“Touching Nature”: Nietzsche, Jung, and the Reappraisal of Eros and Animality
Thursday 29th January, 2026
12:30-14:00 (UK time), QMUL Mile End Campus, Laws Building, Room 209 / Online attendance via Teams
- Dr Tommaso Priviero (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Queen Mary University of London)
Humanity’s alienation from its animal roots was central to the intersecting perspectives of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and one of his most avid readers, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, Carl Gustav Jung. Both thinkers posed the subjugation of the animal as the defining wound of Western consciousness: a rift intensified by Christianity’s repression of the instincts and the industrial-technological idolatry of rationalism. While Nietzsche offered a crude diagnosis of the sickness of the modern individual, Jung’s call to “touch nature” invited a symbolic and experiential reconciliation with the instinctual life, within and without. This presentation traces how in the early twentieth century, with the rise of psychoanalysis, Jung’s psychology (even more so than Freud’s), contemporary ethology (Konrad Lorenz), and “biocentric” thought converged toward a new image of the human as participant rather than master of nature. To “become animal,” in this context, evoked the urgent demand to rediscover intimacy with the living world.
Modern Languages and Comparative Literature Research Seminar