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In this book, the Greater Personality is the figure of Zarathustra, the reincarnation of the ancient prophet. And this figure announces a new morality and a whole new worldview. What he announces in truth is the harbinger of depth psychology. Zarathustra is an absolutely remarkable psychological document.
The way he describes the collective Shadow of modern man is breathtaking. It abounds in brilliant psychological truths, but it’s also a dangerous poison. It can make you sick. I cannot read very much of Zarathustra; it makes me ill--literally.
Because its transcendent insights have not been assimilated by the whole man, that makes them evil and destructive. And they can kill. But that’s the nature of the Greater Personality. That’s what it is! That’s why we talk about wounding. It doesn’t exist within the categories of the Ego, of human decency. It bursts those categories on both sides—on the good side and on the evil side. But as a phenomenon it’s absolutely remarkable.
Many of the ideas that we’re familiar with from Jungian Psychology show up in Nietzsche. For instance, I’m going to read you a short section, which is an explicit description of the Self. See if you don’t agree this sounds familiar. This comes from Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part I Section 4:
“I, you say, and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not want to have faith; your body and its great reason. That does not say I; that does I. What the sense feels, what the spirit knows never has an end in itself. But sense and spirit would persuade you that they are the end of all things. That’s how vain they are.
“Instruments and toys are sense and spirit, behind them still lies the Self. The Self also seeks with the eyes of the senses; it also listens with the ears of the spirit. Always the Self listens and speaks. It compares; overpowers, conquers; destroys. It controls. And it is control of the Ego too! Behind your thoughts and feelings my brother there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage whose name is Self. In your body he dwells. He is your body. There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom, and who knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom.
“Your Self laughs at your Ego; that is its bold leaps. “What are these leaps and flights of thoughts to me?” It says to itself; “A detour to my end. I am the leading strains of the Ego and the prompter of its concepts. The Self says to the Ego, “Feel pain here.” Then the Ego suffers and thinks how it might suffer no more. And that is why it’s made to think. The Self says to the Ego, “Feel pleasure here.” Then the Ego is pleased and thinks how it might often be pleased again. And that is why it is made to think.”
You see, Nietzsche was an intuitive type; Intuitive and how! Has the Self affiliated with the inferior function, namely Sensation, which is represented by the body. So the Self is the body to him. That’s generally true of Intuitives. If you look around at your friends who are particularly interested in bodywork, they’re almost all Intuitives. We Sensation types don’t have to pay much attention to the body. We don’t have to deify it. [Think of the significance of the Type Theory here—MBTI.]
But the remarkable point in this account is the explicit description of the Self as a second center of the personality. And as a center that is super ordinate to the Ego. Nietzsche knows that about the Self only because he’s had the experience. It wasn’t all assimilated at the time he wrote it, but he had the experience.
It did get assimilated in the mental hospital. That’s the great worth of the posthumous document; it demonstrates that.
I want to put in a few words of homage to Nietzsche. I see him as a martyr in the cause of emerging depth psychology. If one reads him carefully, one gets definite hints that he deliberately chose the way of inflation, in order to find out what lies on the other side.
He was a man of immense psychological courage—immense psychological rashness more than courage, but courage too. Although he was pushed over the brink of psychosis by syphilitic brain disease, in some sense he also seemed to choose it. Here’s what he says in his posthumous autobiography:
“The legend makers saw Empeticles [sp?] plunging into the belching flames of Etna. But this fate was reserved not for the great pre-Socratic, but for me alone. Having been separated from the love of my life, Lou Salome, the love that made me human, I made my desperate plunge into the fires of madness hoping like Zarathustra to snatch faith in myself by going out of my mind and entering a higher region of sanity; the sanity of the raving lunatic, the normal madness of the damned.”
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And in the same posthumous work, Nietzsche writes these moving words from his room in the madhouse:
“Is my honor lost because women have betrayed me to weakness? Or I have betrayed my own strength seeking the power of true knowledge, which alone can save us from approaching doom? Am I completely damned because I am crushed beneath the Athenian dead on the plain of Marathon? Let Demosthenes, the eloquent defender of Athenian honor, deliver his funeral oration over me.
“No you have not failed Frederick Nietzsche. There are noble defeats as there are noble deaths, and you have died nobly. No you have not failed. I swear it by the dead on the plain of Marathon.” [This brings tears to my eyes.]
I think now with this final work of Nietzsche’s available to us we can see that life in its entirety as a heroic tragedy—a sacrifice which inaugurated the age of depth psychology and which first brought the Greater Personality to the awareness of modern man. And after Nietzsche’s experience, the way was now prepared for Jung.
