Post number 45914
I'm going to copy and paste again....not my words....for a simple reason which I will bring to light here soon.....
Jung had many friends and respected colleagues who were Jewish and he maintained relations with them through the 1930s when anti-semitism in Germany and other European nations was on the rise. However, until 1939, he also maintained professional relations with psychotherapists in Germany who had declared their support for the Nazi regime and there were allegations that he himself was a Nazi sympathizer. In his work Civilization in Transition, Collected Works Volume X, however, Jung wrote of “... the Aryan bird of prey with his insatiable lust to lord it in every land, even those that concern him not at all."
There are writings showing that Jung's sympathies were against, rather than for, Nazism. In his 1936 essay Wotan, Jung described Germany as "infected" by "one man who is obviously 'possessed'...", and as "rolling towards perdition", and wrote "...what a so-called Führer does with a mass movement can plainly be seen if we turn our eyes to the north or south of our country." The essay does, however, speak in more positive terms of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer and his German Faith Movement which was loyal to Hitler. In April 1939, the Bishop of Southwark asked Jung if he had any specific views on what was likely to be the next step in religious development. Jung's reply was:
We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.
It must be clear to anyone who has read any of my books that I have never been a Nazi sympathizer and I never have been anti-Semitic, and no amount of misquotation, mistranslation, or rearrangement of what I have written can alter the record of my true point of view. Nearly every one of these passages has been tampered with, either by malice or by ignorance. Furthermore, my friendly relations with a large group of Jewish colleagues and patients over a period of many years in itself disproves the charge of anti-Semitism.
In 1933, after the Nazis gained power in Germany, Jung took part in restructuring of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie), a German-based professional body with an international membership. The society was reorganized into two distinct bodies:
1. A strictly German body, the Deutsche Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie, led by Matthias Göring, an Adlerian psychotherapist and a cousin of the prominent Nazi Hermann Göring;
2. International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, led by Jung. The German body was to be affiliated to the international society, as were new national societies being set up in Switzerland and elsewhere.
So what was this affiliation wth Matthias Goring and Hermann Goring......
As leader of the international body, Jung assumed overall responsibility for its publication, the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie. In 1933, this journal published a statement endorsing Nazi positions and Hitler's book Mein Kampf. In 1934, Jung wrote in a Swiss publication, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, that he experienced "great surprise and disappointment" when the Zentralblatt associated his name with the pro-Nazi statement.
How does that work? How does one assume overall responsibility for a publication and experience "great surprise and disappointment associating his name with the publication that was his overall responsibility?
Lets talk about archetypal symbols....the swastika ......right up his ally.....
A book by Charles Allen, The Search for Shangri-La: A Journey into Tibetan History, states, "To the Swiss shaman-cum-psychophilosopher Carl Jung the swastika was an archetypal symbol, a rotating mandala that signified a `projection of an unconscious collective attempt at the formation of a compensatory unified personality'.
Jung was editor of the Zentralblatt fur Psychotherapy, a publication that eventually endorsed Mein Kampf as required reading for all psychoanalysts. Jung claimed that he did this to save psychoanalysis and preserve it during the war, believing that psychoanalysis would not otherwise survive because the Nazis considered it to be a "Jewish science" . He also claimed he did it with the help and support of his Jewish friends and colleagues.
Jung also served as president of the Nazi-dominated International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. Later in the war though, Jung resigned and joined the allied cause in the United States. In addition, in 1943 he aided the Office of Strategic Services by analyzing Nazi leaders for the United States.
Some scholars feel that Jung's reversal was not enough to compensate for his complicity in the "nazification" of psychoanalysis. Jung published several articles while working at the Göring Institute that claimed superiority for the "Aryan race", in particular that the Aryan race had a more "creative unconscious" than the Jewish race.
Here is a quote from Lucille Boone in her review of The Jung Cult: Without disparaging Jung's contribution to psychology, Noll demonstrates how Jung's experiences with occultism, neopaganism, and German utopianism led him to formulate such concepts as the collective unconscious, archetypes, and individuation. Contending that Jung, after his break with Freud, modeled his school of psychoanalysis on ancient mystery religions, Noll shows how followers continued to perpetuate this personality cult, ignoring Jung's early life and work.
Here is another quote from Brian McCombie in his review of The Jung Cult: Noll argues that Jungian analysis has evolved to a cult of personality around its founder, to the point of becoming a religion--with Jung as its prophet, and today's analysts its priesthood. If it's a religious movement, Noll argues, there's too much focus on economic and personal promotion. As a way to explain the workings of the human mind, Noll asserts, Jungian theory contains little that is truly new, borrowing as it does from nineteenth-century occultism, social Darwinism, and neopaganism. Noll further takes to task many cornerstones of Jungian thought, such as the collective unconscious. An interesting deconstruction.
Jung's visions.....
Jung's official autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections tells of Jung's visionary journeys of December 1913. But, according to Noll (TAC, 122-25) it omits the most important part of Jung's prescription: an experience of god through self-deification. Jung induced an altered state of consciousness and entered what he describes as the Land of the Dead. He met an old man named Elijah and a blind young girl named Salome. The initial descent was followed by a second. This time he saw Elijah on a rocky ridge, a ring of boulders, maybe a "Druidic sacred place." The old man went inside and climbed upon an altar--the wall grew larger while the altar and Elijah began to shrink. Jung noticed a tiny woman, who turned out to be Salome. He also saw a miniature snake and a house.
