Jung on War, Politics and Nazi Germany

Exploring the Theory of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Nicholas Lewin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429915338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

This book presents a historical examination of C.G. Jung's politics and considers the insights he provides for those seeking to understand the causes of War. It looks at how Jung applies his theories to Nazi Germany and the rise of the theories of the collective unconscious and the archetypes.

Phase Two: Exploring the Theory

One can study the symptomatology of such a public movement exactly as a doctor would study the symptomatology of a certain disease; one can make the assumption that the nation is something like a person, that the whole nation is one human being who is shaken by peculiar psychological spasms… for the ordinary layman, as well as the nonspecialists among the doctors, it is often exceedingly difficult, a most baffling task, to construct a true picture of the total symptomatology of a neurosis. It is the same in studying a nation. One doesn’t know whether the traits one sees should be ascribed to the particular normal nature of that nation, or whether they are neurotic. Certain traits seem to be peculiarities of a more or less local nature, and one does-n’t know how to value them. (Jung, 1998 [1930–1934], p970–971)³⁴

4 FROM THE INDIVIDUAL TO ‘THE COLLECTIVE’: EXAMINING JUNG’S PROGRESSION FROM CLINICIAN TO GRAND THEORIST

We now begin the second phase of the book which explores Jung’s conception of the structure of the psyche. This was based on the existence of two psychological mechanisms, that of the collective unconscious and that of archetypes. Briefly put, the first idea postulated that mankind’s psychology evolved in stages as different strata of experience that were set down like a ‘geological’ model with racial and national layers. With this perception Jung felt he made a unique contribution to psychology by adding a prehistoric time-scale and a perspective that included the psychological significance of whole societies whether they were isolated tribes or whole races. This perspective is unusual and provides us with a rare opportunity to study a thinker willing to consider the relationship between race, nationalism and psychology. The second idea—archetypes—suggests that there are within the unconscious universal psychic imperatives that are akin to the instincts of our species. With these two ideas, which for brevity’s sake will sometimes be referred to as the ‘theories of the collective’, Jung supposed himself to be dealing with a level of psychic activity common to all, which operated at a deeper and wider level beyond the range of most historians or psychologists, and here we must pause for a brief aside on the sensitive subject of race.

This is not a new problem, for even in Jung’s lifetime he was caught in political controversy that made the critical discussion of his work very problematic. This issue has not become any easier to discuss for, of late, concerns about issues of race have led some readers to overlook the historical context of Jung’s ideas and so misinterpret and misjudge him. If we are to re-evaluate Jung’s theory we need to suspend our contemporary perspective and endeavour to evaluate Jung and his ideas in their own time before we think of trying to apply these ideas to our own era. So, in re-examining Jung’s work we face an exciting challenge and the reader may find that the image of Jung and his work is substantially different from the picture that has often been presented by those who portrayed Jung as a racist.

JUNG’S PROGRESSION FROM CLINICIAN TO GRAND THEORIST

At the start of chapter two it was explained that if we want to assess the viability of Jung’s collective theory in the wider world we needed to take stock of his political acumen. In much the same way, before we can look in detail at his theories of the collective we must consider some of the theoretical landscape in which we find his ideas. To do this we need a short chapter to explore how Jung’s professional orientation influenced the way he theorised, to help us understand some of the controversies that Jung’s work has provoked. Jung formulated much of his theory in an unconventional manner. Many of his ideas were derived from his introspective work on himself which he formulated into hypotheses and then applied to others. In his writings he was drawing on his voyage of discovery and the colourful material he found in the unconscious. This material gives his work an impact that many readers are drawn to, but as we shall see in looking at his theory, this style of work did not help the theoretical distillation and scientific formulation of what goes on behind the emotional images.

