Jung and Nazis: A Second Take

This piece is a sequel of sorts to the history paper I posted last week. It too takes up the subject of Jung and Nazis, but does so primarily through Jung's writings from the era. Jung basically bookended World War II with a pair of essays on society, Wotan and After the Catastrophe. This paper is somewhat of a comparison of the two, an attempt to show how Jung's ideas were influenced by the currents of the time... for the worse, yes, but also, I think, for the better. 

Jung is not often thought of as a social psychologist due to his commitment to his own brand of phenomenology.¹ He is sometimes described as subscribing to panpsychism.² But despite his introverted bias, Jung's sensitivity to society became more pronounced in his writings the older he became. One can get a good sense of how Jung's views on this subject developed longitudinally by looking at two pieces that feature prominently in Civilization in Transition, the tenth volume of his Collected Works. From them we can appreciate how Jung's outlook evolved over time, and how both the content and style of his writings changed depending on the ecology of his day.

A Living God

In 1936 Jung publishes his essay Wotan. In the piece he comments on the rise of National Socialism, the power of the German Faith Movement, and his belief that the German people have been possessed by the archetype of the old German God, Wotan.³ While Jung is mildly critical of Hitler in the essay- he never flatly condemns the Nazis until 1946-⁴ he seems cautiously optimistic about the prospects of this archetypal hold on Germany, saying:

It is above all the Germans who have an opportunity, perhaps unique in history, to look into their own hearts and to lean what those perils of the soul were from which Christianity tries to rescue mankind. Germany is a land of spiritual catastrophes where nature never makes more than a pretense of peace wilt world-ruling reason. The disturber of the peace is a wind that blows into Europe from Asia's vastness, sweeping in on a wide front from Thrace to the Baltic, scattering the nations before it like dry leaves, or inspiring thoughts that shake the world to it! foundations. It is an elemental Dionysus breaking into the Apollonian order. The rouser of this tempest is named Wotan, and we can learn a good deal about him from the political con· fusion and spiritual upheaval he has caused throughout history.⁵

Grossman notes how in the paper Jung seems to encourage the fanaticism and “irrationality” of the so-called German Faith Movement.⁶ Indeed, Jung instructs those worshiping Wotan to “throw aside their scruples” and chides those for whom Wotan worship is “a mere pretence. There are people in the German Faith Movement who are intelligent enough not only to believe but to know that the god of the Germans is Wotan and not the Christian God.” Jung is asking those of the German Faith to discard Christianity and embrace their primordial heritage.⁷

Jung is eager to demonstrate the mythological aspects of Wotan. He explains some of the mythos behind the German God, drawing heavily on a monograph written by Martin Ninck:

The Romans identified Wotan with Mercury, but his character does not really correspond to any Roman or Greek god, although there are certain resemblances. He is a wanderer like Mercury, for instance, rules over the dead like Pluto and Kronos, and is connected Dionysus by his emotional frenzy, particularly in its mantic aspect. It is surprising that Ninck does not mention Hermes, the god of revelation, who as pneuma and nous is associated with the wind. He would be the connecting link with the Christian pneuma and the miracle of Pentecost. As Poimandres (the shepherd of men) Hermes is an Ergreifer like Wotan. Ninck rightly points out that Dionysus and the other Greek gods always remained under the supreme authority of Zeus, which indicates a fundamental difference between the Greek and the Germanic temperament.⁸

It is interesting here that Jung picks up on comparisons of Wotan to mythical figures that he himself covers elsewhere, such as the spirit Mercurius. The slippery figure of Mercurius, in Jung's interpretation, is a classic example of the duality of the archetype: he is both creator and destroyer, trickster and wise man, god and devil.⁹. More importantly, Jung implicitly identifies three aspects of Wotan that match three aspects of the archetype that Jung describes in his paper on The Psychology of the Child Archetype. In Child Archetype Jung describes the archetype of the child having qualities of the past, a function in the present, and a potential for the future.¹⁰ Jung links Wotan with the Gods of the past. He describes its function as a national catalyst in the present. And towards the end of the article he speculates about Wotan's potential for the future. Therefore, Jung is not just making amplifications between Wotan and other mythical icons. Rather, he is implicitly but nevertheless systematically proofing the archetypal nature of Wotan. Thus, to the reader well-versed in Jung's work, it is evident that, by acknowledging the similarities of Wotan and other Gods, and of greater import by exploring the three archetypal aspects of Wotan, Jung is bringing the German condition of the day not just into the pantheon of myth, but into the archetypal as well. He writes:

Wotan is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife, now here, now there, and works magic. He was soon changed by Christianity into the devil, and only lived on in fading local traditions as a ghostly hunter who was seen with his retinue, flickering like a will o' the wisp through the stormy night. In the Middle Ages the role of the restless wanderer was taken over by Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, which is not a Jewish but a Christian legend. The motif of the wanderer who has not accepted Christ was projected on the Jews, in the same way as we always rediscover our unconscious psychic contents in other people. At any rate the coincidence of anti-Semitism with the reawakening of Wotan is a psychological subtlety that may perhaps be worth mentioning.¹¹

