CHAPTER 13: Jung and the Aryan Unconscious

Even Jung's much-debated interpretation of what was happening in Hitler's Germany in the thirties was not without insight, though his conduct justifies the suspicion that he himself, like all too many equally intelligent contemporaries in Europe, had momentarily turned to the same demonic powers for salvation and let himself be carried away by them.
-- Lewis Mumford, "The Revolt of the Demons," The New Yorker, May 23, 1964

It has always been a mystery why intelligent people outside of Germany in the twenties and thirties were attracted by the Nazi movement. Before the atrocity stories began to leak out, the Nazis were persona grata with a certain type of mystical temperament which saw in the romantic aspects of their ideology a refreshing return to "thinking with the blood," as D. H. Lawrence called it.

The psychologist Carl Jung is a case in point. His interest in the occult ran very deep, and began very early. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, he told of his initiation, in dreams of childhood, to "the secrets of the earth" and "the realm of darkness," "overpowered by a vision of the whole cosmos," where "lived the 'Other,' who knew God as a hidden, personal, and at the same time suprapersonal secret. Here nothing separated man from God; indeed, it was as though a human mind looked down upon Creation simultaneously with God."

The young Carl soon discovered that his jolly housewife mother harbored a submerged self, "archaic and ruthless," just as sacred as God, which he later identified with the ancient Germanic realm of Wotan. Sometimes the child would find her doing chores with a strange look in her eyes, muttering incomprehensibly to herself. When he listened more attentively, it was clear that the words were designed for him, and their appropriateness reached "to the very core" of his being.

Her diary recorded experiences with precognition, ghosts, and supranormal phenomena. As a child, her services had often been called upon to protect her theologian father from spectral presences:

She had to sit behind him when he was writing his sermons, because he could not bear "spirits" passing behind his back and disturbing him. Every week, at a fixed hour, he used to hold intimate conversations with his deceased first wife, very much to the chagrin of the second! Jung's psychiatric diagnosis was that he suffered from "waking hallucinations," though at the same time he dismissed this as a "mere word." [His] second wife, ... Jung's maternal grandmother, was gifted with "second sight" and could also see "spirits." The family traced this back to an episode when, as a young girl, she lay for thirty-six hours in a state of catalepsy resembling death. Her gifts, however, could stand the test of a more rigorous judgment: she sometimes saw apparitions of persons unknown to her, but whose historical existence was later proved.

Carl was both scared and thrilled by the sense of the uncanny. As a teen-aged student at the Gymnasium in Basel, he found a philosophical basis for it in the work of Pythagoras. By this time, the private, secret world which he had learned to inhabit as an escape from his all-powerful mother was much pleasanter than the bourgeois school world from which he was excluded by poverty, provincialism, and personal unpopularity. He saved his ego by retreating into ritual, fantasy, and nature-mysticism. The greatest fantasy, which came unbidden, and which would have earned him the applause of Jonathan Swift and Rabelais, was a masterpiece of unconscious wit in such a stolid fellow: God, from on high, sent down his own personal blast of excrement, appropriately monumental, to bomb the newly decorated roof of the Basel Cathedral.

Jung was convinced that he had been chosen by God for a prophetic mission to herald the dawning Age of Aquarius. At the same time, he felt privy to ancient dark mysteries, which he was not about to reveal, wanting to avoid the fate of Nietzsche, who went mad. Jung had a sense of himself as two distinct personalities, the schoolboy and the wise old man. The schoolboy was himself as he appeared to others. The wise old man was a powerful figure of the Enlightenment, and the young boy owed to this odd presence his sense of being selected for a great work and of being perfectly at home with eighteenth-century ideas and artifacts. The psychologist, looking back at this dichotomy in his youth, insisted that it did not represent a diseased disunion. A recurring daydream, which he was later able to play out in reality, had him ensconced in a medieval castle where, as judge, he ruled over the town. What gave him the power to rule was that, hidden in the tower,

was a thick copper column whose top, branching into a network of tiny capillaries, drew from the air an ineffable spiritual substance which, condensed and transformed by its passage through the metallic column, would reappear at the bottom as finished gold coins. In his gold-making fantasy, Carl, unlike the medieval alchemists, did not use lead or other base metals for raw material, but something "spiritual" diffused in the air. With his hunger for omens, he was bound to retrospectively view this adolescent daydream as presaging his long-lasting fascination with alchemy in later years. A person of less exalted turn of mind might read the same fantasy as pointing to Jung's future adroitness in extracting money from "spirituality."

