Reading Goethe At Midlife

This book explores the history of the idea of the midlife crisis, using the writings of C.G. Jung and Goethe to investigate its relevance for today. Tracing how “the ages of humankind” became “the stages of life” in which the midlife crisis represents a pivotal moment, Paul Bishop offers a detailed analysis of a paper by Jung on this subject. He then shifts the focus to Goethe’s interest in Orphic wisdom, and one of Goethe’s major later poems, “Primal Words. Orphic” (Urworte Orphisch). Using Jungian ideas to explore the psychological implications of this poem, Bishop draws on Goethe’s own commentary, and other background material, to uncover its vital message. Reading Goethe at Midlife reveals the remarkable symmetry between the ideas and Jung and Goethe. Jung’s analysis of the stages of life, and his advice to heed the “call of the self,” are brought into the conjunction with Goethe’s emphasis on the importance of hope, showing an underlying continuity of thought and relevance from ancient wisdom, via German classicism to analytical psychology. At a time when many Jungians are turning to neuroscience to provide an external underpinning for Analytical Psychology, this scholarly book is very welcome: it returns to psychology’s home territory, placing Jung firmly in a long cultural tradition. Impressively well-read in many fields extending from literature and the history of ideas to psychoanalysis and Jungian studies, Paul Bishop allows a text by Jung and a late poem by Goethe to mirror and enhance each other, demonstrating Jung's intellectual proximity to the tradition of German classicism. The wealth of “amplifications” that Bishop brings to the many themes treated allows us to experience a living reality—a continuity of ideas across different times and cultures.

This book explores the history of the idea of the midlife crisis, using the writings of C.G. Jung and Goethe to investigate its relevance for today. Tracing how "the ages of humankind" became "the stages of life" in which the midlife crisis represents a pivotal moment, Paul Bishop offers a detailed analysis of a paper by Jung on this subject. He then shifts the focus to Goethe's interest in Orphic wisdom, and one of Goethe's major later poems, "Primal Words. Orphic" (Urworte Orphisch). Using Jungian ideas to explore the psychological implications of this poem, Bishop draws on Goethe's own commentary, and other background material, to uncover its vital message. Reading Goethe at Midlife reveals the remarkable symmetry between the ideas and Jung and Goethe. Jung's analysis of the stages of life, and his advice to heed the "call of the self," are brought into the conjunction with Goethe's emphasis on the importance of hope, showing an underlying continuity of thought and relevance from ancient wisdom, via German classicism to analytical psychology. Table of Contents List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Preface to the second edition PART ONE Chapter 1: The Stages of Life and the Midlife Crisis: A Brief History of an Idea Two Visual Starting Points - From the Ages of Humankind... ...to the Stages of Life -- The Stages of Life: An Idea Comes of Age - The Midlife Crisis - Walter B. Pitkin and Edmund Bergler - Erik H. Erikson and Elliott Jaques - Gail Sheehy and Daniel J. Levinson - Other Approaches, Including the Return of the Noonday Demon - Jungian Approaches to Midlife - Literature of the Nineties - Recent French Approaches: Éric Deschavanne and Pierre-Henri Tavoillot, Marie de Hennezel and Bertrand Vergely Chapter 2: The Turning Point in Life: What Conflict the Sun Must Experience at Midday! PART TWO Chapter 3: Goethe's Orphism The Cult of Orpheus - Orpheus in the Age of Romanticism - Goethe's Relation to the Orphic Mysteries - Creuzer and Hermann, Zoega and Welcker - Faust as Orpheus - Orphism, and Primal Words Chapter 4: Primal Words. Orphic Daimon - Chance - Eros - The Necessity of Love; or, Erotic Necessity - The Necessity of Necessity; or, Necessary Necessity - Hope - Conclusion Index

Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on Goethe and visual culture.

A new crop of essays on topics in the literature of Goethe and the Goethezeit, with a special section providing innovative readings of Goethe's lyric poetry. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 20 contains a special section on Goethe's lyric poetry with contributions from leading scholars. The essays incorporate a range of new methodologies that provide innovative readings of Goethe's most important poems, including contributions by Benjamin Bennett on Faust and Daniel Wilson on the West-östliche Divan. The volume also includesessays on Götz von Berlichingen, the Sturm-und-Drang sublime, the Nibelungenlied's place within Weltliteratur, as well as an examination of Schiller's notion of freedom. Contributors: Constantin Behler, Benjamin Bennett, Frauke Berndt, Fritz Breithaupt, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge, Andrew Erwin, Patrick Fortmann, Edgar Landgraf, Horst Lange, Charlotte Lee, Claudia Maienborn, Joseph D. O'Neil, Elizabeth Powers, Christian P. Weber, W. Daniel Wilson. Daniel Purdy is Associate Professor of German at Pennsylvania State University. Book review editor Catriona MacLeod is Associate Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania.