As Jung seems to suggest here with his allusion to anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, he believes “the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan's character explain more of National Socialism than” what he refers to as the reasonable factors, “economic, political, and psychological factors,” put together. As Jung explains, “there is no doubt that each of these factors explains an important aspect of what is going on in Germany, but Wotan explains yet more. He is particularly enlightening in regard to a general phenomenon which is so strange to anybody not a German that it remains incomprehensible even after the deepest reflection.”¹² Elsewhere, Jung links the mythology of Wotan and the revolution in Germany with the mass-mindedness of Dionysus. He explains:

The German youths who celebrated the solstice with sheep- sacrifices were not the first to hear a rustling in the primeval forest of the unconscious. They were anticipated by Nietzsche, Schuler, Stefan George, and Ludwig Klages[...] The literary tradition of the Rhineland and the country south of the Main has a classical stamp that cannot easily be got rid of; every interpretation of intoxication and exuberance is apt to be taken back to classical models, to Dionysus, to the puer aeternus and the cosmogonic Eros[...] No doubt it sounds better to academic ears to interpret these things as Dionysus, but Wotan might be a more correct interpretation. He is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.¹³

Jung hints that Nietzsche's own description of Wotan was archetypal. According to Jung, Nietzsche “had no knowledge of Germanic literature; he discovered the 'cultural Philistine'; and the announcement that "God is dead" led to Zarathustra's meeting with an unknown god in unexpected form...” Jung wonders if it was the “classic philologist” in Nietzsche, or perhaps his meeting with Wagner, that caused him to refer to this unknown God as Dionysus instead of Wotan.¹⁴

For Jung, to downplay what was going on in Germany as anything less than an archetypal phenomenon is simply not enough:

For the sake of better understanding and to avoid prejudice, we could of course dispense with the name "Wotan" and speak instead of the furor teutonicus. But we should only be saying the same thing and not as well, for the furor in this case is a mere psychologizing of Wotan and tells us no more than that the Germans are in a state of "fury." We thus lose sight of the most peculiar feature of this whole phenomenon, namely, the dramatic aspect of the Ergreifer and the Ergriffener. The impressive thing about the German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously "possessed," has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition.¹⁵

The piece, as it appears in volume ten of Jung's Collected Works, ends with a stanza quoted from the Voluspo that contains foreboding overtones, which seems to indicate that Jung foresaw Nazi Germany's doom. Jung himself promotes this idea in 1946, saying that “the quotation from the Voluspo with which I ended the article I wrote at that time, about Wotan "murmuring with Mimir's head," pointed prophetically to the nature of the coming apocalyptic events. The myth has been fulfilled, and the greater part of Europe lies in ruins.”¹⁶

This passage certainly gives the illusion that the Jung's purpose with the Wotan paper was to forecast Armageddon via the Germans. However, as Grossman tells us:

After the Second World War, Jung claimed to have ended the 1936 essay with a quote from the Voluspo (poetic Edda) that predicted the coming catastrophe[...] This was a distortion of the facts. The original text closed with the statement, “Then at last we shall know what Wotan is saying when he murmurs with Mimir's head”. Coming as it did immediately after a sentence in which Wotan was referred to as a recular pour mieux sauter, it was evident that Jung originally intended to conclude on a positive note. The supplementary, explanatory quotation from the Voluspo which seemed to predict dire events was only added after World War II. Unfortunately the reader has not been notified of this change, not even in the Collected Works edition.¹⁷

Thus, the original conclusion in paragraph 399 perhaps shows what Jung's original hopes about what was occurring in Germany really were:

If we apply our admittedly peculiar point of view consistently, we are driven to conclude that Wotan must, in time, reveal not only the restless, violent, stormy side of his character, but also his ecstatic and man tic qualities-a very different aspect of his nature. If this conclusion is correct, National Socialism would not be the last word. Things must be concealed in the background which we cannot imagine at present, but we may expect them to appear in the course of the next few years or decades. Wotan's reawakening is a stepping back into the past; the stream was dammed up and has broken into its old channel. But the obstruction will not last for ever; it is rather a reculer pour mieux sauter) and the water will overleap the obstacle. Then at last we shall know what Wotan is saying when he "murmurs with Mimir's head."¹⁸

Jung's essay on Wotan was meant to be an archetypal exploration of the volatile events in Germany during the 1930s. As we have seen, Jung draws upon mythological evidence to prove the primordial nature of the Wotan character. That Wotan shares characteristics with other mythical characters seems to amplify his archetypal nature. Jung further expands upon this strand when he draws upon events in the real-world to establish the archetypal nature of Wotan. This act of culling the archetypal from myth in order to connect it to reality is similar to what Jung does in other works, such as The Spirit Mercurius, The Psychological Aspects of the Kore, and even Jung's early case studies of archetypal experiences as seen in part one of Symbols of Transformation.¹⁹²⁰²¹ What is unique about the Wotan paper and indeed Nazi Germany for Carl Jung was that it was a contemporary, living phenomenon that would allow him to see the power of an archetype unfold on a mass scale in real time. This is why he tells us the Germans have a “unique opportunity” to face the collective depths, and perhaps why he also sympathizes with their condition in the years that led to catastrophe:

