I’ve learned an awful lot from Jung. I feel I have an immense debt of gratitude to him, in that way, in that, if you read Jung, you’re really getting a little education in itself. What Jung is trying to do is to reinvest that notion of redemption with meaning. Not in a way that abandons its theological term, but to make it meaningful: an existential redemption in a world where God is dead.”
Paul Bishop is a renowned British scholar who has spent the last twenty-five years researching and writing on the foundational relationship between C.G Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche and Johann Wolfgang Goethe. In this episode, we dive into Jung’s relationship to both these figures but with a special emphasis on the latter and the legend Faust as an archetypal motif.
Goethe’s Faust struck a chord in Jung and its foundational story when trying to understand Jung’s own inner struggles, motivations, creative contributions, and wrestling with the religious question. We explore an “Imitatio Fausti” in contrast to an “Imitatio Christi” and the seeking for psychological transformation. How the question of finding redemption in a secularized world is portrayed in the story Faust, and transmitted through Jung’s life and psychology.
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Books by Paul Bishop on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Paul-Bishop/e/B001HD3FWE/
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Biography
Paul Bishop teaches German at the University of Glasgow. Following the publication of The Dionysian Self: C.G Jung’s reception for Friedrich Nietzsche, he has written various books and articles on Jung’s intellectual affinities with Weimar Classicism, German philosophy and literature.
He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and he is currently William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages at the University of Glasgow. His books examine the history of ideas and the histories of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, with particular emphasis on Nietzsche, C.G. Jung, and Ludwig Klages. He has edited Companion volumes for Camden House on Goethe’s “Faust”, Parts One and Two; and on the life and works of Nietzsche.
Music played in this episode:
‘One has another’ and ‘Blue Violets’ by Ketsa. Licensed under creativecommons.org by NC-ND 4.0.