Jung

by Phil Goss

  Key idea: Jung and New Age thinkers

  Despite these criticisms of New Age thinking, Jung’s insights into what he saw as the role of fresh psychological and spiritual awareness provide a response to a deeper collective call for change in our way of relating to symbolic and archetypal influences. He identified this era as a ‘right moment for a metamorphosis of the Gods’ (Jung, 1964, p. 585). Something is changing in the (Westernized) human condition, Jung believed, so, to this extent, what ‘New Age’ thinkers suggest may reflect a real strand in Jung’s thinking.

  What Tacey perceives in New Age philosophy is a wish to avoid really engaging with the full substance and challenge of a Jungian take on the malaise of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century mind. He makes the point that bringing about a deep psychological and spiritual change in response to social, moral, political, socio-economic and ecological challenges is, to say the least, hard work. He sums this up in this way:

  ‘The New Age says, “It’s easy”,

  The Old Age says “It can’t be done”,

  But the prophetic voice says:

  “It can be done, but it’s not easy.”’

  Tacey, 2001, Frontispiece dedication

  Key terms

  God archetype: The archetype of the numinous/divine which evolves over time and cultures; it can be seen as a representation of the self in relation to the ego, as the deeper intelligence in the unconscious which guides the latter in life.

  God image: The way the divine/numinous presents itself to humanity at one particular time; this evolves in relation to the dynamic between Gods/Gods and humanity and religions.

  The numinous: An experience of something transpersonal, divine, religious or mysterious. Casement and Tacey (2006, p. vxvi) describe it as ‘the emotional quality of religious experiences’.

  The religious function: This refers to the human psyche’s need for ‘religious (i.e. numinous) experience’ and a living spirituality which can help promote a deeper sense of meaning to life.

  Dig deeper

  Casement, A. and Tacey, D. (eds.), The Idea of the Numinous, Contemporary Jungian and Psychoanalytic Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2006)

  Conrad-Lammers, A. and Cunningham, A. (eds.), The Jung–White Letters (London: Routledge, 2007)

  Dan, J., Kaballah: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

  Dourley, J., A Strategy For a Loss of Faith: Jung’s Proposal (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1992)

  Edinger, E., Encounter with the Self: A Jungian Commentary on William Blake’s ‘Illustration of the Book of Job’ (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1986)

  Edinger, E., Transformation of the God Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s ‘Answer to Job’ (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1992)

  Germer, C., Siegel, R. and Fulton, P. (eds.), Mindfulness and Psychotherapy (New York: Guilford Press, 2005)

  Heelas, P., Spiritualities of Life: New Age Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism (London: Blackwell, 2008)

  Jung, C. G., ‘The Undiscovered Self’ in Civilisation in Transition, CW10 (London: Routledge, 1964)

  Jung, C. G. (1968), Aion, CW9ii (London: Routledge, 1991)

  Jung, C. G., ‘Psychology and Religion’ in Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW11 (London: Routledge, 1969a)

  Jung, C. G., ‘Answer to Job’ (ibid, 1969b)

  Jung, C. G., ‘Psychological Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead’ (ibid, 1969c)

  Jung, C. G., Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (London: Ark, 1977)

  Mathers, D., Miller, M. and Ando, O., Self and No-Self: Continuing the Dialogue Between Buddhism and Psychotherapy (Hove: Routledge, 2009)

  Moore, R. and Gillete, D., King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990)

  Neumann, E. (1954), The Origins and History of Consciousness (London: Karnac, 1989)

  Segal, R., The Gnostic Jung (London: Routledge, 1992)

  Tacey, D., Jung and the New Age (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2001)

  Young-Eisendrath, P., Subject to Change: Jung, Gender and Subjectivity in Psychoanalysis (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2004)

  Fact-check (answers at the back)

  1 Why was the religion of Jung’s father problematic for Carl?

  a It was too complicated

  b It only took the Swiss experience of Christianity into account

  c It was caught up with creed and tradition but not genuine religious experience

  d It portrayed Christianity as rational

  2 What does the numinous refer to?

  a Numerical representations of transcendence

  b The highest point of experience in a meditative or similar state

  c Images of the Church as portrayed in important rituals

  d The emotional quality and impact of religious experience

  3 Why did Jung think the Christian era was coming to a close?

  a It referred to a medieval conception of God and left out the feminine

  b It believed in a model of the divine which was too similar to other religions

  c He had a vision where the ‘fish’ of the Piscean era were swept away

  d He thought the rational mind was now clearly superior to the religious one

  4 Why did Jung think the Old Testament God was ‘neurotic’?

  a Job generated a good deal of anxiety for God

  b God refused to relax about his creation

  c Job was God’s therapist but God refused to pay the fee

  d God reacted to Job’s goodness by persecuting him

  5 What did Jung think was our task in relation to the God archetype?

  a To worship it/him/her

  b To help heal the split in it/him/her

  c To ask forgiveness for our shadow frailties

  d To try and portray the image of it/him/her

  6 The ‘God Image’ has had three stages according to Jung. What are they?

  a Yahweh, Christ and our psychological grasp of it/him/her now

  b Christ, Science and Contemporary

  c Yahweh, Job and Christ

  d Yahweh, Jehovah and psychological grasp of it/him/her now

  7 What does Jung advocate we do regarding the numinous?

  a Keep trying to make it appear in our lives, and contextualize this in Jungian psychology