This is a tragic experience and no disgrace. It has always been terrible to fall into the hands of a living god. Yahweh was no exception to this rule, and the Philistines, Edomites, Amorites, and the rest, who were outside the Yahweh experience, must certainly have found it exceedingly disagreeable. The Semitic experience of Allah was for a long time an extremely painful affair for the whole of Christendom. We who stand outside judge the Germans far too much as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to regard them also as victims.²²

Hysteria

Jung changes his tune after the war and joins the chorus of those condemning Germany for the bloodbath. His post-war analysis, titled After the Catastrophe, is situated directly after the Wotan essay in volume ten of the Collected Works. Jung says of the Germans that they cannot “can rid [themselves] of [their] collective guilt by protesting that [they] did not know. In that way [they] merely [compound their] collective guilt by the sin of unconsciousness.”²³

Gone is the careful optimism of the article written a decade prior. Instead After the Catastrophe is ridden with the subject of guilt. Concerning Germany:

If the German intends to live on good terms with Europe, he must be conscious that in the eyes of Europeans he is a guilty man. As a German, he has betrayed European civilization and all its values; he has brought shame and disgrace on his European family, so that one must blush to hear oneself called a European; he has fallen on his European brethren like a beast of prey, and tortured and murdered them. The German can hardly expect other Europeans to resort to such niceties as to inquire at every step whether the criminal's name was Muller or Meier. Neither will he be deemed worthy of being treated as a gentleman until the contrary has been proved. Unfortunately, for twelve long years it has been demonstrated with the utmost clarity that the official German was no gentleman.²⁴

Furthermore, in the next passage:

If a German is prepared to acknowledge his moral inferiority as collective guilt before the whole world, without attempting to minimize it or explain it away with flimsy arguments, then he will stand a reasonable chance, after a time, of being taken for a more or less decent man, and will thus be absolved of his collective guilt at any rate in the eyes of individuals.²⁵

And later, Jung no longer explains the mass-mindedness of the Germans through possession of a living god named Wotan. He instead makes a less fantastic diagnosis:

Although we may be able to understand why the Germans were misled in the first place, the almost total absence of any reaction is quite incomprehensible. Were there not army commanders who could have ordered their troops to do anything they pleased? Why then was the reaction totally lacking? I can only explain this as the outcome of a peculiar state of mind, a passing or chronic disposition which, in an individual, we call hysteria.²⁶

From these excerpts it appears Jung has absolved a 'living god' of the blame for the Second World War and has instead placed it squarely on the shoulders of the German people. However, Jung does remain consistent in his phenomenological attitude in the sense that the kind of guilt he speaks of here is not about the actual whodunit, but rather something more psychological and collective:

The psychological use of the word "guilt" should not be confused with guilt in the legal or moral sense. Psychologically, it connotes the irrational presence of a subjective feeling (or conviction) of guilt, or an objective imputation of, or imputed share in, guilt. As an example of the latter, suppose a man belongs to a family which has the misfortune to be disgraced because one of its members has committed a crime. It is clear that he cannot be held responsible, either legally or morally. Yet the atmosphere of guilt makes itself felt in many ways.²⁷

And:

Psychological collective guilt is a tragic fate. It hits everybody, just and unjust alike, everybody who was anywhere near the place where the terrible thing happened. Naturally no reasonable and conscientious person will lightly turn collective into individual guilt by holding the individual responsible without giving him a hearing. He will know enough to distinguish between the individually guilty and the merely collectively guilty.²⁸

So Jung still is taking into account a collective level of the psyche. That said, there is no hope here about the opportunity of the masses to explore the depths of the primeval, as seen in the previous work. Instead Jung continues by asking: “But how many people are either reasonable or conscientious, and how many take the trouble to become so? I am not very optimistic in this respect.”²⁹

So has Jung forgotten Wotan? Whereas Wotan seems to celebrate the Germans' brazen exploration of the irrational, in Catastrophe Jung chides the German people for leaving their problems up to a “megalomaniac psychopath” who “proclaimed, 'I take over the responsibility!'” He continues:

Any man who still possesses the instinct of self-preservation knows perfectly well that only a swindler would offer to relieve him of responsibility, for surely no one in his senses would dream of taking responsibility for the existence of another.³⁰

Despite his scolding tones here, Jung in fact has not forgotten Wotan, but rather has blamed the Germans for letting its potential slip through their fingers:

Here again the Germans had a priceless opportunity for self-knowledge-and let it slip. And what could they not have learned from the suet-and-syrup of Wagner! Nevertheless, with the calamitous founding of the Reich the devil stole a march on the Germans, dangling before them the tempting bait of power, aggrandizement, national arrogance. Thus they were led to imitate their prophets and to take their words literally, but not to understand them. And so it was that the Germans allowed themselves to be deluded by these disastrous fantasies and succumbed to the age-old temptations.³¹

Therefore there is not necessarily a contradiction between the two essays on the subject of whether or not Germany had become archetypally possessed. Even Jung's diagnosis of social hysteria instead of possession by the god Wotan can be seen as the same thing, albeit described in less romantic words and in a considerably cooler tenor (“the first outbreak of epidemic insanity”³²). Certainly, the fact that Wotan was written in the mid thirties, when Jung was walking a delicate political tightrope while still harboring some hopes about the outcome of Nazi Germany, whereas After the Catastrophe was Jung's first written article following the war, and on some level may have been damage control for his reputation in the sense it was his first outright decry of Hitler, must be considered. Instead, perhaps what has changed from before and after the Second World War is how Jung sees society gain access to the collective psyche. Perhaps in Jung's account, the bipolarity of the Wotan archetype was lost when the Germans took the paranoid words of their high command to heart, and became hysterical. This idea seems to match with what Jung says here:

The essence of hysteria is a systematic dissociation, a loosening of the opposites which normally are held firmly together. It may even go to the length of a splitting of the personality, a condition in which quite literally one hand no longer knows what the other is doing. As a rule there is amazing ignorance of the shadow; the hysteric is only aware of his good motives, and when the bad ones can no longer be denied he becomes the unscrupulous Superman and Herrenmensch who fancies he is ennobled by the magnitude of his aim.³³

While the essay focuses primarily on the guilt of the Germans, Jung does not exclude the rest of Europe from his analysis. Just as Germany must account for itself before Europe, he states, so too must “Europe must account for herself before the world.”³⁴ Further distinguishing itself from the romanticism and mythos of Wotan, Catastrophe deals not just with guilt, but also with evil:

The sensation aroused by a crime, the passionate interest in tracking down the criminal, the eagerness with which the court proceedings are followed, and so on, all go to prove the exciting effect which the crime has on everybody who is not abnormally dull or apathetic. Everybody joins in, feels the crime in his own being, tries to understand and explain it. Something is set aflame by that great fire of evil that flared up in the crime[...] It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. The murder has been suffered by everyone, and everyone has committed it; lured by the irresistible fascination of evil, we have all made this collective psychic murder possible; and the closer we were to it and the better we could see, the greater our guilt. In this way we are unavoidably drawn into the uncleanness of evil, no matter what our conscious attitude may be. No one can escape this, for we are all so much a part of the human community that every crime calls forth a secret satisfaction in some corner of the fickle human heart.³⁵

In reading Wotan it is not hard to see why one might think Jung himself was caught up in the furor going on in Germany. That Jung was in some way complicit with Nazism is certainly a sore question for Jungians looking back at the era.³⁶ Is After the Catastrophe in some way an admission of guilt on Jung's part? He says:

While I was working on this article I noticed how churned up one still is in one's own psyche, and how difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one's emotions. No doubt we should be cold-blooded and superior; but we are, on the whole, much more deeply involved in the recent events in Germany than we like to admit[..] Neither the doctor nor the psychologist can afford to be only cold-blooded-quite apart from the fact that they would find it impossible[..] That being so[...] I must confess that no article has ever given me so much trouble, from a moral as well as a human point of view. I had not realized how much I myself was affected [emphasis mine]. There are others, I am sure, who will share this feeling with me. This inner identity or participation mystique with events in Germany has caused me to experience afresh how painfully wide is the scope of the psychological concept of collective guilt. So when I approach this problem it is certainly not with any feelings of cold-blooded superiority, but rather with an avowed sense of inferiority.³⁷

In 1936 Jung certainly writes about Wotan as if he almost wished Wotan was a true living god and not just a psychological fiction. Jung's introverted bias towards the reality of archetypes is seen in many of his writings on mythology. Jung himself often went on record about placing psychological reality above all else. In the introduction to his essay on Flying Saucers he states that “as a psychologist, I am not qualified to contribute anything useful to the question of the physical reality of UFOs. I can concern myself only with their undoubted psychic aspect...”³⁸ Perhaps the zealousness with which Jung riffs on about Wotan is an acute example of this principle. But does privileging the archetypal figure as such break one of Jung's oldest covenants concerning archetypes? Does that not leave him vulnerable as such to the mana-personality, to inflation?³⁹ Is Jung not taking his archetypal images too literally, instead of trying to understand them, thus succumbing to the same crime he accuses Germany of?