As outsider and as pagan, he felt much closer to the animal and vegetable kingdoms than to the kingdom of man. Nature was suffused with "numinousness," a term which he came to love and use a great deal. It well described his family's extrasensory experiences.

As it came time, however, to decide on a profession, he was governed by more practical concerns. He did not care to repeat his clergyman father's history of poverty, and in 1895 enrolled as a medical student at the University of Basel. There he was attracted by spiritualists like Johann Zoellner and Emanuel Swedenborg, discussing their theories by the hour. He was far from being alone in his fascination with spiritualism. A number of respectable scientists believed in the existence of occult phenomena and were investigating them. Jung arranged mediumistic seances. In his autobiography, he described how a medium, his fifteen-year-old cousin, made a sturdy antique table and a knife in a drawer break apart. (The family saved the fragmented pieces of knife.) This medium became the subject for Jung's doctoral dissertation, "The Psychology and Pathology of Supposed Occult Phenomena." In it, he talked about the relation of the unconscious to the conscious mind and referred to Sigmund Freud's new theory of hysterical identification. Jung made up his mind to become a psychiatrist and unite his interest in the soul with his interest in medicine.

He did not meet Freud in the flesh until 1907. By then, strong anti-Semitic sentiments were already skulking through Western Europe. Freud was a pariah, both as Jew and as proponent of a controversial theory of sexuality, a subject shrouded with taboo -- one Freud himself referred to as "that troublesome factor so unwelcome in good society." It took courage on Jung's part to join the Freudian camp. Then almost thirty-two, Jung had a good deal to lose by associating himself with the Austrian Jew. Also, by becoming Freud's favorite son, he incurred the enmity of older and longer-standing disciples.

Despite mutual respect and admiration, there were insurmountable differences between Jung and Freud. The older man could not share the younger's passion for occultism. When Jung came to visit Freud in Vienna, they discussed precognition and parapsychology in Freud's study. Freud dismissed the matter as "nonsensical," and there came a loud cracking sound from his bookcase. Jung predicted that there would be another in a moment, and interpreted the noise as evidence of the paranormal. Returning home, he wrote Freud that the visit, "most happily, freed me inwardly from the oppressive sense of your paternal authority." Freud replied that the "poltergeist business" left him incredulous. Since Jung's visit, he had heard the sounds from the bookcase repeatedly -- not, he hastened to add, when he was thinking of Jung -- but he warned his "dear son to keep a cool head, for it is better not to understand something than make such great sacrifices to understanding." Jung's "investigations of the spook complex" Freud took to be "a charming delusion" which he could not share.

Years later, in his autobiography, Jung confessed that, as Freud was disparaging parapsychology, he himself felt "a curious sensation" in his diaphragm, as if it "were made of iron and were becoming red-hot -- a glowing vault." Hearing the noise from the bookcase, he feared it would topple over on them. Freud's retort that this was "sheer bosh" made Jung believe that his mentor mistrusted him, and though they never talked about the incident after the exchange of letters, the schism between them grew. Nonetheless, Freud did push for Jung to be elected president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, to the horror of other disciples.

