What You Dont Know About Carl Jung

Were you to google "Carl Jung and Nazism"—and I'm not suggesting that you exercise—you would detect yourself hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. Many sites condemn or exonerate him; many others celebrate him every bit a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can exist nauseatingly difficult at times to tell these accounts apart. What to make of this controversy? What is the bear witness brought against the famed Swiss psychiatrist and onetime close friend, educatee, and colleague of Sigmund Freud?

Truth be told, information technology does not look good for Jung. Dissimilar Nietzsche, whose piece of work was deliberately bastardized past Nazis, beginning with his own sis, Jung need non be taken out of context to exist read as anti-Semitic. There is no irony at work in his 1934 paper The State of Psychotherapy Today, in which he marvels at National Socialism equally a "formidable miracle," and writes, "the 'Aryan' unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish." This is merely one of the least objectionable of such statements, as historian Andrew Samuels demonstrates.

One Jungian defender admits in an essay collection called Lingering Shadows that Jung had been "unconsciously infected by Nazi ideas." In response, psychologist John Conger asks, "Why not then say that he was unconsciously infected past anti-Semitic ideas as well?"—well before the Nazis came to ability. He had expressed such thoughts every bit far back as 1918. Similar the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Jung was accused of trading on his professional associations during the 30s to maintain his condition, and turning on his Jewish colleagues while they were purged.

All the same his biographer Deirdre Bair claims Jung's proper noun was used to endorse persecution without his consent. Jung was incensed, "non least," Mark Vernon writes at The Guardian, "because he was really fighting to go on German psychotherapy open up to Jewish individuals." Bair also reveals that Jung was "involved in ii plots to oust Hitler, substantially by having a leading md declare the Führer mad. Both came to nada." And unlike Heidegger, Jung strongly denounced anti-Semitic views during the war. He "protected Jewish analysts," writes Conger, "and helped refugees." He besides worked for the OSS, precursor to the CIA, during the war.

His recruiter Allen Dulles wrote of Jung's "deep contempt to what Nazism and Fascism stood for." Dulles also cryptically remarked, "Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof. Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war." These contradictions in Jung'due south words, grapheme, and actions are puzzling, to say the least. I would not presume to draw whatsoever difficult and fast conclusions from them. They do, notwithstanding, serve equally the necessary context for Jung's observations of Adolph Hitler. Nazis of today who praise Jung most ofttimes do so for his supposed characterization of Hitler as "Wotan," or Odin, a comparing that thrills neo-pagans who, like the Germans did, use ancient European belief systems as apparel hangers for modern racist nationalism.

In his 1936 essay, "Wotan," Jung describes the old god as a strength all its ain, a "personification of psychic forces" that moved through the German language people "towards the end of the Weimar Republic"—through the "thousands of unemployed," who by 1933 "marched in their hundreds of thousands." Wotan, Jung writes, "is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of boxing; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature." In personifying the "German psyche" as a furious god, Jung goes so far as to write, "We who stand outside approximate the Germans far as well much as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to regard them also as victims."

"One hopes," writes Per Brask, "evidently against hope, that Jung did not intend" his statements "every bit an statement of redemption for the Germans." Whatever his intentions, his mystical racialization of the unconscious in "Wotan" accorded perfectly well with the theories of Alfred Rosenberg, "Hitler's principal ideologist." Like everything about Jung, the situation is complicated. In a 1938 interview, published by Omnibook Magazine in 1942, Jung repeated many of these disturbing ideas, comparing the German worship of Hitler to the Jewish desire for a Messiah, a "characteristic of people with an inferiority complex." He describes Hitler's power as a grade of "magic." Simply that power only exists, he says, because "Hitler listens and obeys…."

His Voice is nothing other than his ain unconscious, into which the German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious of seventy-eight meg Germans. That is what makes him powerful. Without the High german people he would exist nothing.

Jung'south observations are bombastic, but they are non flattering. The people may be possessed, only it is their will, he says, that the Nazi leader enacts, not his own. "The true leader," says Jung, "is always led." He goes on to paint an fifty-fifty darker motion picture, having closely observed Hitler and Mussolini together in Berlin:

In comparing with Mussolini, Hitler fabricated upon me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of woods covered with textile, an automaton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. During the whole operation he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad sense of humor, sulking. He showed no human sign.

His expression was that of an inhumanly unmarried-minded purposiveness, with no sense of sense of humor. He seemed equally if he might be a double of a real person, and that Hitler the human might perhaps be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the machinery.

With Hitler y'all practice not feel that you are with a man. You are with a medicine man, a class of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even ameliorate, a myth. With Hitler you lot are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; considering there is nobody at that place. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How tin you talk intimately with a nation?

Read the full interview here. Jung goes on to further talk over the German resurgence of the cult of Wotan, the "parallel between the Biblical triad… and the Third Reich," and other peculiarly Jungian formulations. Of Jung'due south analysis, interviewer H.R. Knickerbocker concludes, "this psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may audio to a layman fantastic, but can anything exist as fantastic equally the bare facts about the Nazi Political party and its Fuehrer? Exist sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling them gangsters."

Related Content:

Carl Jung Explains Why His Famous Friendship with Sigmund Freud Brutal Apart in Rare 1959 Sound

Carl Jung Explains His Groundbreaking Theories About Psychology in a Rare Interview (1957)

Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Provide Doorways to the Unconscious, and Maybe a Way to Predict the Futurity

Josh Jones is a author and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

mcclainthatiand.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.openculture.com/2017/11/carl-jung-psychoanalyzes-hitler.html

Share this post