The aforementioned old covenant concerning archetypes can be found in some of Jung's earliest writings about them, before the name archetype was ever even applied, in his 1913 book Symbols of Transformation of the Libido. In the book he describes the story of a Catholic priest who troubled over the story of Judas. The priest asks God whether Judas was truly a traitor or a actually a servant in the grand scheme. During prayer God answers the priest and tells him that Judas was indeed a true servant. The next morning the priest went to the archbishop to declare that he had decided to spread God's word throughout the world. During his travels he converted to a different sect of Christianity. Jung writes:

Now we understand his Judas fantasy: he was the Judas who betrayed his Lord. Therefore he had first of all to assure himself of God's mercy in order to play the role of Judas undisturbed[...] Oegger's case throws light on the mechanism of fantasies in general. The conscious fantasy may be woven of mythological or any other material; it should not be taken literally, but must be interpreted according to its meaning. If it is taken too literally it remains unintelligible, and makes one despair of the meaning and purpose of the psychic function. But the case of the Abbe Oegger shows that his doubts and his hopes are only apparently concerned with the historical person of Judas, but in reality revolve round his own personality, which was seeking a way to freedom through the solution of the Judas problem.⁴⁰

Thus the archetypal image is a tool, a way to circumnavigate a situation too difficult or painful to otherwise comprehend. But by becoming so viscerally involved with the volatile events in Gemany, perhaps Jung in fact identified with the collective and had a moment of possession by the mana-personality. For as he writes:

Hence the "magician" could take possession of the ego only because the ego dreamed of victory over[...] That dream was an encroachment, and every encroachment of the ego is followed by an encroachment from the unconscious...⁴¹

Interestingly though, the romantic zeal with which Jung writes with in Wotan when describing archetypes possessing an entire nation is utterly absent in Catastrophe. Instead we are given cold, clinical detachment. Wotan becomes hysteria. Nationalism becomes an epidemic. The same principles are at work, but suddenly Jung is no longer writing of them with a bias towards their absolute reality. It is as if he is beginning to approach the topic of society from a way that does not privilege the reality of the archetypes first and foremost. Perhaps he does this to avoid the dangers of a slippery slope he was already far too acquainted with.

We have seen that After the Catastrophe paints a far bleaker picture than Wotan ever came close to. Jung seems disappointed with the Germans, not just for their war crimes, but for the fact they forfeited the chance of tapping into a great collective reservoir. Jung no longer writes about about the archetypal effects on the nation in a romantic manner; instead he only refers to archetypes in the most clinical means possible, and instead deploys pathological symptoms to describe the mass-mindedness of the German people. By the end of Catastrophe one gets the sense that, above all the damage control, admissions of guilt, and even his earnest effort to make sense of World War Two, Carl Jung simply feels let down by his species.

Present and Future

This fleeting analysis of both Wotan and After the Catastrophe has allowed us to see how Jung's writings changed from time and place. While it should come as no surprise that articles written about Germany would vary in flavor from before and after the war, Jung's affair with Germany gives us a valuable insight into how his thinking changed due to contemporary events. Before the war he was hopeful regarding the German nation; perhaps he even believed he was seeing real-world evidence for the existence of archetypes. But if Jung thought he would witness a healthy collective catalyst, as the original conclusion to Wotan would imply, the events that unfolded over the next ten years defied his expectations. The cataclysm seems to have soured Jung considerably. His writing is cool and at times clinical, and the volleys of myth and history that he is so fond of pummeling his dear reader with in other works are nowhere to be found. Certainly Jung sets out in Catastrophe to appeal to a world shook to its core. He is out to reassure, to assess, and to diagnose. There is also much talk of collective guilt, and even the contagion of evil. Jung admits that he himself was caught up in the fervor of the day. But he is also angry. His anger is concerned not just with the actual horrors of the war, but with the fact that the positive psychological change he was so certain the Germans had within their grasp was lost. Germany had the opportunity to prove the teleological, healthy aspect of the collective unconscious- and by proxy the validity and value of Jung's own psychological theory. The task was left to the Germans, and it was botched.

And that is why it is still a surprise that, at the very end of Catastrophe, Jung once again urges the German people to consider the opportunity they still have: “If the Germans today are having a hard time of it outwardly, fate has at least given them a unique opportunity of turning their eyes inward to the inner man. In this way they might make amends for a sin of omission of which our whole civilization is guilty.”⁴²

The comparison between Wotan and Catastrophe allows us to see that all the intrigue, controversy, and discouragement that surround Carl Gustav Jung during the Nazi years actually refines his thinking. He becomes more sophisticated in his critique on society, which culminates in his 1957 essay The Undiscovered Self. He also finds a novel way of proving the existence of archetypes in Flying Saucers.⁴³ And while Jung's pessimism towards society blooms by the time he writes Undiscovered Self, he has finally found a way to make amends for his infatuation with the living god of Wotan: by stressing that the psychological responsibility of each and every individual is the key to a better future. Self-knowledge is key.⁴⁴

Let that be Jung's legacy.

***

1Roger Brooke, Jung and Phenomenology (Trivium, March 1, 2009).

2 David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press, May 1, 2005).

3C.G. Jung, “Wotan,” The Collected Works (Bollingen, Princeton, 1971), vol. 10.