  b Stay open to numinous experience, explore it psychologically and contextualize it

  c Remain alert to it and keep a record of when we experience it for psychological research

  d Be open to the analysis of the numinous intellectually

  8 In what way is the Gnostic approach to religion similar to Jung’s?

  a It emphasizes the goodness of God

  b It believes in the collective unconscious as created by God

  c It advocates the idea that evil is real and part of the divine

  d It promotes the notion of a higher and lower world

  9 Why did Jung disagree with the Church’s doctrine of privatio bono?

  a He saw evil as a presence in its own right and not the absence of good

  b The church represented something repressive to him

  c He saw God as a many-faceted phenomenon which we cannot know

  d The influence of the church and his father interfered with his private ideas

  10 Why is the ‘New Age’ movement drawn to Jungian ideas?

  a They are more logical than older religious ideas

  b Jung looks like a wise old man

  c Jungian therapy is newer than Freudian

  d Central concepts of a Jungian framework appear relevant to it

  18

  Jung’s legacy in politics, ecology and education

  It is not hard to see how a Jungian approach may have something to say about collective influences and developments, considering that the approach is founded upon the premise of there being a collective unconscious beneath the purely personal one. Jung’s ideas about identity, nations and the collective form a starting point for a d
iscussion about the relevance of Jungian thinking to politics and social issues. However, the legacy of Jung’s dealings with Nazi Germany, as well as some of his thinking about the differing unconscious foundations of nations, raises the question: Was he racist? We explore the debates and the evidence. We will also consider how post-Jungian ideas on ecology, education, and political issues can provide valuable insights into the challenges faced by our world in the twenty-first century.

  Peoples, politics and problems

  In his biographical work written at the end of his life, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963), Jung warned of the destructive potential of the shadow of humankind. In the face of this he said:

  ‘Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence. We stand perplexed and stupefied before the phenomenon of Nazism and Bolshevism because we know nothing about man… If we had self-knowledge, that would not be the case.’

  Jung, 1963, p. 363

  Although the two movements Jung had in mind half a century ago no longer cast their shadow, his point remains pertinent. All expressions of potential tyranny, nationally and internationally, can be seen as expressions of the shadow of all of us. ‘Self-knowledge’ therefore becomes a prerequisite for individuals to contribute to the health of the ‘body politic’.

  The way human beings get into deadly conflicts, for example, can be seen as an archetypal pattern repeating itself over and over again, from the brutal battles that established and maintained the Roman Empire through to the huge wars of the twentieth century, which sucked in almost the whole world, as well as more recent conflicts in Europe, Asia and Africa. Likewise, the ways in which societies organize themselves to protect their members and provide for them has an archetypal resonance: monarchist, democratic and totalitarian approaches all reflect archetypal, ubiquitous forms of governance.

  Jung was also interested in what might make different cultures and nations distinctive, as well as where they may have common features. It was an area he explored without the sensitivities and attitudes we now take as read. These were not on his radar and he did not steer clear of overgeneralizing, or even stereotyping, communities, nations and cultures.

  WAS JUNG A RACIST?

  Perhaps the greatest and most enduring controversy associated with Jung is the question of how he responded to the rise of the Nazis in Germany, as well as whether his approach to culture and nationality had a strand of what we might term ‘racist’ to it. Inevitably, Jungians have found this debate uncomfortable and some have steered clear of it, while others have defended Jung’s ‘innocence’.

  Andrew Samuels, however, in his 1993 book The Political Psyche took on such questions head on. His aim was, by being as open, undefensive and thorough in his research as possible, to clear the air around this question. His approach was informed by his own experiences, as a Jewish Jungian analyst, of being quizzed about this, particularly by psychoanalysts from other traditions. Jung’s ideas and approaches, however innovative and potentially valuable, have been somewhat tarnished by his alleged racism and anti-Semitism.

  Farhad Dalal (1988) was clear, after investigating Jung’s writings, that indeed he was a racist in the way we might understand this term (where this refers to someone who believes people of another race or culture are inherently inferior to their own race and culture). This view was based on the way Jung tried to group nations and races as part of a more layered model of the collective unconscious. Jung does indeed overgeneralize about the ‘character’ of groups of peoples (e.g. African) and individual nations, implying characteristics that are present in some but ‘missing’ in others. So one implication would be that African people are inherently less developed than their European counterparts because they lack some kind of civilizing aspects that ‘the white man’ may have.