Jung devoted more and more of his professional activity to investigating what Freud had called "the black tide of mud of occultism." Although the scientific establishment scorned the notion that occult phenomena were worthy subjects for investigation, the romantics had managed to generate excitement about hypnosis, mesmerism, somnambulism, precognition, and spiritualism, so that a man with Jung's family history, personal experiences, predisposition, and natural gifts was not alone in his proclivities. After he separated from Freud, Jung immersed himself in Gnostic and Neoplatonic texts and in Eastern philosophy. Befriended by the celebrated German Orientalist Richard Wilhelm, he explored Chinese alchemy and the I Ching, the ancient Chinese method of divination. Jung took this oracle quite seriously as a revelation of unconscious knowledge. In preparing the introduction to Wilhelm's book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung found the link he had been searching for, between ancient Gnosticism and modern thought, in European alchemy. He identified himself with another Swiss doctor-metaphysician, Paracelsus, who had enriched the sixteenth century with his esoteric lore. "Magick is a Great Hidden Wisdom -- Reason is a Great Open Folly," he had taught.

Paracelsus' observation that Eastern and Western alchemy were really concerned with psychic states rather than with chemical states confirmed Jung's perspective of the unconscious as a reservoir of collective as well as personal images. This collective unconscious explained the presence of archetypes -- myths and symbols that were made up off "universal dynamic forms." Though there were similar archetypes in all races and throughout all the ages, there were also perceived differences between races, because of their different evolutions. The Jew, for instance, because he was rootless, needed to "reduce everything to its material beginnings." That was why the simple reduction by Freud and Alfred Adler of all psychic phenomena to primitive drives was gratifying to the Jew, though "thoroughly unsatisfying to the Germanic mentality," which still (in 1918) had "a genuine barbarian in [it] who [was] not to be trifled with." Said Jung: "The fact is, our unconscious is not to be got at with over-ingenious and grotesque interpretations. The psychotherapist with a Jewish background awakens in the Germanic psyche not those wistful and whimsical residues from the time of David, but the barbarian of yesterday, a being for whom matters suddenly become serious in the most unpleasant way...."

By the time the Nazis came to power, this sort of distinction caused Jung some embarrassment -- not, to be sure, with the champions of National Socialism. The new study of psychoanalysis had to go through a process of gleichgeschaltung, i.e., conformity to the Party line. Jung's mysticism was far more congenial to the philosophy of Aryanism than Freud's "Jewish science." Jung understood and shared the romantic sensibility which craved for pagan purification. In 1923 he had written:

... we cannot possibly get beyond our present level of culture unless we receive a powerful impetus from our primitive roots. But we shall receive it only if we go back behind our cultural level, thus giving the suppressed primitive man in ourselves a chance to develop. How this is to be done is a problem I have been trying to solve for years.... the existing [edifice] is rotten. We need some new foundations. We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will there come what we need: a new experience of God....

Jung came under the influence of the German Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, an authority on Kundalini yoga and number-symbolism. Hauer was head of the Nordic Faith movement, which barred Freemasons, Jews, and colored people from membership. He lectured at Eranos, a Swiss esoteric school for Jungians, on the racial unconscious and its symbolism. When the Nazis came to power, he gave an impassioned talk on the SS hero and Hitler, the "genius of our people." Jung, in his essay, "Wotan," later mentioned that Hauer's group "aims at the religious renaissance of the nation out of the hereditary foundations of the German race" and advised the "German Christians" to join Hauer's "decent and well-meaning people ... intelligent enough not only to believe but to know that the god of the Germans is Wotan and not the Christian God."

When the president of the international German Medical Society for Psychotherapy, located in Germany, resigned because of the Nazi takeover in 1933, Jung filled the post by remote control from Switzerland and assumed the editorship of its official publication, the Zentralblatt fur Psychatherapie. Its December 1933 issue was graced with a commitment by the new Reichsfuhrer of psychoanalysts, Professor M. H. Goring, the nephew of Hermann Goring, to "Adolf Hitler's fundamental book, Mein Kampf" and "to contribute to the work of the people's chancellor to educate the German people for the spirit of heroism and sacrifice." And Goring gratefully acknowledged: "Thanks to the fact that Dr. C. G. Jung accepted the presidency on June 21st, 1933, it has been possible to continue the scientific activity of the Association and of its periodical."