4C.G. Jung, “After the Catastrophe,” C.W., vol. 10.

5Ibid. pp.391

6S. Grossman, “C.G. Jung and National Socialism,” Journal of European Studies, ix (1979) 9: 231-59. [In P. Bishop (ed.) (1999) Jung in Contexts: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge. 92-121.]

7C.G. Jung, “Wotan,” C.W., pp.398.

8Ibid. pp. 394.

9C.G. Jung, “The Spirit Mercurius,” C.W., vol. 13.

10C.G. Jung, “Psychology of the Child Archetype,” C.W., vol. 9.1.

11C.G. Jung, “Wotan,” C.W., pp. 374.

12Ibid. pp. 385.

13Ibid. pp. 375.

14Ibid. pp. 383.

15Ibid. pp. 388.

16C.G. Jung, “After the Catastrophe,” C.W., vol. 10, pp. 401.

17Grossman, “C.G. Jung and National Socialsim,” 252.

18C.G. Jung, “After the Catastrophe,” C.W., vol. 10. pp. 399.

19C.G. Jung, “The Spirit Mercurius,” C.W., vol. 13.

20Ibid., “Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” vol. 9.1

21Ibid., “Two Kinds of Thinking,” vol. 5.

22C.G. Jung, “Wotan,” vol. 10, pp. 398.

23C.G. Jung, “Catastrophe,” C.W. Vol. 10. pp. 404.

24Ibid. pp. 405.

25Ibid. pp. 406.

26Ibid. pp. 422.

27Ibid. pp. 403.

28Ibid. pp. 405.

29Ibid. pp. 405.

30Ibid. pp. 414

31Ibid. pp. 433.

32Ibid. pp. 432.

33Ibid. pp. 424.

34Ibid. pp. 404.

35Ibid. pp. 408.

36Andrew Samuels, The Political Psyche (Routledge, 1^st Edition, 1993) Kindle Edition,Chapters 13+14.

37C.G. Jung, “Catastrophe,” C.W. Vol. 10. pp. 402.

38C.G. Jung, “Flying Saucers,” C.W., vol. 10, pp. 594.

39C.G. Jung, “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,” C.W., vol. 7.

40C.G. Jung, “Two Kinds of Thinking,” C.W., vol. 5, pp. 43-44.

41C.G. Jung, “The Structure of the Unconscious,” C.W, vol. 7, pp. 381.

42C.G. Jung, “Catastrophe,” C.W. Vol. 10 pp. 443.

43C.G. Jung, “Flying Saucers,” C.W. Vol. 10.

44C.G. Jung, “The Undiscovered Self,” C.W. Vol. 10.

Bob Log #18: Therapy=Drugs? And RIP RUC? LOL

So I know I said I would resume updating 'regularly' once I returned to Essex, but obviously I was lying. The first three days back I basically spent in a coma, nursing a cold and jetlag. After that things got a bit better. Class topics have been getting increasingly more varied and thus more interesting: Jung and Nietzsche, Psychosomatic Therapy, and Transference have all been discussions thus far. The weather has generally been mild and sometimes even sunny. I've gotten back in touch with friends and professors, and I might even dare to be productive.

There's two things I'd like to talk about tonight. First I'd like to martial my thoughts about the idea of transference and how I think it actually might be a bit misunderstood, and how that in turn affects my view of psychotherapy. Then I'd like to discuss the impending demise of Rutgers-Camden.

Is psychoanalysis bullshit after all?

You can't study a subatomic particle without affecting either its speed or position. This is a fundamental problem in physics, and some have extended it to all of science. Can you study anything without disturbing it in some way, which would then affect your own results? How would the uncertainty principle come into play with studying animals, or say, people?

Freud coined the term transference sometime around 1910. Basically 'transference' is a term used in therapy to describe what happens when the patient directs feelings towards the therapist that were originally directed towards another person, something that presumably occurs without the patient being aware of it. Freud believed that these feelings were originally directed usually towards someone in the patient's childhood (e.g. the mother). He described the transference as inappropriate, and that making the patient consciously aware of this redirection of feelings was crucial. For if the patient becomes aware of why they project such feelings, they may in turn find the cause of their mental distress. Thus, to Freud sublimation of the transference was the goal of therapy.

This view has changed a little in the past 100 years, mainly because therapists now acknowledge the importance of the so-called 'countertransference'. The countertransference is what occurs when the therapist directs feelings towards the patient, presumably as a reaction to the patient's transference. Freud believed it was essential for therapists to be devoid of any countertransference, or else their interactions with patients could become compromised. Eventually though psychoanalysts began to value equally the countertransference, because observance of reactions and hunches towards a client could offer insight into the right course of action. One person who saw the value of this before anyone else was, not surprisingly, Jung.

