The following is a draft article version of the previous review of the book about Jung: "The Aryan Christ":
Bookreview: Jung - The Aryan Christ - the times in which he lived and links to the present
Can we learn something from history or are we doomed repeat it? The movement that brought Hitler to power did not happen in a vacuum and neither did the postmodernists of today. Trying to understand this a little better, I was indirectly encouraged to read a few books about Carl Jung and Hitler. They are not people that are normally put together in the same sentence and yet despite their great differences, a lot can be learned from the cultural background that they as contemporary of one another both shared and which gave rise to them and their ideas. The first book was a book by Milton Mayer from 1955 'They thought they were free' where Mayer tries to understand what made ordinary Germans en masse go along with Hitler. This was followed by 'The Aryan Christ - The secret life of Carl Jung' by Richard Noll and lastly 'The psychopathic god, Adolf Hitler' by Robert Waite.
The following summarizes some of the points about Jung from reading these books and a few others. Points that shocked me, but helped to put certain things in perspective.
Jung was happy to use others for his own advancement. One example was his use of his young cousin Helly in order to get a doctoral dissertation, which according to what Noll writes, played a devastating part in the short life that Helly ended up having. (pp. 47-51). A number of the things that we attribute to Jung such as archetypes, were actually done by others, that Jung forgot to credit. One of those was Sabine Spielrein.
Jung showed one face in public, which was that of a professor of science and the wise old man, while in private he delved into many kinds of occult things, portraying himself as the initiate of ancient occult mysteries. I don't have a problem with him using the I-Ching, astrology, Ouija board or that he was interested in paranormal things in general, but he seemed to display a great naiveté and a lack of knowledge that made him totally open for dark forces. Sadly that naivité is still prevalent today in what cHe could have used his scientific background in looking at paranormal things, but he ended up believing anything that came through.
Jung was able to lure rich men and women into his orbit and this played a key role in securing himself financially and fund his movement. His wife, Emma Jung was at the time of their marriage in 1903, the second richest heiress in Switzerland, being the daughter of a rich Swiss industrialist. This also enabled his bohemian lifestyle, daydreaming and carefree living.
Jung wanted a cultural revitalization and as it says on (p.57) "He seems to have been attracted to psychoanalysis as an agent of cultural revitalization through its promotion of core Nietzschean themes of uncovering, the breaking of bonds, irrationality, and sexuality. He was not alone." Could we say world revolution, sexual revolution, 1968, postmodernism? One can see the seeds of the descent into chaos, disorder, anarchy etc. as witnessed today in the search for a new utopia.
Jung saw himself as the messiah, the Aryan Christ (pp.112, 142 and many other places). Jung (1875 - 1961)just like Hitler (1889 - 1945) were to a great deal a product of the time they lived in and the various movements and intellectual thoughts of the time (admittedly we all are).
They both believed themselves to be the Aryan Christ. They both were moved greatly as young men by the opera 'Parsifal' by Richard Wagner and longed for the return to the old Aryan gods of Wotan and the völkisch pagan spirit. (pp 143-146) Noll writes:
All of the values that formed the foundation of the industrial order - repressive Judeo-Christian anti-hedonism, utilitarianism, and rational thought - were confronted with new philosophies of life or of pure experiences that exalted myth over history, impulsive action or deed over conscious reflection, and feeling or intuition over rational thought.
[...]
The iron cage of "civilization" - Judeo-Christian beliefs and other political and value systems - had to be cast off in order to recover true culture, the primordial ground of the soul, the Volk. There was only one solution: recover the "archaic man" within, allowing a rejuvenating return to the chthonic powers of the Edenic, Aryan past.(p.115).
So there was at the time a religious crisis and it was considered normal in order to become 'modern', to question and even reject Christianity (p.125) and there was a search for ancient roots. Philosophical ideas, the theosophical society, books on occult mysteries, art and a host of various nationalists movements at the time inspired many people and it is in this context that both Hitler and Jung appear. Racialist thinking dominated the intellectual debate. Anti-Semitism was equally topical at the time and Jung and his movement took on on the nature of an Aryans-only cult of redemption and rebirth. (p.108, 114)
German Romanticism which disregarded reason in favour of feelings, the instinctive and a return to nature, influenced Jung as well as Hitler. Nudism, vegetarianism, paganism, anarchism, contact with the ancestors, hiking in nature, sun worshipping, are some of the movements that stemmed from that period and thrived in Germany towards the end of the 19th century. This was linked to the idea of spiritual purity of the Aryan blood and the Aryan race which was seen as having been polluted, thus the body centered approach to rectify it(p115-116). This was part of the Lebensreform social movement of "going back to nature". The artist Fidus (1868 - 1948) whose drawings are used in the book on Jung was in this movement. Most of the ideas that the German romanticists had, can be seen today and on the political cultural scale it is easy to see which movement embodies these, namely the progressive liberal movement.
