, pp. xxii-xxiii
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