Embedded in all this talk is the notion of projective identification. A projection is of course a package of feelings an individual directs upon another person. These feelings often have to do with something the person hates about himself and cannot totally accept. For instance, Bill hates his own job, and thus he becomes very scathing of successful people. Or Mary hates her own disorganization, so in turn she constantly harps about her husband's clutter. Projective identification is the phenomenon that occurs to the recipient of the projected feelings. Someone who has a cluster of feelings projected onto them will actually identify with their own feelings that match the received cluster, and in many cases will bring forth those feelings tenfold for the occasion! In terms of a couple, both parties project onto the other, and if things go sour a sort of dismal equilibrium is met, where both parties are living within the bounds of the transference. People tend to go on with their lives without any awareness of this subliminal information at work.

Cool shit, huh?

But notice how I turned to normal relationships, not therapeutic relationships, as examples. Because that's the key here: transference isn't something that happens solely in some therapeutic vacuum. It should occur in all of our relationships, to some degree with every person we ever meet. I would imagine this is one reason why Jung put value on the countertransference. But even he spoke of the therapeutic relationship within a sealed vessel, a matter of alchemy. But as one of our speakers this past week noted, the notion that you can keep the transferences of client and analyst confined to an office is not really all that feasible. Furthermore, if 'transference' is occurring all the time, who are we to define boundaries for it?

I think you can start to see the prelude to my gripe here: transference is something that occurs all the time, and thus the idea you can confine it or even control within the therapy room seems erroneous to me. The therapist is put in a position of power that allows himself to dissect or disintegrate the the projections of his client at will. This is especially true of the classical Freudian view; as far as I can tell the goal there of getting rid of transference is basically a way of absolving the therapist of any responsibility within the relationship. At least most psychoanalysts today put import on their own transference, but even then there is this presumption that transference is inappropriate, something to be rid of (especially for the patient!). I don't buy that.

What are hunches, what is intuition (and I at least partially mean that in the typological sense) without prior experience to base an inference off of? If I transfer feelings towards you that I originally associated with an abusive schoolteacher and a host of other degenerates who affected me throughout my life, is my hunch then- the feelings of my transference- probably trying to tell me something useful? Isn't this essentially just my instincts and past experiences at play to give me some information that may be useful for my own survival? If transference serves some sort of evolutionary purpose- if it's about learning and adaptation- then surely it isn't inappropriate, right?

Freud himself suggests that people constantly lie to themselves. This week in class we visited Nietzsche's parable of the ancient Hebrews. The story goes that, once the Jews were kicked out of the Holy land and enslaved by the Babylonians, they had a very hard truth staring them in the face: that maybe they weren't God's chosen people. They were too scared to accept what their instincts told them, so instead they created this written myth about a promised son who would fix everything, and thus the Bible was born. In turn this created a 'bad conscience' of repressed truths deep in the psyche of humanity, waiting to burst forth. This tale is very Jungian because it speaks of collective instincts that society would be wise not to ignore, but I think it is even more akin to Freud: we are faced with a truth too horrifying to accept, so we repress it and create a nice story to get around the whole problem (As an aside, I feel as if this is a great way of bridging Freud and Jung. Jung's collective unconscious encompasses those instincts whispering to us the truth. Freud's unconscious is the 'bad conscience' of repressed thoughts and GUILT. Thus, Nietzsche acted like a mediator between Freud and Jung well before the advent of either man).

Anyways... what if neurosis has less to do with the act of transference as it does with the failure to acknowledge what the transference is trying to say? When a man despises and secretly envies the rich, is it because his hunch that rich people are selfish is wrong? Or is the problem that he fails to acknowledge what he is afraid of: that there might be something wrong with him for not being successful, thus perpetuating his jealousy? If you acknowledge the truth, you are left with merely an insight. Similarly, if a girl gets a bad vibe about her boyfriend, is the vibe the cause of the problem, or is it the unacknowledgement of that vibe, thus leading to further psychic misinformation in the form of negative projections?

Thus my gripe is this: psychoanalysts assume they can manipulate conscious awareness of the transference in their favor. A woman falls in love with her therapist, who then explains to her that it is not he who she really loves, but rather what he represents, and that coming to grips with this will allow her to happily conquer her own life. But if the transference doesn't lie, then maybe she really does have feelings for him. If so, then this dissection of what's happening between them is just a cruel way of destroying something natural, something that perhaps the professional shouldn't have been meddling with to begin with. Because here's what seems to often happen afterwards: the patient continues to just pay the bill and sit at the therapist's knee, eager for validation, until something occurs in her life that makes the sessions no longer practical (e.g. moving away).

Of course not all therapies end that way (but I'll bet my Colchester bus card it often does). Nor do all therapists choose to freely manipulate the transference. So I am not trying to crucify all of therapy here. But I do think, if my logic about transference is right, that it serves some sort of innate evolutionary purpose, then there is something flatly cruel about causing a person to pour their heart out to you, only for you to tell them that whatever they subsequently feel about you is misguided. Then the patient is completely at your will, and suddenly psychotherapy is equivalent to drugs.

If that's true, I'm not sure what that says about either, other than that if you want to help people, you best understand the sheer responsibility you face, and you better have the balls to accept it when it comes rather than blanketing yourself with a cheap professional veneer.

