Carl Jung's Secret Life: "The "Aryan Christ" - something rotten in Jungian psychology?

I think we can merge this thread with the Jung discussion thread where it rightly belongs.
 
I posted an intro to a book here: The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler which is so apropos of this topic, I thought I'd better post a recommendation here that y'all should go read it.

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning is a book by Jonah Goldberg, in which Goldberg argues that fascist movements were and are left-wing. Published in January 2008, it reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list of hardcover non-fiction in its seventh week on the list. Goldberg is a syndicated columnist and the editor-at-large of National Review Online.
 
I posted an intro to a book here: The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler which is so apropos of this topic, I thought I'd better post a recommendation here that y'all should go read it.

Nazis were National Socialist and Nazism and fascism had strong socialist tendencies as Nazis mentioned in their party name, but it is less about names but about acts, some communist countries had word democratic in their name, it is more that they are totalitarian in their worldview but as so through history there were many regimes and rulers that were so, and it was called tyranny, so it is same thing different names.
 
I finished Colin Wilson's "Lord of the Underworld" and I think it should be read along with Noll's book. Wilson takes a more charitable view of Jung, but I don't know if this is because he didn't dig into the archives like Noll did, or because he simply chose to ignore many things.

At the same time that he is being more or less nice to Jung, the man, he actually writes a pretty devastating analysis of Jung's ideas and modes of presentation. There's nothing mean about it, he just simply points out all the errors and omissions while also reminding the reader that Jung, himself, seemed to be a pretty messed up person and his ideas were pretty much him trying to solve his own existential crisis in terms of his historical time and place and individual personality.

It's a much shorter book than Noll's, and much easier to read but it still ends up doing the same thing: putting Jung's ideas where they belong in a category of ATTEMPTS to sort out our reality that didn't quite fit the bill.
 
I came across this video that assesses Jung based on Memories, Dreams and Reflections. For those who don't want to sit through 2 1/2 hours of it (I found it difficult and had to listen to this over the course of several days) I've added notes. I think she easily claims that way too many things lead to possession or are indications of that, like yoga, meditation, or any religion other than Christianity, which gives a flavour of true-believer at certain times, nonetheless I think she presents a compelling portrait outlying Jung's gradual descent.


