In the aftermath of World War 2 and since, controversy has raged about Carl Jung’s attitude to Nazism, with some condemning him as a Nazi sympathiser, and others defending him in the strongest terms. After reading Deirdre Bair’s detailed biography of Jung, and following up my recent post (and as yet unpublished book) on Jung and the Middle Way, it seems increasingly clear to me that this is a classic case of a messy Middle Way strategy being misunderstood by polarised interpreters on both sides.
Jung was a citizen of Switzerland, which remained neutral throughout the Second World War. However, throughout the 1930’s he remained the president of an international psychoanalytic society that was based in, and dominated by, Germany. From the time of the rise of Hitler in 1933 this society was subject to Gleichgeschaltung, the regulations by which the Nazi government ensured conformity to Nazi values in organisations of civil society. In many ways Jung was a convenient tool for the Nazis, as they were able to use him as a source of credibility for their gleichgeschaltet version of psychoanalysis, purified of what they considered the corrupting Jewish influence of Freud with his decadent emphasis on sexuality. Although there was ambiguity in this position, because the society was formally international, the Nazis were able to manipulate that ambiguity, and he was only finally able to resign from this presidency in 1940.
It is this involvement, together with a number of incautious public statements about the psychology of races and nationalities (some of which generalised about Jewish psychology as distinct from other races) that form the basis of a case against Jung that has been raised on a number of occasions by his detractors, and even led to one (not very realistic) proposal that he be prosecuted at the Nuremberg war crime tribunals. For his critics, any compromise with Nazism or involvement in Nazi-dominated organisations makes Jung a Nazi sympathiser, and any generalisations about the psychology of Jews make him anti-Semitic.
However, Jung’s position was highly ambiguous. On his own account, his motive in remaining involved with the Nazi-dominated society was to maintain the position of psychoanalysis and to help Jewish psychoanalysts. If he had tried to take a position of purity and refused to be involved, he would have lost the possible opportunity to help psychoanalysis survive in Nazi Germany, and the opportunity to help maintain the status of persecuted Jewish psychoanalysts. After 1940, with the cohesion of the international society destroyed and Freud having fled to England, it is fairly clear that he recognised such hopes as naïve. However, he did manage one substantial achievement, which was to employ an (ironically Jewish) lawyer called Rosenbaum to introduce lots of loopholes into the anti-Semitic regulations being introduced to the society by the Matthias Goering (cousin of the more famous Goering) – who effectively developed political control over it.
As in many such highly charged and polarised political contexts, there is plenty of evidence that can be seized upon and interpreted one way, and also plenty of evidence the other way. Any case thus becomes overwhelmingly a product of confirmation bias. There is also plenty of scope for hindsight bias if we assume that the attitude Jung took to Nazism earlier in the 1930’s should have been based on their later actions – but nobody knew the full horrors to come. Highly unscientific generalisations about the psychology of races were also common currency at the time.
Later in the war, Jung also became involved in support of a plot to get Hitler overthrown, effectively providing advice about Nazi psychology to a US secret service operative working in Switzerland, as well as psychoanalytic support to a close friend who was more directly involved, both of whom were working in support of a German officer involved in a plot to overthrow Hitler. Jung’s support for anti-Nazi activities may have even gone further than this. Allen W. Dulles, the US agent mentioned, is quoted by Bair as saying “Nobody will probably ever know how much Professor Jung contributed to the Allied Cause during the war, by seeing people who were connected somehow with the other side.” Dulles went on to decline to give further detail on the grounds that most of the information was classified.
What makes me think that Jung was attempting to practise the Middle Way in any sense in this complex and ongoing situation? Partly my reading of the Red Book, which mentions the Middle Way explicitly, as I have discussed elsewhere. Partly, however, it also seems the best way of making sense of Jung’s actions. He was not ideologically motivated, though he could often be accused of political naivete. He saw the justification of one action or another in the situation, even when that situation was one dominated by Nazism, rather than solely in the terms of an ideal situation in which Nazism was not dominant. His moral values were those of individuation (as he usually called it) or what I would tend to call integration, the actual practice of which depends on the quality of judgements rather than any pre-formed general rules about the objects of those judgements.
His involvement was thus deeply messy, and he obviously left himself vulnerable to blame from both sides. It was not Nazi or Anti-Semitic, but neither was it Anti-Nazi in a way that would have made his activities less effective at the time by seeking purity from Nazism. However, it does also seem that he could have followed this path more effectively than he did: by developing more politically awareness, by seeking clearer evidence than he had before making racial generalisations, and by making the Middle Way a more explicit basis of action so as to reduce the chances of being misunderstood. Like the rest of us, however, Jung had limited knowledge, limited abilities and limited understanding with which to work, and the path of the Middle Way only requires reconciliation and adaptation to these conditions, not an unrealistic expectation of transcending them, as a basis for responsibility.