THE CLINICAL INFLUENCE ON JUNG’S COLLECTIVE THEORIES

Contemporary Jungians often forget that collective theories about the existence of a transpersonal unconscious were common currency in the nineteenth century, so the perception that the collective unconscious was unique to Jung is an unfortunate misperception. Indeed, as Shamdasani explains in some detail, when in 1916 Jung was formulating the idea of a phylogenetic unconscious he was continuing in the tradition of organic memory theorists like Hering, Butler, Ribot, Forel, Laycock and Hall. Of these maybe the most significant was Forel who retired from the Burghölzli in 1898 (2003, p184–189, 234) two years before Jung joined the staff in 1900. Though Jung drew on other collective theorists, here we are going to follow a different line of influence on Jung and look at how the sort of collective theory he would generate was shaped by working with individual patients.

At first sight it seems ironic that Jung was to produce a collective theory that would seek to include all people irrespective of their time, class or religion when his working life was spent treating individuals. This paradox is understandable when one recalls that both Freud and Jung, as psycho-analytic pioneers, used their clinical work to generate general theories that could explain the behaviour of all individuals and shed new light on the workings of society.

Jung started as a clinician treating the personal problems and complexes of individuals. He was confident he could extrapolate general principles from individual clinical cases and stated: ‘the psyche of a people is only a somewhat more complex structure than the psyche of an individual’ (Jung, 1991 [1928]-31, §175).

His early ideas owed much to the theories of the French psychologists Janet and Flournoy on individual psychopathology (Haule, 1984; Shamdasani, 1998) and later he attempted to integrate Freud’s theoretical framework into this work. Freud’s central concern had been with the outcome of ‘the family romance’, of how the child confronted its desire for the mother and its feeling of competition and threat from the father. This Freud termed ‘the Oedipus complex’, complex being a term for an unconscious knot of emotional themes that are entwined around a common source. Freud saw this complex as the definitive character-forming struggle and the universal experience of humanity. The other common shaper of consciousness was the individual’s struggle between instinctive sexual desires and the inhibitions of society. Freud saw this common event as vital for the advance or inhibition of civilisation. In Civilisation and its Discontents (1930 [1929]) he suggested that the repression of the sexual urges was vital for humans, lest they be lost in sexual indolence and gratification. As society imposed some restraints on the instinctual drive, some of the frustrated energy was re-directed or sublimated into the evolution of culture and building the fabric of society. In summary, in Freud’s conception humans as individuals faced common events that moulded consciousness. While these complexes were nearly universal, the presence of almost universal complexes did not imply common unconscious links across humanity (as did Jung’s later ideas of the collective unconscious), so for a time Jung complied with Freud’s perception. Indeed while still aligned with Freud he wrote the following passage, which as we shall see would be dramatically divergent from the sorts of things he would later write:

[T]he cause of the pathogenic conflict lies mainly in the present moment. It is just as if a nation were to blame its miserable political conditions on the past; as if the Germany of the nineteenth century had attributed her political dismemberment and incapacity to her oppression by the Romans, instead of seeking the causes of her difficulties in the actual present. (Jung, 1912, §373)

Gradually Jung came to see some of the types of problems he encountered as afflicting large numbers of people. He began to suspect that these common problems had causes set in the historic past, or so far back in evolutionary time that they had become in-born characteristics of mankind that he would call ‘archetypes’. He developed a perspective of the psyche that had two sources. There were the individual life experiences that had filtered down into the personal unconscious and those factors that were common to humanity as a whole, which he called the ‘collective unconscious’.

As one follows the evolution of Jung’s collective and archetypal theories one can see his ideas being transformed from their varied Romantic, French and Freudian origins into a new theoretical synthesis about the collective and instinctive aspects of the psyche.³⁵ After all this theoretical creativity, by the mid-thirties Jung was increasingly drawn to exploring the historical, metaphysical and wider implications of his theories, and his writings reflect a shift from to clinical material to his growing range of academic and scholarly questions (Bair, 2004, p395).

In positing a collective psyche he was advancing a biologically-based concept, which required some mechanism for the collective psyche to be inherited. He made little attempt to explain or account for possible ways that this might happen and implied that as the inheritance of physical characteristics was proved, so the inheritance of mental characteristics was at least equally probable. The idea that there was a mechanism of inheritance was vital for Jung’s theory and the significance of his assumptions about this process are central to our discussion in the next chapter.