So, in conclusion, you will have noticed and it’s surely significant that three of the cases I have discussed are to be found in the scriptures of three of the worlds great religions. And there was a fourth example, that was not discussed, that of Moses and El Kidr, which is found in the Holy Book of Islam.
What this indicates is that the experience of the Greater Personality is of such numinosity that it sometimes might bring into being a whole new religion. But now for the first time, in what I would call the Jungian era, we are in a position to begin to understand scientifically and generally these psychological entities, which generate religions. This influx of new knowledge is pouring into the modern Psyche. Of course it pours into individuals first of all, but it’s also pouring into the modern Psyche as a collective entity. And this influx creates both a great opportunity and a great danger. It’s as if collectively we’re are about to encounter the Greater Personality, which as Jung says can make life flow into that greater life, BUT WHICH IS ALSO A MOMENT OF DEADLIEST PERIL.
It seems to me that our best chance to be spared a collective catastrophe resides in the possibility that enough people will have individual conscious encounters with the Greater Personality, and thereby will contribute to the process of immunizing the body social against a mass atheistic inflation
If each individual can work toward that end by diligently assimilating his projections, and seeking his own individual encounter, then he will contribute to that immunizing process. To the extent that it can take place in the arena of the individual psyche, it will not have to take place in that dreadful arena of the collective psyche. In the words of Jung, with which close, he says this in ¶512 of Mysterium Coniunctionis,
“One must celebrate a last supper with oneself, and eat his own flesh and drink his own blood. Which means that he must accept the Other in himself. Is this perhaps the meaning of Christ’s teaching, that each must bear his own cross? For if you have to endure yourself, how will you be able to rend others also?”
Thank you! [1:21:36 of the audio.]
Questions and Answers:
1. I have already had the question asked 3 times, so I’d better address myself to it. One person formulated it this way. There are no women on your list. Is that because their documents do not exist? How would it be different for a woman to encounter the Greater Personality?
--Well, I haven’t thought this through very much, but several women immediately come to mind, so I’ll mention them as examples. In Greek Myth of course there are a number of examples of the feminine encounter with the deity. Outstanding examples are Semele, the mother of Dionysus; Danae the mother of Perseus; Mary’s encounter with the angel of the Annunciation is another example.
--I haven’t thought this through so it’s something we can all reflect on. It’s my impression that when the feminine entity has the encounter with the Greater Personality has somewhat different quality to it. We don’t hear about wrestling. Sometimes we hear about fleeing. But we don’t hear about wrestling. [Is this a masculine/feminine distinction for the flight or fight instinct?]
--Certainly wounding may be a part of it, when the feminine entity is the operative one. An outstanding example is Semele, who through her own insistence, but also she was goaded by Hera into it, so it’s not only the Ego, it’s an archetypal that goads him into a stupid action. Semele insists on Zeus appearing to her in his full glory, and she was consumed by the fire that the lightning created.
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--In the mythological material, whether it is a feminine figure or masculine figure that encounters the Greater Personality, I don’t think should be too rigorously translated into the experience of women and men specifically. You must remember that each individual as a masculine/feminine components—this is one of the pairs of opposites. To the extent that we are dealing with authentic Individuation symbolism, then the question of is it a man or is it a woman recedes in importance, because one is holding both the opposites.
--We’re living in a time when women are realizing their need to realize adequately their feminine reality, their feminine dimension, and therefore are seeking models and images and myths, which speak to the feminine experience. That is all appropriate, but strictly speaking that does not refer to the Individuation process; that speaks to a prelude to the Individuation process. But certainly there are examples of feminine figures having that encounter, and there are a lot more. And of course the Homeric Psyche story is a splendid example too, not to mention Hades and Persephone.
2. Is the Self personal or impersonal? Such questions are not answered theoretically; they’re answered experientially on the basis of what the accumulated data indicates, and the accumulated data indicates that it’s both. It’s personal and its impersonal. In individual cases, one or the other might predominate. In cases where the Ego is very much in need of succor, sustenance, the personal aspects of the Self might take special prominence. One sees that phenomenon, for example, with the birth of Christianity. The image of the Christian God that emerges is a loving, personal God, but that is not the whole picture of the psychological entity. It’s one part of it. So that what emerges from the unconscious tends to compensate the conscious situation, and what tends to be evoked is what’s needed, or what’s being reflected.
3. Regarding the use of the term “Jungian,” wouldn’t “Jungian” refer to the psychology of Carl Jung the man? The Ego self of Carl Jung the man doesn’t strike me that we should concentrate on that. Would you shed some light on that.
--No. No light. I’ll let that stand as a comment. I won’t say anything about it.