Things to note:
  • He became so focused on his inner experiences that his memories surrounding outer events in relation to those experiences became 'like phantasm's'.
  • Even though he professed to be Christian, he twisted it to suit his own ends, removing concepts and ideas he didn't like, while adding in others that suited him creating his own personal religion while always trying to find connections between external manifestations and the unconscious to support his theories, regardless of whether he could find evidence of it or not.
  • Claimed that his dreams and visions made up the most important part of his 'scientific' work.
  • His mother was involved in occult practices, which she believes opened Jung up to those influences early on.
  • Goes in-depth as to how Jung came about his ideas about God, Christianity and how most of that derived from his early childhood experiences and frightening dreams - which Jung interpreted as revelations from higher sources.
  • He never questioned these experiences, but instead accepted them as truth.
  • Jung's dreams indicate an 'initiation' into the occult and a gradual taking over by dark forces.
  • Started to show more interest in plants, animals and stones and taking less of an interest in the 'human world'
  • Took his judgments and interpretations too seriously, even as a child - not open to questioning them or learning anything new outside of himself.
  • Extremely insecure with a fragile sense of self-importance growing up so in a ritual as a child buried his 'sensitive self' in the form of a doll in an attic and never told anyone about it.
  • Spent a lot of time in isolation in nature daydreaming.
  • His personality split into two - one was that of a sensitive child, the other was an authoritative personality that entered him.
  • Jung believed he was chosen and in communication w/ God thinking himself special because of his dreams and 'visions', as if he knew things that other people didn't.
  • He groped in the dark until the very end, never thinking that other people might know better about his experiences.
  • Jung himself led a normal life while this second personality of his obsessively searched religious texts and works of others for the 'dark deeds of god' which led him to deeper bouts of depression. Believing in some strange way that discovering the depravity of god could one come to understand his grace? I don't really understand that myself.
  • Was suspicious of everyone, always thinking they had some ulterior motives.
  • Dream of walking in a mist with a great gust of wind holding a small candle that he must keep lit, only to be followed by a dark shadow behind him - reinterpreted the dream to mean not losing his personal understandings, the speaker interprets this being a warning that very little of his soul remained if he continued on the path he was headed.
  • Jung did care about his patients, but because of his own instability and distorted ideas, he was a case of the blind leading the blind.
  • Suspects he worked with insane patients because he couldn't be around 'normal' people that may have seen through and questioned Jung and his ideas more critically.
  • Pushed his subjective interpretations of patients dreams onto them even when they resisted and didn't think his interpretations were wrong but that his patients weren't willing to deal with the truth of their dreams, essentially believing his judgments to be infallible.
  • Never attributed the failure of his patients to be cured on himself, but rather his patients unwillingness to accept the truth he provided.
  • Neither Freud nor Jung could accept that their theories and ideas might be wrong which was one of the main sources of friction between them.
  • Claimed this second personality spoke to him, as did god and the devil - and supposedly he could tell the difference between who was who. And since he thought he was right, never questioned these convictions.
  • He'd listen to suggestions from the devil and this second personality and proceeded to go with whichever made the most amount of sense to him.
  • Completely self-absorbed and his descriptions of those close to him are negligible. His wife is barely mentioned in the book except on a few occasions.
  • Played games he used to play as a child in order to find some sort of truth or mythology about himself?
  • When he totally let go and gave into his fantasies, in a 'vision' he consciously fell into an abyss and found himself in a dungeon - after this happened he started getting weird dreams and beings with separate intelligence would start forming in his mind and communicate with him.
  • Because of this he lost his ability to control his fantasy world because it was overrun by these 'others'.
  • It was around this time that a winged-figure that called himself Philemon appeared to Jung and became his guru of sorts.
  • This being taught him about psychology and very likely influenced his writings - 4D STS influence.
  • He later started clinging to his patients and those close to him so he wouldn't lose his sanity entirely.
  • Another being formed in his mind by the name of Ka that Jung himself referred to as an earth demon.
  • And then another being formed in his mind in the figure of a psychopathic patient of his --- A crowded house indeed!
  • His house became haunted with his children experiencing these terrifying high strangeness experiences.
  • He had a vision of his soul flying away around this time which he interpreted as meaning it went into the unconscious in order to give way to spirits to 'speak through him', rather than the more apparent symbolism of Jung sinning against or losing his soul -- this is reminiscent of Darkness Over Tibet where the greatest sin against one's soul is to allow something else to possess your body.
  • He compared himself to a medium at this point and became a vessel for these things.
  • Discusses how because Jung was fascinated by Hinduism, that this was part of these 'demons' influencing him to that direction and that pagan countries, and other religions outside of Christianity are the work of 'the devil' --- this is part of the true believer mentality coming through the speaker.
  • An example of Jung's contradictions and inability (or unwillingness) to see objectively is when he visited India in the hopes of finding the meaning of evil, only to think that those in India and China didn't hold the same moral weight to their beliefs as those in Western countries, so he incorporated the idea of merging the darkness and the light together, but without the idea of non-attachment as being a necessary factor in this because he wouldn't let go of the psychic imagery and visions he had.
  • Would state his morbid interpretations of religious texts and other work as statements of fact without ever explaining how he came to those conclusions.
  • Jung's obsession with the astral realm was a call from 'demons' towards fantasy and pleasure and away from reality - a consequence of involving oneself in the occult.
And it goes on about many other things. I guess what struck me the most is that if her account of Jung's memoirs is true, how any of this could have possibly been construed as coming from his subconscious. There's no integration of his psyche or development of his Being at all! Rather, it's the exact opposite. If other psychologists read his memoirs, I'm surprised he wasn't categorized as suffering from schizophrenia mixed with a god-complex and nixed his work entirely.
 