JUNG’S VIEW OF HISTORICAL AGES

Drawing on some of the German Romantics, Jung developed a concept of historical ages that mirrored developmental ideas of individual psychology. This idea was very vaguely articulated by Jung, but it was significant in as much as it added an element of teleology to his conception of the collective unconscious. This happened through his perception of the individual’s drive towards consciousness and health. Jung in turn duplicated this in his perception of historical ages, which showed his tendency to build from a theory based on individual clinical work and then think in terms of collective trends affecting vast vistas of time and groups of people. Given this link it is unsurprising to find that Jung’s view of historical periods, with their own characteristic level of psychological development, echoed his experience with individuals.

The connection in Jung’s mind between the individual psyche and wider society and its history was so strong that he declared: ‘My medical bias prevents me from seeing [historical coincidences involving whole cultures] simply as an accident. Everything happened in accordance with a psychological law which is unfailingly valid in personal affairs’ (Jung, 1991 [1928]/1931, §175). On another occasion he wrote: ‘Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice, and its psychic malaise. An epoch is like an individual, it has its own limitations of conscious outlook… this blind collective need results in good or evil, in the salvation of an epoch or its destruction’ (Jung, 1986 [1930]/1950, §153).

Much later Jung revisited his interest in historical ages and the evolution of religious thought. One of the themes of his book Aion was to chart the link between individual mental development and the wider culture. He suggested that suitable mythological dreams and visions produced in the unconscious may be taken up and used in the conscious religious themes of an era that then affect the wider political culture. As an example he suggested that the age of cults in the late Roman Empire showed how individuals’ ‘religious inflation’ affected the whole society in a way that was very different from the ‘rationalistic and political psychosis that is the affliction of our day’ (Jung, 1974 [1951], §139).

Jung was concerned with the psychological processes by which a society achieved change or continuity of its religion and culture (Jung, 1989 [1934–1939], p78–79). He fitted this thinking in terms of psychological ages into his ideas on how myths were formed. He argued that a culture’s mythologies evolved from the sum of the emotional themes in its collective unconscious at a given time. These energies were then projected as myths that portrayed the problems and preoccupations of that level of development. In this way mythologies were like shared dreams that catch the popular imagination. Jung suggested that eventually when such ideas lost their compelling nature a society lost its unity and collapsed (von Franz, 1992, p124). With this fall, new tensions or new situations were created which would bring about a new unconscious response, and from this new symbols arose that released fresh psychic energy (Jung, 1991 [1957], §549). Given all this, for Jung myths, like dreams, may contain the seeds for the next stage of development (Jung, 1989 [1934–1939], p206) and this idea cast its shadow when he saw the Nazi revolution and came to write ‘Wotan’.

JUNG AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Thus far we have seen how his clinical work focused Jung on the individual, but what account did he take of social influences? One’s first impressions can be striking and Jung repeatedly laid stress on the individual as the ultimate reality and had little interest in ‘society as an abstract thing’. For example, in 1952 when questioned on this point Jung declared: ‘You see, I am not a philosopher. I am not a sociologist—I am a medical man. I deal with facts. This cannot be emphasised too much’ (McGuire and Hull, 1980, p203). Jung rarely wrote specifically on the social dimension or its impact on either the individual or wider historical events. He was not intellectually interested in this area. The causes of this lack of interest are difficult to determine, but given Jung’s intensely introverted nature and his psychiatric profession it is understandable that his attention was concentrated towards the psychological and away from social institutions and sociological or economic assessments of an academic study of social...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Phase One: The Political Jung
• Phase Two: Exploring the Theory
• Phase Three: When Theory Meets History
• Appendix A The Question of Anti-Semitism in the Zofingia Lectures
• Appendix B The Freudians and Collective Theory
• Appendix C Jung’s Perspective on International Politics After 1945
• Appendix D Adolf Bastian and Elementargedanken
• Appendix E Key Dates For Jung During the Nazi Seizure of Power
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index