It’s a warm, blustery Monday afternoon in Leicester, and I’m sitting in the cathedral gardens with a notebook and a recorder. After some time away from spoken-word podcasting, I’m relaunching Distraction Therapy with a new focus and a new sense of purpose: to explore how meaning might be reassembled in a time of increasing cultural fragmentation and confusion. This isn’t a lecture series. It’s not a course or a performance. It’s a space for me—and hopefully others—to dwell with difficult texts, to trace symbols, and to make room for the unknown to speak.
This project began with a simple image: the osprey and the tortoise. An icebreaker exercise asked me what animal I identified with, and I couldn’t choose between the two. One soars, the other grounds. That tension—between ascent and descent, abstraction and slow digestion—captured something essential. And it led me back to a long-standing ambition: to read and reflect on Carl Jung’s seminars on Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Both volumes of Jung’s notes on Nietzsche have been sitting on my shelf, largely unopened. Expensive, dense, and intimidating, they’ve always seemed like something to tackle “later.” But “later” has a way of becoming never, and so I’m making “now” the time. At the same time, I’m engaging with Jung’s earlier seminars on dreams, which lay the psychological groundwork that informed his later mythopoetic and symbolic thinking. Together, these texts offer a structure, a rhythm, and a challenge.
I’ll be using a mix of media tools—AI transcription, podcasting, journaling, blogging—to reflect and externalise the internal dialogue. I’ve also found that reading Nietzsche in print left me cold, but the audiobook version, especially the Penguin Classics reading, has brought the text to life. Hearing Zarathustra performed as dramatic prose helps me enter its symbolic world. It reminds me that these texts aren’t just ideas to be decoded; they are performances, incantations, provocations.
This project is deliberately exploratory. I am not an expert in Jung or Nietzsche. But I’m drawn to both thinkers because of their commitment to the inner life—and their belief that personal psychological development cannot be separated from cultural, philosophical, and symbolic conditions. Nietzsche offers a critique of inherited values and metaphysical illusions; Jung provides a map of the unconscious terrain we must navigate to become whole.
Through this project, I’m asking myself:
- What does it mean to think symbolically today?
- How do I use technology, voice, and solitude to reflect more deeply, not just consume more efficiently?
- What unconscious patterns shape how I respond to texts, to the world, to myself?
This isn’t just a reading exercise. It’s a slow turning of the soil. It’s an individuation practice disguised as scholarship—or perhaps scholarship disguised as individuation. There will be awkward pauses, ill-formed ideas, messy turns of phrase. But this is how things emerge when we commit to staying with the questions.
If you’d like to follow along, I’ll be posting episodes and reflections regularly on robwatsonmedia.net, and you can listen to the podcast on all the usual platforms. If you’ve read Zarathustra—or wrestled with Jung—feel free to get in touch. This isn’t a performance of knowing; it’s an invitation to wander, to reflect, and to let the symbols speak.
Until next time: stay with the questions
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