‘IAJS Online Seminar
“The Quest for the Grail and the Search for the Self: Jung and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival”
February 14, 2026, with Paul Bishop
Moderator: Robin McCoy Brooks
Summary: In this session we shall explore Jung’s use of the Grail myth as found in his autobiographical writings, in one of his major theoretical works of the early period (Psychological Types), and in his Red Book. These references to the Grail invite us to consider a deeper affinity between Jung and the story of Parzival as told by Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose Middle High German epic of that name is one of the glories of medieval German culture. “I must catch up,” Jung says at the end of Liber Secundus in the Red Book, “with a piece of the Middle Ages — within myself,” adding: “We have only finished the Middle Ages of — others.” Surely we must catch up with a piece of the Middle Ages within ourselves —and there we shall find, this paper will suggest, the Grail. For the quest for the Grail is a symbol of the search for the Self — and a symbol of the transformative process associated with that great adventure.
Bio: Paul Bishop is Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Glasgow, UK. After studying at Oxford and (for a year) at Harvard, Paul has lived and worked in the great Scottish city of Glasgow for over three decades. He is interested in all aspects of German culture and thought, in tracing the progression of ideas through time, and in uncovering links between German culture and the concepts of psychoanalysis, with particular emphasis on analytical psychology. His doctoral dissertation, subsequently published with de Gruyter as The Dionysian Self, examined Jung’s reception of the throught of Friedrich Nietzsche. Although he is currently researching the philosophy of Ludwig Klages, the publication of the Red Book and subsequently the Black Books means he keeps returning to Jung’s remarkably rich and fertile thought. He is the author of various studies on aspects of Jung’s thought in an intellectual-historical perspective, and his most recent publications include Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Parzival” and the Grail as Transformation (Chiron, 2024) and Goethe’s “Faust” as a Text of Transformation (Chiron, 2025), respectively volumes 1 and 2 of a four-volume series, Jung and the Epic of Transformation.’.