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In her penetrating philosophical study of Nietzsche and Jung, Lucy Huskinson continues an enterprise that originated with the earlier works of Paul Bishop, Patricia Dixon
and Graham Parkes. Huskinson brings to explicit expression the questions that have begun to emerge for many of us who have wrestled with Nietzsche's impact as a philosopher of psyche and culture. These questions include the profound influence Nietzsche has had upon Jung's thought, and the origin and dynamics of Jung's deeply rooted ambivalence toward Nietzsche.
In her study, Huskinson follows a rigorous method of analysis which includes both the exegesis of the thought of Nietzsche and Jung as well as a thorough comparison of the two models in which Nietzsche and Jung come into a profound Auseinandersetzung with each other. In this encounter Nietzsche seems to have a slight edge because of what seems to this reader to be the author's own philosophical commitments.
Exegetically, Huskinson argues that Nietzsche's thought was organized around the questions of the opposites: their nature and dialectic as represented by the Apollinian and the Dionysian. In his early thought, Nietzsche understood the opposites as at once metaphysical, aesthetic and psychological, and later as exclusively psychological. Nietzsche envisioned the ultimate psychological unification of the opposites in a state of existential wholeness in his famous concept of the Ubermensch.
Jung also took the unification of opposites, consciousness and unconsciousness, as the task of analytical psychology. The state of wholeness in which the opposites are unified he called the Self. For Huskinson, Nietzsche's Ubermensch and Jung's Self are conceptually equivalent. Both point to a state of creative existence open primarily to the gifted few (both Nietzsche and Jung were elitists). For both thinkers, this experience of wholeness in which the opposites are united is irrational and thus ultimately beyond the reach of reason in both science and ph