4. On immunization of the social body by the Individuation of many individuals:
--If I had a blackboard I’d try to illustrate what I mean. I would draw on the blackboard a great circle, and then at the circumference of that circle I would draw a lot of little tiny circles, each of which intersected by the great circle. Some of them are a little more below the line and some a little above the line to illustrate different levels of consciousness. I would use that image to visualize for you how I perceive the nature of the collective psyche.
--It is made up of the sum total of individual human psyches, and we are all therefore connected by virtue of our lower psychological depths with the collective psyche and with each other individual in that collective psyche. We are all part of the larger organism. That can be demonstrated. It’s not very difficult. You only need for someone to run into this room under the influence of some intense affect and we’ll all have it. We may not all act on it, but we’ll all have it. We’ll all feel it. It demonstrates the fact that we are all cells of one great organism.
--We’re affected not only by things we’re conscious of but we’re affected by things we are not conscious of. If someone on the other side of the planet is having some serious affect, it might show up in our dreams, for instance. So this is what the nature of the collective psyche is. Once you see it – as I describe it to you it probably sounds like a theory, but you have a body of experience it’s not a theory any more it’s a fact. And once that is recognized as a fact then it’s evident that the way one – if one hopes to do anything at all to alter the great collective organism, he has to do it by cultivating that part of the collective psyche that is available to him, and that’s his own psyche. It’s not somebody else’s psyche it is his own psyche. And as you cultivate that little spot of land that is your own, you are influencing infinitesimally the greater organism.
5. What’s the importance of the Ego? The Ego is the carrier of consciousness, and to the extent that consciousness is valuable in a cosmic sense, and it is, supremely valuable, it requires an Ego to manifest—to be the vessel to carry it.
6. Jung faced the Greater Self and remained sane, but Nietzsche went insane. Do you have any idea why Nietzsche went insane but Jung didn’t?
--Yes, I do have an idea. Do you want me to tell it? [Laughter]
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--They both had the experience of the encounter with the Greater Personality, with the overwhelming archetypal psyche. Jung integrated his experience, and Nietzsche during his working life didn’t, as I suggested, he did integrate it in my opinion in his final silent last years. But as far as his known experience is concerned it was not integrated, but Jung integrated it.
--What does it mean to integrate it? It means to having achieved a sizeable enough Ego that it doesn’t drown. The way you can tell it’s drowned is when one lives and functions and speaks in a non-human way. When he’s lost his limited human dimensions. And we all have a good instinct to tell us when we encounter that sort of thing. You don’t have to learn it with your head. An instinct tells you! There’s something that smells bad. When Jung read Nietzsche he knew right away. “It’s morbid.”
And when you’re in good connection with your instinct, when you read Thus Spake Zarathustra, and you feel sick, you know there’s something wrong. Of course, if you’re not in good touch with your instinct, then you won’t. But we’ve got built in the equipment about what’s good for us and what’s poisonous. The difference is the development of the Ego that’s able to have the experience and relate to it without identifying with it. If one succeeds in that, then one becomes an initiated one when one comes; one becomes a privileged participant in a level of the psyche that isn’t generally available. One doesn’t go around spouting out that fact, because preaching about it is just an expression of the identification with it.
7. Speaking about drug and alcohol addiction. It’s a concrete misapplication of the hunger for connection with the autonomous psyche.
8. Could you give an example of the violation of the Shadow? Let’s talk about Nietzsche. Someone has brought up that event in his life where he had the image of a toad on his hand, that he was obliged to eat. You get a variation of that in Zarathustra where a snake crawled into the mouth of the shepherd. Jung’s thought about that was that it was probably an image of his syphilis that needed to be assimilated. My notion is that it was probably an image of his incest experience that needed to be assimilated.
There’s a lot of talk in Zarathustra of what Nietzsche calls “the ugliest man.” In Zarathustra the ugliest man is rejected. He isn’t accepted. So Nietzsche is an excellent example of the very question, because he did not at least in his working life. That’s what makes this final document so important. It redeemed him psychologically, but it damned him philosophically, so the philosophers will have nothing to do with it. But it redeemed him psychologically. But so far as his working is concerned, he did not assimilate the Shadow. He committed a crime against the Shadow; he was inflated; horribly inflated. You read such things as Ecce Homo and you’re shocked. And therefore the vengeance of the Self has destructive effect. That’s the first example that comes to me on that question. [My personal image of a small evil train coming toward me on the bed at nap time—very fearful—when I was 4 or 5? This comes to mind.]
9. Jacob and Paul were assimilated. Nietzche is the modern example. I think of Nietzsche and Jung like Saul and David. Saul was the first king of the Hebrew kingdom and he was a failure. He was rejected by God and the spirit of God was taken away from him. David was given; he couldn’t do anything wrong. That’s an archetype that Saul-David conjunction. Nietzsche-Jung combination is somewhat analogous.