Other inspirations at the time was the movement started by another Romanticist Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852) a nationalist who founded German gymnastics societies and of which it says (Waite p 263).One of the first "völkisch Nationalists," he preached the concept of Volkstum - the mysterious racial force that shapes all history - and in 1813 he called for a national leader, "a great Führer, cast of Iron and Fire...The Volk will honor him as savior and forgive all his sins."This is just to show the Zeitgeist (spirit of the age) that influenced Jung as well as Hitler. Jung delved into the Germanic Aryan part of mysticism casting himself as the Aryan Christ, while Hitler drew from it that he was the long awaited for Führer who would be the savior first and foremost of Germany and the Aryan race and whose sins would be absolved.
Jung like Hitler were authoritarians and none of them could take criticism, both going into rages (p.187) and temper tantrums (perhaps as mentioned by Noll in regards to Jung due to a Freudian father-complex, something that Waite also asserts that Hitler suffered from). This also fits with SJW, who can't allow for any criticism and who also favours subjective feelings, emotions and instinct, over reason.
Jung went for polygamy after meeting Otto Gross, and in so doing opened Pandora 's Box, I think. It was his 'going for the pot of gold' moment and he went without looking and without knowing about the kinds of energies that it unleashed and the destructiveness of such energies both on himself aswell as others. In adopting for polygamy Jung changed a lot of his beliefs and started to see sex as sacred and polygamy as the path to unleash the ancient creative energies of the body and the unconscious mind (p. 87). Understanding the dopamine pathway and how it enslaves us to addictions might be a more accurate explanation. Despite being married and having 5 children, Jung was adamant not to give up on his polygamous lifestyle. He came to believe God was the libido and that not giving in to a strong sexual impulse could result in illness or even death and he urged his ideas on others.(p.87) One can see how these ideas very much are around to day. Jung's legacy can be seen in the pseudo-adage "Follow your bliss". Jung saw polygamy as the cure for many things and prescribed it to his male clients, an example of which was the prescribing of polygamy for Medill McCormich as a way to overcome his despair and the saving of his soul. Sleeping with clients, overstepping professional boundaries and trust ensued and needless to say, so did abuse. As has been seen so many times not least since his time, the path of polygamy goes towards the lower centers and not towards something higher and nobler.
Jonathan Haidt mentions in his book " The righteous Mind" about the six moral tastebuds. They are care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity and liberty. Jung had before meeting Otto Gross (in 1908) been a bourgeois conservative and perhaps more aligned with the full compliment of the 6 moral tastebuds. Gross was an anarchist and according to Noll, inspired Jung with utopian ideas of transforming the world through psychoanalysis (p.84). This changed Jung radically (p. 121) and with it his moral tastebuds. It appears that loyalty, sanctity and authority diminished from the list of tastebuds if they were ever really present. The same moral tastebuds are similarly absent if not low among social justice warriors (SJW) of the postmodernists today. Elevating himself to the level of God after his self-acclaimed initiation into the 'mysteries' in 1913 would perhaps have played a role in absolving himself from the hurt and misery that he caused to those around him.
Jung was at times paranoid as he "was suspicious of everyone, always thinking they had some ulterior motives." He kept a loaded pistol by his bed, so that he could kill himself if he ever felt that he had entirely lost his sanity (p.151). Interestingly, so was Hitler also paranoid and trusted no-one and thought everybody was out to get him. He too always kept a pistol by his side (Waite p.161) Perhaps that was partly due to their strong belief that they were right and their shared difficulty/inability to acknowledge the ideas of others. For Hitler's part, he also had a strong death wish.
Jung pulled in a lot of doctors and psychiatrists not to mention female patients, who became willing followers obeying the supremacy of Jung as their leader/guru and who was seen as key to their souls salvation and their own enlightenment. Again the similarity with Hitler is interesting as Hitler managed to pull in a lot of followers, the closets of whom became his generals/henchmen. They also saw Hitler as the heralded savior and followed him without questioning, perhaps due to believing in Hitler as the destined leader who would lead Germany to glory. The most influential German philosopher in the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, who also happens to be perhaps the father of postmodernism, hailed Hitler in May 1933 as the fulfillment of his fondest dream for Germany. (Waite p.324 and Stephen Hicks p. 69)
Jung spent a lot of time alone in his fantasies, daydreaming, talking to 'spirits', whom he thought of as being divine in origin. Hitler according to Waite also spent a lot of time by himself, engaged in fantasies, daydreaming and far removed from reality.