For that same issue, Jung wrote an introduction which he later had many opportunities to defend:

The differences which actually do exist between Germanic and Jewish psychology and which have long been known to every intelligent person are no longer to be glossed over, and this can only be beneficial to science. In psychology more than in any other science there is a "personal equation," disregard of which falsifies the practical and theoretical findings.

Though he went on to state that he was no more depreciating "Semitic psychology" than he would if he talked of the Chinese in terms of Oriental psychology, his editorial in no way hurt him with the Nazis. The General Medical Society, although international in membership, was dominated by the Germans. Its publication was put out in Germany, and the managing editor and staff were German. Jung had given orders that the issue which caused him such embarrassment be "for exclusive circulation in Germany," but the managing editor had disobeyed him. Jung said: "The incident is naturally so incriminating as to put my editorship seriously in question."

But he defended his position in the March 28, 1934, letter to Max Guggenheim:

If you disregard the persecutions of the Jews in Germany, you must admit that there is a medical Society there which is very important for us in Switzerland. It is therefore not a matter of indifference what happens to psychotherapy in that country.... As a psychotherapist I cannot be indifferent to the future of psychotherapy. Its development in Germany will also be crucial for us. Freud once told me, very rightly: "The fate of psychotherapy will be decided in Germany." To begin with it was doomed to absolute perdition because it was considered wholly Jewish. I have broken this prejudice by my intervention and have made life possible not only for the so-called Aryan psychotherapists but for the Jewish ones as well. What with the hue and cry against me it has been completely forgotten that by far the greatest number of psychotherapists in Germany are Jews. People do not know, nor is it said in public, that I have intervened personally with the regime on behalf of certain Jewish psychotherapists. If the Jews start railing at me this is shortsightedness in the extreme and I hope you will do what you can to combat this idiotic attitude. The existence of the Society for Psychotherapy, which has very many Jewish members, is now assured, also the membership of Jewish doctors. Actually the Jews should be thankful to me for that....

Although he had already made it clear in 1918 that he believed in psychological differences between Jews and Aryans, 1933 was an inopportune moment to reiterate such a thesis. Anyone of Jewish descent had been purged from the German civil service that spring. Other professions were closing to Jews, and with 6 million unemployed, there was a scramble for their jobs. While Jung was not a Nazi [?!], he understood the Nazis' paganism. He also understood their antipathy to Freud, whom he felt to be lacking in spiritual concerns. The Nazi psychiatrist Kurt Gauger reiterated this point of view:

Freud is the scientist, only the scientist: Jung is the ethician. One could also call him a seer, in the deepest and most reverent sense of the word. Jung is the poet among psychologists. His subconscious is full of living forms with whom one speaks and consorts like human beings, who can give counsel and warn, with whom one tries to be on a good footing because otherwise they may become "angry." Jung's psychology is a demonology.... Primordial wisdom has it that one can disarm a demon, even make a servant of him, if one knows his name....

Freudian psychology incorporates all the advantages and dangers of the Jewish spirit, Jungian psychology all those of the Germanic soul.

Freud is atheistic; Jung, not in terms of doctrine but in terms of attitude, is marked by a Catholic piety....

Jung protested that he was not anti-Semitic, that he had courageously chosen to talk about that which was on everyone's mind, that Jews could not be insulted since he had made no value judgments, and that it was the failure to make distinctions which leveled everything and caused hatred between people. He was not for tarring everyone with the same brush. He fought Freud's psychology, he said,

because of his materialistic and intellectualistic and -- last but not least -- irreligious attitude and not because he is a Jew. Insofar as his theory is based in certain respects on Jewish premises, it is not valid for non-Jews. Nor do I deny my Protestant prejudice. Had Freud been more tolerant of the ideas of others I would still be standing by his side today. I consider his intolerance -- and it is this that repels me -- a personal idiosyncrasy.... Infinite nuances are needed if justice is to be done to human beings.