I can even find some inspiration in the way that Jung handled this difficult series of situations, not despite, but because of the many human failings that his biography has made me all too aware of. Would I, or any of us, have done better? Adopting the principle of charity seems to be the first requirement for reading the situation – a principle that allows us to appreciate the strength of messy achievement without idealising it.
It is easy for those who did not live in Nazi Germany to make moralistic judgements on those who did. How a ‘civilised’ society such as Germany could be involved in the atrocities of the 1930’s & 40’s is commonly questioned and explored. Any answer will be complex and must take into account the conditions that could have influenced each of the, many, individuals involved: fear, financial/ social desperation, prejudices, cognitive bias, and so on. To assume that Jung was an ideological Nazi based on the evidence available is an act of gross over-simplification. Criticising what he did or did not do to challenge the situation, on the other hand, seems a much more reasonable pursuit.
I had long believed that the Catholic Church had supported the Nazi party, and in a way they did, but not for the simplistic anti-Semitic reasons that I had assumed. The Pope at the time (I forget his name) did make an early deal with Hitler, but there is evidence to suggest that he did this in order to protect the Catholics who lived in Germany from persecution. Of course one could argue that he should have defied the Nazi regime, regardless of the consequences, but this might not have seemed such a clear choice at the time. I wonder if many of the people living in the shadow of the Nazi regime, Jung included, had to make similar decisions. As it happened, Hitler broke the terms of his agreement with the church and many Catholics, being seen as a threat to the Reich, were persecuted; a great many were murdered or sent concentration camps.
What I have always found most interesting is the constant focus on Nazism in Western media and by Western intellectuals while other events like the starvation of six millions Ukrainians by the Communist regime in the Soviet Union, the 25 millions deaths by Stalin or the 50 million starved and killed in the Mao Communist regime in China gets overlooked.
Why is that?
I mean it cannot be cruelty which attracts all the attention to Nazism because the Gulag system cannot be said to be more humane, nor the starvation of millions in the Ukraine or China by the communist regime.
So what is the reason that keeps Western academia spending hundreds of millions of Dollars each year on research regarding Nazism and Holocaust?
What exactly attracts the attention? It probably must have to do with shadow part of our subconscious. The unwanted, surpressed desire to express our hatred and envy.
What do you think?
Hi Georg, I don’t really know the answer to your question. I could make some suggestions, and I suspect the most likely of them is simply geographical and cultural proximity for Anglophones and Western Europeans. The Holocaust as the deliberate genocide of an ‘othered’ racial group on a massive scale, with the cool calculation with which it was executed, also has a unique shock value that ‘mere’ mass execution of political opponents might lack. It’s not just about numbers.
Could I ask you a question in turn? Why is this especially significant? The Holocaust was pretty bad by any standards, so is attention to it bad in some way, just because it’s not totally consistent? There’s a danger here of the tu quoque fallacy – namely assuming that hypocrisy by itself makes a claim wrong.
Interesting. My intention was not to downplay the atrocities of the holocaust. Rather to ask the question what the interests are in continuous research on this topic. Of course, it is an impossible task to answer it.
The other question is whether or not research on the atrocities of the communist regimes would be of benefit. This question goes much deeper as it might seem. At the foundation it is an ideology question as most political left probably would not be interested in researching the atrocities of a communist regime. In fact I think that some of the interest behind studying the holocaust is because of its affiliation with a far right wing party. In other words, it provides an easy argumentation against conservative policies.
Maybe I am totally wrong with this speculation.
Because among many Western academics, the idea of an uncivilised Russian, Ukranian, Chinese regime; the idea of an uncivilised Communist regime, I would argue, is far more acceptable than the idea of an uncivilised Capitalist, Western, First World Country such as Germany; one that at some point operated under Democracy. Therefore, whether for better or worse, the Nazis install a sense of disbelief in Western Academics and causes a great deal of morbid curiosity; moreover, with Germany being a western country, it is easier for Western academics to relate themselves at the time to the same Euro-centric culture that centres around freedom and acceptance – surely to them, it is absolutely unacceptable that Westerners could be so “savage”. Studying Nazis in such obsessive almost morbid curiosity is another way for Western Academics to create a cultural climate that distances themselves from a tragedy that they cannot distance themselves through other ways; what I mean to say is that Western Academics can easily distance themselves from atrocities such as the gulag because that is not a Western Country; that is not them. This removal of the self from the situation to avoid the thought that one day you could easily be part of the problem as well is necessary for all historians; and the morbid study of Nazism is much like the study of some wild animal: “The Nazis did this/The Nazis did that”. The removal of the word “the people” and being replaced by the word “the Nazis” removes any sense that one day, the same people critiquing these injustices could themselves be perpetuating them.