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"Yet Jung only offered the appearance of a scientific approach through his psychological system, for in actuality it carefully camouflaged religious and philosophical ideas disguised as science. This system in fact forms a major taproot of today’s New Age thought: occult mysticism disguised as psychological science."

Yes, Collingwood addresses this issue thoroughly in 'An Essay on Metaphysics' He doesn't like it one bit. Psychology, according to Collingwood is properly understood as the science of feeling. Any attempt to make it a science of thought turns it into pseudo-metaphysics.

The implications of so doing are significant. I was hoping I could find some relevant quotes but it's late and my attempts were unsuccessful.

Perhaps later
 
Perhaps later

"I do not think it possible to suppress, or conscientiously to conceal, a suspicion that the true explanation of these facts may be that psychology in it's capacity as a pseudo-science of thought, teaching by precept that what is called thought is only feeling, and by example that which is called science is nothing more, is no mere addition to the long list of pseudo-sciences; it is an attempt to discredit the very idea of science. It is the propaganda of irrationalism." Collingwood
 
Exactly. And the problem with all of them is that they are not considering the reality of hyperdimensions and denizens of same, densities, etc. Also, many myths began pretty much as Mike Baillie and Victor Clube describe them: as a result of cometary disasters. Anybody, be they historian, archaeologist, paleontologist, mythologist, psychologist, religious scholar, or whatnot, who does NOT take these two PRIMARY FACTORS into account, are rendered helpless at worst to fully understand and explain their material. Their explanations may approach something like a shadow of the reality - through a glass darkly - but they will never really get close enough to it to call it more than an approximation of truth.
Yep, looking back, those two "primary factors" have invariably and disappointingly been the missing pieces in the information provided over the years by so many seemingly-enlightened people. Learning about these two factors from your writings has been like getting the "keys" to the kingdom of knowledge-- keys that pull all the other insights together into a cohesive, coherent understanding of "what's going on".
 
I was really embarrassed, sorry. I had to accept what happened, thanks for not reacting on my comments. I feel better now and my tooth infection is almost gone. I watched few weeks ago (by accident, I was afraid to go to sleep because I had bat and than a moth invasion in my home at night)an episode of Criminal minds in which an actor totally looked like my cousin and the show ended with quoting CGJ something about Synchronicities. And than few days later I met a friend who married into a family of a serial killer, we shared our stories and I told her every village has one of such troublemakers( which is unfortunately true for our area). It's important to let go of things you can't change. Talking about Syncronicity, that's probably something Jung stole from someone?
 
I finished the book ‘The Aryan Christ’a couple of months ago, after having first read Milton Mayer’s book ‘They thought they were free’. The book by Noll gave a lot of context to the first book. Following this, I read the book ‘The psychopathic god, Adolf Hitler' and this book gave a lot more context for both the time in which Jung but also Gurdjieff lived and also the postmodernist movement. It led to a reflection of my own life and of being involved in one of these New Age ‘vacuum cleaner movements’ which was greatly inspired by Jung but also curiously by Gurdjieff. I will detail that later in a different thread already in existence.

The following is a summarizing of some of the points I made about Jung from reading Noll’s book and the book on Adolf Hitler :