To "accept the conclusions of a Jewish psychology," then, "as generally valid," was a "quite unpardonable mistake. "

Jung's branding of Freud's psychoanalysis -- a technique evolved out of this "Jewish psychology" -- as a "Satanic" doctrine capable of "murdering souls" did not injure his growing reputation. Many famous artists and writers had flocked to him for soul salvation. In 1939, the Mellons were converted. Andrew Mellon's interest in the occult resulted in a huge collection of books on the subject, stretching back to antiquity, which he donated to Yale. The Mellons set up the Bollingen Foundation to publish Jung's work.

After the atrocities of the Holocaust became public knowledge, Jung's outrage against the Nazis was genuine[?!]. Still, his assistant, H. G. Baynes, gave the Jews some unpleasant moments by theorizing, in Germany Possessed, without reasonable evidence [?!] that Hitler's natural father had been a wealthy Viennese Jew:

By far the greater portion of the wealth and power of Austria was, at that time, in the hands of the Jews, and they were also guilty of an unfeeling ostentation of wealth and luxury while half Vienna was starving. One can understand, therefore, how the mind of the boy [Hitler] saw the Jews as the worldly possessors who lay coiled about the wealth of his motherland.

Hitler's "uncanny shrewdness," "political flair," and "taste in lavish interior decoration," "handsome furniture," and "rare things," as well as his "amazing political opportunism" were the result of his Jewish blood. Hitler, in a word, was "the Wandering Jew," "the man accursed" because he had spurned "the jewel of great price," Christ's teaching.

Not until 1945 did Jung publicly comment again upon events in Germany, and then to present himself as a prophet who had foreseen the "collective psychic murder." Now it was the "German psychology" [Librarian's Comment: Rather, his own psychology] which he dissected. The German, charged Jung, instead of purging himself by admitting his guilt, shifted his responsibility for the crime and refused even to acknowledge that he had ever been a Nazi. He "dolled up" his inferiority feeling with "pseudo-scientific race-theory," which "did not make the extermination of the Jews any more acceptable."

About his own collusion Jung said nothing.

Criticism for his aid to the cause of what he believed would be a "Germanic, Jew-free psychotherapy" has now died down, and in the present atmosphere of receptivity to occultism, his ideas, books, and disciples are in the vanguard, enjoying great prestige.

It is difficult, however, to accept his defense that he was simply trying to save a young science. The December 1933 Zentralblatt issue occasioned a number of alarmed letters from colleagues. His answer to Max Guggenheim, on March 28, 1934 (see above), was representative.

What is more likely, the reigning attitudes in Germany expressed mystical affinities with which Jung was very much at home. There were several areas of compatibility between Jung and the Nazis: alchemy, astrology, the Grail legend, the symbolism of the runes, medieval mysticism, anti-bolshevism, and so forth. His high degree of tolerance for the "shadow" side of human nature, a necessary complement to reason, may have caused him to cast the Nazis in a romantic light. Like them, he was not afraid to explore the hidden recesses of the unconscious for ancient secrets so great and fearful, as he said, "that the world is grateful to Freud for having proved 'scientifically' (what a bastard of a science!) that one has seen nothing behind [the door]...."

The Nazis were the new barbarians who would purge civilization of its clotted, stultifying elements. They were the antidote to the civilized man, who had advanced too rapidly, "which is why we have become lopsidedly intellectualistic and rationalistic and have quite forgotten that there are other factors which cannot be influenced by a one-track rational intellect."

If Jung was able, at least for a while, to add his prestige to the Nazis' weltanschauung, it was because of their common occult ground. His thinking rendered him susceptible to their apocalyptic visions of Hitler as a magical shaman with a spiritual mission. To the extent that he enhanced their credibility, if only in their own minds, he strengthened faith in the "hero cult."

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