Jung put off the reading of Nietzsche for years, apprehensive lest he and Nietzsche prove frighteningly alike. Finally, Jung got up his courage in his medical school days and plunged in. It was, he said, “a tremendous experience.” In 1934 he began a five-year seminar devoted to a psychological commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra; now he as able to analyze this complex man in detail, exposing alike his undoubted genius and the tendencies toward inflation that foreshadowed his psychic collapse at the age of forty-four. This lecture will reveal important respects in which Nietzsche was a pioneer in “the discovery of the Unconscious”, with particular reference to affinities between his philosophy and Jungian psychology.

Related Workshop: Jung and Nietzsche

James L. Jarrett, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Philosophy of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, began his teaching career in Utah as a high school English teacher. In addition to his long tenure at U.C. Berkeley, he also taught at Columbia University, Colorado College, and Western Washington College (now University), where he served as president for five years. On Fulbright and other leaves he taught briefly in Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Utah and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, always concentrating on philosophy with particular attention paid to aesthetics.

His publications include Language and Informal Logic, The Humanities and Humanistic Education, The Quest for Beauty, and The Teaching of Values: Caring and Appreciation. For the last forty years he has published many works in Jungian journals and lectured on Jungian topics in cities across the United States, including Little Rock (his birthplace), and often in London and Küsnacht-Zürich. He recently edited both the two-volume and abridged versions of Jung’s seminar on Nietzsche’s ZARATHUSTRA for Princeton University Press.