  To our eyes, this kind of thinking is clearly very dangerous territory for a psychologist to get into. As Samuels observes (1993, p. 309), Jung makes the mistake of trying to generalize about the psychology of nations, to the point where he lapses into a kind of racial typology, implying that ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ characteristics are present in different national populations. However, does this make Jung a racist in a clear-cut way? Samuels invites us to consider, without in any way excusing his approach, whether Jung has set himself a trap and fallen into it, while trying to think creatively about the ways in which culture, race and nationhood influence us as individuals and societies. Jung tries to analyse this question solely through an archetypal lens. As Samuels argues, it is a major error to leave out crucial factors such as historical and cultural influences, as well as socio-economic and political ones, when trying to make sense of what generates nationhood. There is more to a nation than longstanding, archetypal, influences, and this problem pertains to Jung’s relation to Nazism and anti-Semitism.

  What did Jung do or say that might give cause for us to wonder if he, at the very least, compromised his integrity or, at worst, suggested fascist and/or anti-semitic leanings in his attitude towards Jewish people in particular? In relation to the latter, here’s a quote from Jung’s writings in 1918 in which he describes ‘the Jew’ as:

  ‘badly at a loss for that quality in man which roots him to the earth and draws new strength from below. This chthonic quality is to be found in dangerous concentration in the German peoples…’

  Jung, 1970a, para. 19

  This kind of writing reflects the attempt by Jung to portray essential features of different nations and races. In this case, he also went on to portray the writings of Freud (and Adler) as Jewish proponents of a particularly Jewish form of psychology. He argued that the deterministic nature of Freud’s approach, for example, suited the ‘Jewish characteristic’ of needing to bring psychological influences back to their material basics (in his case, psychosexual roots), as a kind of compensation for a supposed lack of ‘roots in the earth’. In this respect, Jung’s approach to the nature of ‘the Jewish psyche’ may well have got tangled up with his efforts to distance himself from Freud, and the difficulties this split caused for him.

  It is worth noting how Jung points out what he sees as a dangerous flaw in the ‘German psyche’ in this quote as well; though, again, he risks the precision of his observations in the way he makes such a big generalization about a nation and its people. However, there is no getting away from the facts surrounding Jung’s activities with the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (GMSP), which was initially based in Germany (though it subsequently became international). This came, like all else in Germany, under the control of the Nazis after they took power in 1933.

  In the same year, Jung became president of the GMSP. He took steps to make it still possible for Jewish practitioners to remain members of the society, although the Nazis had banned their involvement in a national society. Jung helped create an individual membership route instead. Nevertheless, how could someone who might profess real qualms about the rise of the Nazi party take and hold such an influential position in an organization beholden to that movement? This question applies in particular to his involvement and editorship of the GMSP journal, the Zentralblatt. This journal included statements of Nazi principles inserted by the president of the German section of the GMSP. Jung claimed later that he had been unaware of this because he edited this journal from Zurich, and these inserts were made afterwards ahead of wider distribution.

  If this explanation seems a little lame, then what is harder to understand is why Jung would not have noticed how anti-Semitic several articles in the Zentralblatt were. ‘Under his watch’, contributors wrote articles criticizing the Jewish state of mind and lauding the Aryan one. ‘Aryan’ was a term consonant with Nazi ideology and Hitler’s vision of a ‘master race’, which would be given its ‘living space’ by the conquests by the German army. The more this area is investigated, as Andrew Samuels has done, the clearer it becomes that Jung did not disown such material, even where his name was co-attributed to some of them. However, as Samuels asserts, it is also high
ly probable that Jung was focused on preserving his position as editor, and as president of the International GMSP, as he fought to hold his corner in the psychoanalytic world. Possibly he allowed his name, and his editorship, to be besmirched in order to maintain his influence in the world of psychoanalysis, as well as uphold the influence of psychoanalysis in Germany, from where Freud was forced to flee in 1939 as a despised Jewish intellectual.

  While this argument carries weight, when seen in the light of Jung’s priority of building influence both within and outside Germany, the discomfort surrounding how he chose to deal with the phenomenon of Nazism remains. He was clear about the dark, shadowy influences at work behind this movement, again attaching it to dark forces in the national German psyche, which he described, in rebuttal to Freudian theory, as possessing an ‘unparallelled tension and energy… (which is)…anything but a garbage bin of unrealizable infantile wishes and unresolved family resentments’ (Jung, 1970b: para. 354). However, his musings on nationhood provided writers supporting Nazi ideology – who we would have no trouble seeing as ‘racist’ in their attitude towards the Jews – with the ammunition to supposedly ‘substantiate’ their assertions, by referring to the theories of an eminent psychologist.

  As Samuels (1993, p. 302) observes, if Jung, as president of the GMSP had:

  ‘confined himself to the political and institutional arena, then the ingenious way in which his constitutional reforms permitted Jews, barred from the German national society, to practise as individual members would not require justification 50 years later. But at exactly the same desperate moment in history, Jung’s interviews, papers and editorials of the period… could easily be misunderstood as supporting Nazi racial ideology.’