Jung’s Nazism
Anti-Semitism and Reactionary Psychology
In recent months I’ve come across a few Substack posts uncritically devoted to Jungian ideas, even as a smart, good-hearted friend mentioned he’s taken an interest in Jung’s writings.
I hope it’s just a phase that conscientious readers will grow out of, but I must admit that this phase is now over a century old. One reason why many people still view Jung favorably is that they are unaware of the doctor’s collaboration with the highest levels of the Third Reich. Another reason is that Jung’s publications present few problems to the general reader since these works avoid depth and complexity. Actually, these two explanations are related: Jung’s simplistic psychology is inseparable from his political outlook.
This connection between Jung’s endorsement of the Nazis and his metapsychology encourages his followers to minimize his promotion of Nazism to the point where his wartime activities are now widely ignored or unknown. Some commentators argue that Jung’s questionable sympathies are merely an unfortunate aberration that is irrelevant to his contributions to medicine. However, Jung was fully mature during his years of service to the Nazi regime, and he was under no pressure to support the Führer, so his affiliation cannot be excised from his professional views as if it were a circumstantial idiosyncrasy. In fact, his politics are intrinsic to his theory of the mind.
The historical record is unambiguous. In a December 3, 2024 Substack post, Matthew Ehret reviews the most salient facts:
“Jung’s thinking even inspired Herman Göring and his cousin Matthias Göring, who took control of the field of psychology in Germany under his Göring Institute and the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy [of] which Jung served as President from 1933 until 1939 … Matthias Göring … consolidate[d] all psychotherapy organizations around a ‘Nazi approved’ philosophy of the mind.”
Ehret also notes that, in accordance with “Nazi approved” ideology, Jung asserted the superiority of German culture over Judaism’s inherent degeneracy:
“In the 1934 article The State of Psychotherapy Today, Jung states: ‘The Aryan unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish; that is both the advantage and the disadvantage of a youthfulness not yet fully weaned off barbarism ... The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will … Hitler is a spiritual vessel, a demi-divinity.’” 1
In fact, Jung developed his psychological theories explicitly to differentiate himself from his Jewish teacher Sigmund Freud (fatefully, the German word “Jünger” means “disciple”). Jung’s renunciation required him to negate Freud’s most original discoveries, such as the role of sexuality and childhood experiences in mental life, as well as the power of repressed (unconscious) conflicts underlying aggression and anxiety.
Thus, for example, Jung vitiates Freud’s belief in humanity’s innate bisexuality by rebranding this condition with the desexualized jargon of anima (femininity) and animus (masculinity). And where Freud emphasized the significance of his patients’ fathers, Jung reflexively points to the place of mother figures in clinical contexts, while giving no attention to his own transparently Oedipal rivalry with Freud.
Jung is also oblivious to the contradictions that arise from his appropriation of Freud’s insight into humanity’s collective unconscious, since there is nothing collective about exalting the “Aryan” psyche while denigrating Jews.
Furthermore, the fact that Jung borrowed (without attribution) Freud’s idea of the collective unconscious out of envy (penis envy?) rather than by judicious appraisal is betrayed by the fact that Jung nowhere reconciles collective thinking with his doctrine of “individuation” (another rebranding of the Freudian concepts of identification and ego development). Hence the meaning of the collective unconscious is reduced to empty verbiage, as if it were merely a fashion statement.
Jung’s rebellion against Freudian psychoanalysis is therefore rote and reactionary rather than substantive. It usually amounts to a coinage of nebulous terminology, exemplified perfectly by Jung’s linguistic reversal of “psychoanalysis” into “analytical psychology.” Jung’s revisions of Freud are personal, not intellectual, which is why he wrote that psychoanalysis can never be a legitimate discipline because it was invented by a Jew. Jung drains Freud’s ideas into a miasma of otherness, an inauthentic “Jewish science” threatening the future of German soil. By scapegoating psychoanalysis as a dangerous foreign object, Jung predictably adopts the defense mechanism of projection, without noticing or acknowledging this elemental maneuver.
In this way Jung established the untenability of analytical psychology, since it’s based on eviscerating Freud’s insistence on embodiment as the real currency of psychic life — Jung masks the unsettling, alien contents of Freud’s theory with incoherent buzzwords like “archetype” and “synchronicity,” which terminate further investigation. Jungians like Jordan Peterson and Mattias Desmet perpetuate this superficiality, for instance in the case of Desmet’s “mass formation” conceit, which, as eminent psychiatrist Peter Breggin points out, faults the general population for group delusions rather than blaming the corporate and state perpetrators who actually foster citizens’ illusions.2 And when Jordan Peterson exhorts his audience to “tell me what you fear and I’ll tell you what happened to you,” he only offers a facile truism, not some profound revelation.
I can summarize Jung’s exaggerated reputation by citing an episode recounted in the doctor’s introduction to the well-known collection by Jungian essayists, “Man and His Symbols.” Jung claims to prove the value of his method by describing a patient who’s preparing for a hiking trip in the mountains but who reports a recurring dream of dying in a fall on this upcoming excursion. Dr. Jung urges the man to cancel his plans but the foolish patient discounts his premonitory dreams and dismisses his doctor’s sage advice. When the man slips, falls and dies on his mountaineering expedition, Jung wags his finger at us, essentially saying, “I told you so,” as if the patient’s death — and defiance of supreme medical wisdom — vindicated what is, after all, not a particularly challenging dream interpretation. This is Jung in microcosm: an inflated self-importance and a willingness to exploit the suffering of others to disguise a therapist’s mediocrity even as the practitioner fails to save a patient’s life. It’s all shallowness and pretension whose outcome is materially dangerous to others — not unlike the reign of the semi-divine Hitler.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230317190731/https://www.americaoutloud.com/mattias-desmet-mass-hypnosis-expert-or-trojan-horse-the-full-story/