• Visionary Works
• Libro Rosso
• Liber Novus
• Red Book
• Jung
• Zarathustra
• Nietzsche

C.G. Jung had a real life-long confrontation with Nietzsche's philosophy and works, above all with "Zarathustra". In particular, in 1934-1939, he gave a seminar entirely dedicated to a psychological reading of "Zarathustra". In that circumstance, however, the reading of the text came across as unusual, if compared with its contents.
In 1913, Jung went through a period of intense emotional discomfort, in which significant fantasies occurred to him. That was the beginning of his "Red Book". The text, published posthumously in 2009, displays a collection of visions (1913-1917) and comments, on which Jung kept working till 1959.
Surprisingly, among Jung's markings and annotations on his own copy of Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" (available at his personal library in Küsnacht - ZH), there are several references to his "Red Book". This seems to suggests a possible explanation for his apparent misreading of "Zarathustra": it is indeed arguable to postulate that Jung read "Zarathustra" as if it was a sort of Nietzsche's "Red Book".
Jung quite often associates "Zarathustra" with a group of other works defined by him as "visionary". It is likely to hypothesize that he would have called his experience by the same name. The first chapter of this thesis aims to investigate a few "visionary" authors, frequently put by Jung in connection with Nietzsche, by dwelling upon similarities, common ground, and possible mediators. Besides, Jung 's feeling of belonging to the same tradition is also discussed.
Nietzsche's presence in "The Red Book" is quite overwhelming, both explicitly and implicitly, and on both levels of visions and stylistic choices. This is the subject of the second chapter, where such presence is (philologically, when required) investigated, in regard to Jung's personal confrontation with Nietzsche and "Zarathustra".
In the third chapter, it is presence of "The Red Book" in Jung's reading of "Zarathustra" in the '30s to be discussed. Several elements of Jung's seminar appear outside the context of Nietzsche's philosophy, but in fact they recall meaningful motifs from his "Red Book".
To conclude, Nietzsche's and Jung's understandings of the "dead of God", Christianity, and self-overcoming are analyzed and compared. Thereby a sort of dialogue can be imagined, in which its two interlocutors speak two different languages and cannot understand each other.