Jung was secretive and surrounded himself with an air of mystique. He talked about ancient mysteries cults that were in vogue at the time as if he was an most high initiate of these mysteries and that through him and the Jungian psychoanalytic method was it possible for others to enter the mysteries. Implied was it that Jung had the full banana and way beyond any of his followers. (pp.120 - 147).
Jung was racial in his view of spirituality as he saw it as distinct German and Aryan. This was particularly shown I think in his response to the arrival of the Greek-Armenian Gurdjieff and the Russian Ouspensky on the scene, where Jung argued for racial spirituality, claiming foreign teachings as being poison.
He [Jung] argued that Germans would find Jewish psychoanalysis unsatisfying. Analytical psychology is therefore an Aryan science and form of spiritual psychotherapy that can truly assist only those of Aryan blood. Whereas Jung considered the English an extension of Germanic blood, his tolerance did not extend to the Slavs such as Ouspensky. The English were Aryans, they could be redeemed with his methods. Slavs, although originally Aryan, had too much Asian blood mixed in; they would have a difficult time. Jews could not be redeemed. that spirituality must come from one's blood and that one should be aware of the sweet poison of foreign gods. (p.258-259)
According to Noll, then Jung learned from the set-up around Freud (1856 - 1939), which was like a religious sect with Freud as its head, pulling the strings and with supreme loyalty to him. Everybody gave Freud intimate details about each other in the group which then Freud could use as leverage and control. That aspect sounds much like Scientology. Jung venerated initially Freud in a religious way and as a godlike figure and appears to have copied. As things developed AND with the help of Rockefeller money the idea to use psychoanalysis to bring a spiritual rebirth to the world blossomed. (p.225). Considering the pervasiveness of Jungianism in psychological thought and how its influences made its way via New Age movements, then one can say that they have been very successful.
In a sense one can argue that a Jung or a Hitler were special and that if so and so hadn't lived things in our world would have been different. Looking at all the people around Jung who readily served what became the psychoanalytic movement and the prevalent zeitgeist of those times, then it is likely that if it hadn't been for Jung, who was but a mediocre doctor, then someone else would have stood up. The same goes for Hitler.
Let me for a moment speculate and entertain the idea that we are not alone in the universe and that other 'invisible' forces pull the strings much like in the Cave story by Plato. Then such forces with a much longer time horizon and planning could nicely set up conditions over millenia to take over our heart and soul. Especially if such forces do not have our best interests at heart and can hide behind a curtain. The end result of such 'programming' could be one in which we freely give up our free will as long as we can indulge our hedonist lower centers a la 'follow your bliss'. We might even beg for laws to be imposed creating a surveillance police state, just to protect us, you know. In that scenario, one could then ask if they would not also have made sure to have spare 'Jungs' or 'Hitlers' etc, up their sleeve? Surely they were not the only ones, who could have had 'godly experiences' (if need be) to make them believe they were the long awaited return of Christ. And if they both had so many similarities, was it then what made them so open/vulnerable to be used as tools for an agenda with far greater scope than they could ever comprehend.
Again if one looks at it from a distance, then the movements started by Jung and Hitler close to a hundred years ago were at the onset so completely opposite to each other, yet both wanted to destroy the existing order to bring about each their version of a utopian paradise, both essentially material in nature. Today, some vocal offsprings of Jungian thought, the ideology of the postmodernists are exponents of leftists fascism supporting a Big brother society that stifles free speech and dissenting voices, while claiming the holy highground of protecting the planet, the biodiversity, the animals, the climate and of course freedom and democracy. One can perhaps say that the herding of the sheep which started a long time ago from different directions now is reaching a common climax. Let us hope that Hitler's Third Reich was not a practice run, though the programming on the masses which Goebbels would have envied appears close to complete.
Lastly a disclaimer.Even if I found quite a number of similarities between Hitler and Jung then I am not saying that Jung was a Hitler or that psychoanalysis is nazism. The similarities were just interesting, having read the two books in succession which to me highlighted the influences at the time under a Germanic cultural background.
I also think it is important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I find that a number of Jungian concepts have validity as a framework of understanding things and one can even say that many of them are not even Jungian. He just got the credit for them, but some were worked out by his collaborators at the time or later and he also got ideas from the works of other authors, whom he didn't necessarily give credit.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana
References:
The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung by Richard Noll
The Psychopathic God: Adolph Hitler by Robert G. L. Waite
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Stephen R. C.Hicks