The walls kept growing. Jung was descending into the underworld. Salome became interested in him; she assumed he could cure her blindness. "She began to worship me. I said, ‘Why do you worship me?' She replied, ‘You are Christ.' Jung protested but Salome persisted.
Then I saw the snake approach me. She came close and began to encircle me and press me in her coils. These coils reached up to my heart. In the agony and the struggle, I sweated so profusely that the water flowed down on all sides of me. Then Salome rose, and she could see. While the snake was pressing me, I felt that my face had taken on the face of an animal of prey, a lion or a tiger.
Jung explained to his disciples that his experience was similar to the ancient mysteries:
You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them...These images have so much reality that they recommend themselves, and such extraordinary meaning that one is caught. They form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact, it is such figures that made the mysteries.
"the mystery of deification," which Jung describes in this way:
The important part that led up to the deification was the snake's encoiling of me. Salome's performance was deification. The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous [Deus] Leontocephalus (lion-headed god) of the Mithraic mysteries. It is the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake's head resting on the man's head, and the face of the man that of the lion. This statue has only been found in mystery grottoes (the underground churches, the last remnants of the catacombs).
Jung then identified this figure as Aion, or the eternal being.
Jung believed that just as the human race all started out pagan and only later, having lost touch with its pagan roots, became rootless, "civilized" and Christian, so Germans start out, in infancy, as spontaneous pagans, but this spontaneous religion is overlaid with the artificial ideas of monotheism. Our loss of wholeness is a loss of contact with these roots. But we can reach these roots, not by the difficult work of historical research but by going inward, digging below the personal unconscious and uncovering the collective unconscious that had only been covered over.
Jung explained the resistance of Freud and his close followers to Jung's version of analysis in an essentially racist way. The Freudians were mostly Jews, as was Freud himself. Freudians are uninterested in pagan myths, Jung decided, because they are mostly Jews. The Jews came from the Middle East, which was urbanized and thus depaganized at an early date. Jews had allegedly lost their pagan roots so long ago that they no longer had access to the collective unconscious. By contrast, Germanic peoples had lost their paganism at a relatively late date, roughly 500 to 1100 AD. Thus the pagan collective unconscious lay close enough to the psychological surface that it could still be dug up if only one were persistent enough. Since for Jung being in touch with the collective unconscious is a precondition for psychological health, Germanic types like himself are potentially healthier than Jews.
Here is a letter he wrote December 17, 1921 to Constance Long, an important American disciple then living in England. (TAC, 258-59). Long had begun to come under the influence of exiled Russian mystic Ouspensky, and Jung correctly feared that he would lose her allegiance to Ouspensky at a time when she was important to his desire to expand his influence in the English speaking world. Jung wrote:
Gnosis should be an experience of your own life, a plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison, but the vegetable gods you have raised in your own garden are nourishing. They are perhaps less beautiful but they have [illegible].
You shall not make totems of foreign trees [ ]. No one shall keep you else you trespass your limits; but blessed be the place where we meet the beginning of our limitations. Beyond one's frontiers there is not but illusion and misery, because there you arrive in a country of the wrong ancestor spirits and the wrong charms . . .
Why do you look for foreign teachings [i.e., the Russian's]? They are poisons, they did not come out of your blood. You should be on your own feet, and you have your own rich earth below them. Why should you listen to the word of a man who is off his own soil [Ouspensky was in exile]? Truth is tree with roots. It is not words. Truth only grows in your own garden, nowhere else.
Only feeble men eat the food of a stranger. But your people need a strong man, one who gets his truth in his own roots and out of his own blood. . . . "
After Hitler, who also spoke incessantly of soil and blood and portrayed himself as a strong man, this document is an embarrassment for the most devout English-speaking Jungians. But there's no mistaking how Jung is thinking here. When he appeals to Long to be true to her own roots, he means the Aryan (or Indo-Germanic) roots. His point is not that Long should be loyal to her American or English roots, as distinct from Germanic roots. In fact Long was until then among Jung's most loyal disciples; and he is an ethnic German who happens to be a citizen of Switzerland.
Jung thought that Germans, English, and Anglo-Americans were all part of the Germanic family tree. The Jews, in his view, had been civilized too long--uprooted from the soil. The Russians were polluted by too much Asian/Mongolian blood. Jung thought his kind of analysis will get (Aryan) people in touch with their roots, still latent inside them, and restore their wholeness.
Jung shared these ideas with a number of individuals who became Nazis. This is not to say that Jung was a Nazi. But he made one of the same basic errors that Nazism made: he failed to distinguish acquired cultural characteristics from inherited biological ones. It is understandable that Jung, like many intelligent Germans, could be confused on this question early in the 20th century when the science of genetics was barely getting started. But he continued to believe in it into the 1950's, according to Noll; and this is strong evidence of the fundamentally problematic nature of his key concepts.
Last edited by Brook on Tue Dec 06, 2011 1:15 pm; edited 3 times in total