I will answer this five years down the line.
Communism under Stalin or Mao never killed as many innocent people as Nazism did, nor did it maintain the extermination of races as its main goal.
You mention Ukrainian starvation, which is a HOTLY contested topic, but the academic consensus is that it was not an intentional genocide. Stalin’s poorly implemented collectivization destroyed agrarian production which already struggled through the Russian Civil War. There was absolutely no way to provide food for the (accepted number) of 3.5 million Ukrainians who starved to death. A lot of aid was stolen and eaten by soldiers, bandits, or other peasants, since the famine was USSR-wide.
According to Wheatcroft and accepted by Conquest (where the higher estimates came from outside of Nazi propaganda), the *real* crime was not the famine, but Stalin’s heartless attempt at a cover-up. He bluntly said that the famine was under control and everything was Nazi lies. Well, many Ukrainians fled to Germany, were picked up by the newly empowered Nazi party, and used to claim Stalin was manufacturing a genocide. Stalin outright dismissed this, refused to claim *any* responsibility, and as a result, the world trusted the Nazis exaggeration of the truth rather than Stalin’s attempt to sweep it under the rug.
The Gulag system was not an original idea from Stalin or Lenin. I often tell people it is VITAL to study the Tsardom if you want to understand the USSR. The Gulag was derived from the tsar’s Katorgas, mining and labour camps that were often remote, isolated, and in harsh climates. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno would all spend years in these prisons. Iirc Lenin’s and Trotsky’s were more urban, but Makhno was tortured for a decade and after two escape attempts, Stalin was sent to a camp far north of Mongolia, accessible only by riverboat. I won’t make excuses for the brutality that occurred in the Gulag, but I think it’s vital to understand that incarceration was even more standardized (along with summary executions) under the tsar.
One of the reasons communism is not studied seriously in the west is because the 1917 revolution was an extremely popular movement, and it was not the first revolution. In 1905, during an attempt to deliver a petition on working class conditions to the palace, the tsar ordered his Cossacks to fire on the crowd. This killed 200+ people and immediately led to a revolution attempt which was violently suppressed. The Tsars journal entry for that day was about a visit from his mom. No mention of his order to have people shot in the street.
Mao is a very different topic. China was *actually* a feudal state with less than 10% literacy. We talk about Mao killing “landlords,” but it’s important to note that these were not rent-seekers, they were feudal lords of the land who functionally owned the people who worked their land.
When Mao had his soldiers visit rural towns to speak with peasantry, there were absolutely witch hunts against the wealthy, but there are also stunned reports from soldiers of peasants taking guns and immediately killing their landlords, telling the soldiers that those landlords had been killing and raping their subjects for decades.
The famines caused by Mao’s regime should actually be blamed on Stalin, by my estimate. Mao was attempting major agrarian reform in an attempt to empower the peasantry through food production, and to achieve this goal he wanted to use the most advanced Soviet science. Unfortunately, that was Lysenkoism, a theory created mostly on the basis of doing the opposite of what the Nazis did. Of course this meant that ethics were a bit better (kind of lol) but also Lysenko was rejecting EVERYTHING, including basic farming science. His methods were disastrous and since they were applied so broadly in an already fragile agricultural industry, the whole thing collapsed. Mao was blind-sided, largely because the Soviet literature he had read had said that Lysenkoism was a great achievement. Soviet propaganda had fooled Mao and his cabinet into adopting a destructive policy.
When we study communism and Nazism (or any history), we need to look at what came before. Death tolls and living conditions under Stalin or Mao don’t mean much unless they’re compared to death tolls and living conditions under the feudal governments that preceded them. Compare that to the Nazis, and you’ll see that the Weimar Republic was actually a pretty decent place to live for the overwhelming majority of people, especially compared to Germany under the Kaiser pre-WWI. It was an academic, arts, medical, and political hub. Germany hadn’t recovered militarily or financially from WWI, but they weren’t just murdering each other in the street until Hitler and the Nazis began their coup attempts and suckered in a broad tent of early supporters with empty promises. Hitler’s plans were explicitly about extermination and expulsion of Jews as the root cause of Germany’s “problems,” and from his rise to Fuhrer in 1933 onwards, he implemented policies of “extermination through work,” using Jewish slaves to manufacture weaponry until they died from exhaustion or beatings. While the Einsatzgrüppen was generally given carte blanche to commit mass murders and incarceration during their early expansion into the Baltics, it wasn’t until 1942 that they launched the Final Solution campaign where they began liquidation by the millions through the use of the gas chambers.