What are the blissful islands? And where are they? This book takes as its starting-point the chapter called ‘On the Blissful Islands’ in Part Two of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and its enigmatic conclusion: ‘The beauty of the Superman came to me as a shadow’. From this remarkable and powerful passage, it disengages the Nietzschean idea of the Superman and the Jungian notion of the shadow, moving these concepts into a new, interdisciplinary direction. In particular, On the Blissful Islands seeks to develop the kind of interpretative approach that Jung himself employed. Its chief topics are classical (the motif of the blissful islands), psychological (the shadow), and philosophical (the Übermensch or superman), blended together to produce a rich, intellectual-historical discussion. By bringing context and depth to a nexus of highly problematic concepts, it offers something new to the specialist and the general reader alike. So this book considers the significance of the statue in the culture of antiquity (and in alchemy), and investigates the associated notion of self-sculpting as a form of existential exercise. This Neoplatonic theme is pursued in relation to a poem by Schiller, at the centre of which lies the notion of self-sculpting, thus highlighting Nietzsche’s (and Jung’s) relationship to Idealism. Its conclusion directly addresses the vexed (and controversial) question of Nietzsche’s relation to Plato. This book’s main ambition is to provide a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary reading of key themes and motifs, using Jungian ideas in general (and Jung’s vast seminar on Zarathustra in particular) to uncover a dimension of deep meaning in key passages in Nietzsche. Engaging the reader directly on major existential questions, it aims to be an original, thought-provoking contribution to the history of ideas, and to show that Zarathustra was right: There still are blissful islands! This book will be stimulating reading for analytical psychologists, including those in training, and academics and scholars of Jungian studies, Nietzsche, and the history of ideas.

The meaning of life is a common concern, but what is the meaning of midlife? With the help of illustrious writers such as Dante, Montaigne, Beauvoir, Goethe, and Beckett, The Midlife Mind sets out to answer this question. Erudite but engaging, it takes a personal approach to that most impersonal of processes, aging. From the ancients to the moderns, from poets to playwrights, writers have long meditated on how we can remain creative as we move through our middle years. There are no better guides, then, to how we have regarded middle age in the past, how we understand it in the present, and how we might make it as rewarding as possible in the future.

The 74th volume of the Eranos Yearbooks, The Age of Immediacy at the Test of Meaning, presents to the public the work of the last two years of activities at the Eranos Foundation (2017–2018). The book gathers the lectures presented at the occasion of the 2017 Eranos Conference, Where is the World Going? The Uncertain Future, between Traditional Knowledge and Scientific Thought, the 2018 Eranos Conference, Space for Thinking and Thinking about Space. Reflections on the Relations between the Soul and Places at the Time of the Anthropocene, the 2017 Eranos-Jung Lectures, Who is Afraid of Interiority? A Journey through Literature, Philosophy, and Psychology, the 2018 Eranos-Jung Lectures, Who is Stealing our Time? The Age of Immediacy at the Test of Meaning, and the 2018 Eranos School seminar, The Mechanisms of Heresy: Old and New Forms of Exclusion and Repression. The volume includes essays by Valery Afanassiev, Stephen Aizenstat, Arnaldo Benini, Paul Bishop, Roberto Casati, Adriano Fabris, Franco Ferrari, Giuseppe O. Longo, Jaap Mansfeld, Panos Mantziaras, Grazia Shōgen Marchianò, Massimo Mori, Guy Pelletier, Antonio Prete, Francesca Rigotti, René Roux, Silvano Tagliagambe, Yannis Tsiomis, Amelia Valtolina, Matteo Vegetti, Antonio Vitolo, Samaneh Yasaei, and Chiara Zamboni.

Swiss-born Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was one of the pioneers of psychology, largely responsible for the introduction of now-familiar psychological terms such as “introvert,” “extrovert,” and “collective unconscious.” But in spite of this, Jung has often remained on the fringes of academic discourse. Seeking to understand Jung in view of not only his life, but also in light of his extensive reading and prolific writing, this new biography reclaims Jung as a major European thinker whose true significance has not been fully appreciated. Paul Bishop follows Jung from his early childhood to his years at the University of Basel and his close relationship—and eventual break—with Sigmund Freud. Exploring Jung’s ideas, Bishop takes up the psychiatrist’s suggestion that “the tragedies of Goethe’s Faust and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra . . . mark the first glimmerings of a breakthrough of total experience in our Western hemisphere,” engaging with Jung’s scholarship to offer one of the fullest appreciations yet of his distinctive approach to culture. Bishop also considers the role that the Red Book, written between 1914 and 1930 but not published until 2009, played in the progression of Jung’s thought, allowing Bishop to provide a new assessment of this divisive personality. Jung’s attempt to synthesize the different parts of human life, Bishop argues, marks the man as one of the most important theorists of the twentieth century. Providing a compelling examination of the life of this highly influential figure, the concise and accessible Carl Jung will find a place on the shelves of students, scholars, and both clinical and amateur psychologists alike.