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  • The Dionysian Self: C. G. Jung's Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Adrian Del Caro
Paul Bishop , The Dionysian Self: C. G. Jung's Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995, reprint 2010. xvi + 427 pp. ISBN: 3-11-014709-2. Hardcover, $280.

This reprinting of Paul Bishop's 1995 doctoral dissertation is a welcome event in Nietzsche circles, and I hope it will be viewed with the gravity it deserves in Jung circles as well, since part of Bishop's purpose is "to return Jung to a tradition of intellectual debate from which, very often thanks to his followers, he has been excluded" (1). The gain here redounds equally to Nietzsche and Jung readers, because specialists in the respective camps could use a better understanding of the intellectual-historical legacy assimilated by these thinkers. Jung's background in Romantic Naturphilosophie (7), his perception of a "continuous tradition within German literature and philosophy" that runs through Romanticism and idealism (138), his place within the "Romantic yearning for the return of Dionysos" as it is manifested in Hölderlin, Schelling, Creuzer, the Schlegels, Goethe, and Bachofen (369-72), and his ultimate engagement with Nietzsche as the "apogee of post-Enlightenment thought" (378) position him as arguably the most consequential Nietzschean of the twentieth century and, if Jung himself is to be believed, as the first successful Dionysian. Bishop demonstrates as clearly as anyone I have read that Nietzschean notions of the self are in fact notions of a Dionysian self, paradoxical as it sounds given that "self" is supposed to align with the Apollinian. Bishop's elevation of Dionysian selfhood in Jung sheds light on the Dionysian contribution to modernity, especially as it bears on styles and notions of creativity. For those of us who have tried to elaborate on Nietzsche's understanding of the "Dionysian philosopher," Bishop's approach imparts depth to Nietzsche's project by reframing the discussion as "Dionysian self."

The power of myth as represented by Goethe, Nietzsche, and Jung in particular had been well formulated by the Jungian Joseph Campbell, whose work on myths became widely known through the media of print and television (14). The neo-Jungian James Hillman meanwhile "takes the figure of Dionysos to represent an act of psychic recuperation of lost powers and potential, now rendered available for use" (19). Hillman's sense of the Dionysian aligns very closely with Goethe's in Faust, which some regard as an experiment in rolling back misogyny and repositioning the corporeal and the spiritual with respect to the earth—and indeed Jung, more than anyone else, recognized the kinship between Faust and Zarathustra as "extraverted" works. Bishop demonstrates the validity of the triad Goethe, Nietzsche, Jung, even as he qualifies Jung's claims or aspirations to be a kind of "superior" or "successful" Nietzsche on the basis of a successful integration of the Dionysian (80). After all, Nietzsche had syphilis to contend with, unlike Goethe and Jung, and ultimately madness as well—for someone who virtually brought Dionysus back to life for moderns, these tragic aspects are simultaneously a blessing and a curse. The centrality of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Jung to modern thought rests on a Dionysian foundation. Jung had to learn to accept the Dionysian as a positive force, and the transformation in his thinking is apparent in the shift from a negative view of Dionysus in Psychologische Typen (1921) to a positive one in "Psychologie und Dichtung" (1930). Bishop attributes this shift to Jung's increased interest in the Dionysian that grew out of seminars he gave between 1925 and 1936 (167). Moreover, the Dionysian foundation includes the Apollo-Dionysus polarity. Bishop explains how Goethe and Schelling worked with the terms "systole" and "diastole" as cosmological principles, which Jung then adapted to psychological principles. Diastole, for example, "is associated with the extraverted standpoint, which subordinates the subject to the [End Page 373] object" (140). Hence Zarathustra is an extraverted work according to Jung because it is diastolic in nature; he draws on Goethe here to formulate a method for discussing the psychological attributes of Apollo and Dionysus (140).

Perhaps the most consequential adaptation of Dionysian and Nietzschean material emerges in Jung...

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