Understanding communism requires nuance and a materialist approach that can understand how and why mass movements like that start, as well as how they are co-opted, how they fail, and how the brutality of the past affects those governments’ approach to establishing power and authority.
Fascism bedecks itself in individualist and egoist justifications, be that the machismo of fascist Italy or the revival of the hero cult by Nazi Germany, but at the core the belief is anti-intellectualism, “Might Makes Right,” as written by proto-fascist Ragnar Redbeard.
Hope this helps.
Hi Nat, I happened to have some of Jung’s books, including “Jung speaks”, where he makes some interesting remarks about America. I knew he had performed a “psychological portrait” of all three dictators (Mussolini is described as an opportunistic, childish and vain bully, while Stalin as a brute), which is the reason why he advised Americans to first fight against Hitler. Regards, Rodolfo https://babel-ua.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/babel.ua/en/amp/texts/94183-a-year-before-wwii-doctor-carl-jung-made-psychological-portraits-of-hitler-stalin-and-mussolini-and-accurately-predicted-their-future-here-are-the-main-theses-of-the-prophetic-diagnosis-and-a-bold-hin?amp_gsa=1&_js_v=a9&usqp=mq331AQIUAKwASCAAgM%3D#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=17229841931690&csi=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&share=https%3A%2F%2Fbabel.ua%2Fen%2Ftexts%2F94183-a-year-before-wwii-doctor-carl-jung-made-psychological-portraits-of-hitler-stalin-and-mussolini-and-accurately-predicted-their-future-here-are-the-main-theses-of-the-prophetic-diagnosis-and-a-bold-hin
Hi Georg, I appreciate the provisionality. I’m really no expert on either the Holocaust or Communist atrocities, but my impression is that both have been quite extensively researched and discussed by historians. I also can’t think of any influential left-wingers who would be likely to be opposed to research into Stalinist or Maoist atrocities. After all, many of the people Stalin and Mao killed were sincere Communists!
Yes, I think the issue goes much deeper. After all Stalin and especially Mao made Hitler look like a romantic amateur in some sense.
I think Jordan Peterson talks about ideology, politics and power and it’s connection to the atrocities of the 20th Century. He also talks about how communist regimes and their atrocities get comparably little attention which favors repetition of history.
Ps. In case you want to get some attention on your website, listen to his maps of meaning lectures and write some posts about it! 👍
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XY7a1RXMbHI
In fact I believe that the 20th century provides a perfect example on how to apply a middle way philosophy. Jordan Peterson pointed out that with the loss of religion and the death of God the 20th century began and in the middle of the century was in at most chaos with Mao killing almost a 100 million people in the name of absolutist communist ideology.
In 2021, those comments made in 2017 seem hopelessly naive, falling into the same trap that Jung fell into in Central Europe. Fascism was never defeated. It roared through the person of Donald Trump, and we saw nazi flags on display yet again in the storming of the US capital. A nazi displaying nazi regalia was just arrested in Texas plotting mass murder. Those who continue to think fascism is some passing fad aid and abet it.
Hi Geoffrey, I don’t really understand what you think was naive in the blog. The blog doesn’t claim that Fascism has been finally defeated – it focuses on Jung’s ambiguous responses to it. I was as shocked by Trump’s links with the extreme right as anyone else, but I can’t see any obvious reason why that undermines what I have written about Jung here.
I agree with the middle way idea since Jung wanted to keep the door open for possible help defuse the war, but it did not work. Jung being the diplomat and even in his psychology looked at both sides, but Jung underestimated the NAZI’s who simply used Jung for propaganda an attached his name to their side and and completely suppressed any of Jung’s criticisms. In Jung’s own words not any of his writings was not tampered with by the NAZI’s. When Jung psychoanalyzed Jung and said about Hitler being a madman and a psychopath, Hitler put Jung on his hit list of men to kill. Consequently, Jung moved away from where he lived to a safe, hidden place during the war.
If someone hasn’t done so already, someone needs to do a deeper dive into this subject particularly regarding the archives of the OSS during WW2 as Francis Stonor Saunders did with art during the cold war with her book CULTURAL COLD WAR. I do recall finding and reading an article many years ago that Jung wrote for a US magazine like Collier’s or similar in the late 1930s or early 1940s where he was taken aback by the psychiatric problems of the German patients coming to him for treatment and what it meant in terms of the psychic reality of Germany and war. In the tone of it, he wasn’t happy about what he perceived. I didn’t sense a lot of sympathy for the Nazis in the article.