  • Jung was happy to use others for his own advancement. One example was his use of his 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)
  • 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. 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. He could have used his scientific background in looking at paranormal things, but he ended up believing anything that came through.
  • 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 old Aryan gods of Wotan and the völkisch pagan spirit. (pp 143-146) 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. As Noll writes: “The multifaceted Volkish movement (Volkstumbewegung) had a broad plan for Germanic society: Anti-Semitism was equally topical at the time (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, contact with the ancestors, hiking in nature, sun worshipping, are some of the movements that stemmed from that period and thriving in Germany towards the turn of the 20th century. This was linked to the idea of spiritual purity of the Aryan blood and the Aryan race which was seen as polluted, thus the body centered approach (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.
    On the political scale it is easy to see which movement today would show more approval of such, namely the progressive liberal movement. It would affect those more who were more in deficit of all the six moral tastebuds (using the model of Jonathan Haidt), especially sanctity.
  • 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). 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 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.
  • 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 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 and are similar to postmodernism of 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.
  • According to the notes that Turgon posted then he was paranoid as he “Was suspicious of everyone, always thinking they had some ulterior motives.” Interestingly, so was Hitler. Perhaps that is due to their strong belief that they were right and their shared difficulty/inability to acknowledge the ideas of others.
  • 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. Again the similarity with Hitler is interesting as Hitler managed to pull in a lot of followers, the closests of whom became his generals/henchmen. They also saw Hitler as the savior and followed him without questioning, perhaps due to believing in Hitler as the destined leader who would lead Germany to glory.
  • 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 violated the trust of patients by sleeping with them and thus abused that vulnerability that patients put themselves in when seeking therapeutic help.
  • Jung was secretive and surrounded himself with an air of mystic. He talked about ancient mysteries cults that were in vogue at the time as if he was an initiate and that through him and the Jungian psychopanalytic method was it possible for others to enter the mysteries. Implied was 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 Gurdjieff and Ouspensky on the scene, where Jung argued for racial spirituality. He said that Germans would find Jewish psychoanalysis unsatisfying, that spirituality must come from one’s blood and that one should be aware of the sweet poison of foreign gods. (p.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. That aspect sounds much like Scientology. Jung venerated Freud as a godlike figure andappears to have copied this from what I gather. 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 and the offsprings via New Age movements, then one can say that they have to a large extent been successful. This along with the remarks by the C’s that “Nazism was a trial run” and “Programming is complete”, makes one wonder.
  • Jung was able to lure rich women into his orbit and thus secure himself financially and fund his movement. This also enabled his bohemian lifestyle and daydreaming and carefree living.
  • 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, whom Laura called a mediocre doctor, then someone else would have stood up. The same goes for Hitler.
    If the hyperdimensional controllers have been busy setting up the conditions for millennia to accomplish a complete programming so as to take-over, would they 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. The herding of sheep from different directions towards a common point far in the future (which is now).
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 the two books in succession and it highlight the influences of 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. And I do find it interesting that Jordan Peterson, to his credit, got so many insights from the work of Jung. It could also lead JP to 'inherit' the blinders that Jung had and interpret hyperdimensional realities as just psychological archetypal patterns.
 
Wow! That's a great review and I hope you tweak it just a tiny bit to turn it into a sott article!

I agree that reading those books in juxtaposition to each other really contributes to fleshing out the whole picture.

Now you may want to read the book I just reported on in the science board: "Genetic Entropy"... boy, did they all get it wrong!
 
Nudism, vegetarianism, paganism, contact with the ancestors, hiking in nature, sun worshipping, are some of the movements that stemmed from that period and thriving in Germany towards the turn of the 20th century.
Thorbiorn just made me aware of a typo. It was at the turn of the 19th century ie. around year 1900.

And thanks for the hat tip Laura. The book suggestion sounds great and your description of it makes it sound as an easy read.
 
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 old Aryan gods of Wotan and the völkisch pagan spirit. (pp 143-146) 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. As Noll writes: “The multifaceted Volkish movement (Volkstumbewegung) had a broad plan for Germanic society: Anti-Semitism was equally topical at the time (p.108, 114)

I think your summary nails it. For me it was kind of creepy to get an inside scoop to that Volkish ideological possession and I had the same feeling while reading "The Psychopathic God" (I'm not entirely finished yet with this book). I think it will be quite awhile before I can listen to Wagner again.

"Race and Human Evolution" by Wolpoff and Caspari also gave the racial ideology background which helps to see how Hitler just naturally filled the role expected of someone like him.
 
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