The transference doesn't lie. But people do.

Goodbye Rutgers-Camden?

For those who don't know, Governor Christie of NJ has announced a plan to basically excise Rutgers-Camden from the Rutgers community. Rutgers will keep UMDNJ, the major medical school in South Jersey that was affiliated mainly with Rutgers-Camden, but the rest of RU-C will be bartered off to Rowan University, just twenty minutes away. Wow!

There's a lot of outrage about this, though I'm not sure why it's such a surprise. If I recall correctly this rumor has been floating around for more than a year. It is a poorly kept secret that Rutgers New Brunswick has always seen the Camden campus as not really being part of Rutgers. Unlike the many Penn State campus, that all tend to work together and send many students to the main hub for the final two years, transferring (ha, we meet again) from Rutgers-Camden to Rutgers-New Brunswick requires jumping through seven hoops of fire and accepting the insinuation that the education at Camden is inferior to the one at New Brunswick. Honestly it's probably easier to transfer from RU-C to most other schools in the area than it is to the 'sister' campus. New Brunswick doesn't want Camden students, wants nothing to do with the RU-C community, and has probably been looking for a way to dump off RU-C for a long, long time.

The current economy and apparently some sort of financial issue with UMDNJ probably presented the right opportunity to pull this plan off. I have little doubt that a bunch of smug fucks in Piscataway hatched this plan long before Christie ever announced it. Of course everyone is blaming Christie because they're passionate liberals and he's a jackass Republican (plus: he's really fat!), but come on. Rutgers, I mean the real Rutgers, not the fake one in Camden, wields so much power in that state that there's no doubt it's Dick McCormick and friends who wanted this to happen. I also suspect the plan was in place for some time that Rowan would take over. For three years now I've heard talk about Rowan increasing their presence in Camden, and all I can think is: where? The decrepit church across the street? The crumbling RCA building? It seems so obvious now that they wanted to take the Camden campus; there's nowhere else to go.

For some reason though a lot of people at RU-C seem to be having trouble accepting all that, most bafflingly the not-new idea that New Brunswick could give a shit about Camden. No one wants to acknowledge the fact that Rutgers-Camden was never really Rutgers, but just a (yes) glorified commuter college that happened to hold the same name. It seems people are really embarrassed by that truth and don't want to accept it (aha), so instead they're blaming UMDNJ or Rowan. A lot of people are claiming they don't want a degree with the Rowan name, partially because Rowan does not have the reputation of a research school (fine), but also because they claim the Rutgers-Camden name is simply better. Lol.

Listen, friends. I went to RU-C myself, and I have a lot of friends who are still there, and who are going to be adversely affected by this change, either because their degree requirements will change or disappear entirely. And there are a lot of people in the faculty and staff who I either consider friends or like quite a lot, and they're going to get the shaft here and I think that's bullshit. In other words, there's a lot of people I like at that place and I don't want to see harm come to them. But let's be real: the Rutgers-Camden degree is not superior to the Rowan degree. In fact, in some cases it's probably inferior. A biology professor told us once about a student from the business school who finished with a 4.0 and applied to a firm in Philadelphia, that told the student they couldn't trust his grades because they were from Rutgers-Camden. Out of eighty biology students a year, on average four get into medical school. Someone I know with good grades was going to apply to University of Pennsylvania for graduate school, but was told not to by her professor, stating "you're not going to get into U Penn from Rutgers-Camden." Rutgers-Camden is not Rutgers, and it (and perhaps the Rutgers brand in general) is not some awe-respected name. This poorly kept secret is apparently not known to you, but it is known to everyone outside of Rutgers-Camden. The idea that Rutgers-Camden is suddenly a million times better than Rowan is just stupid. Rutgers-Camden is a community college masquerading as a state university with a few graduate programs, many of them absolute shit. It's the truth.

The real problem is that people will lose jobs and students will suddenly find themselves with unclear and entirely new degree requirements. Some might lose their departments altogether. That's going to affect a lot of people I like and truly is unfair. Dick and Wendell apparently sent out emails explaining the situation and assuring there would be time for dialogue, but from what I've been told in-between-the-lines the truth is clear: this is a done deal. Anyone thinking that discussion and passionate protest is going to make a difference is either has some sort of pathological fixation with student activism or otherwise still buys into the myth that Rutgers-Camden ever had any say to begin with. Everywhere on facebook people are planning protests and discussions and filling their walls with big red Rs. It's like sending flowers to make nice with a girl who doesn't like you, a girl you never even dated, but maybe in your infantile mind you believed you really did. Rutgers doesn't want anything to do with Camden. Why does Camden still clamor for that love?

The Scarlet Raptors have never been the Scarlet Knights, never have been, never will be. But that delusion has been the source of all problems at Rutgers-Camden. It's why it takes two months to get any paperwork processed. It's why you have a campus center that acts they're a hip 24/7 campus when it's really a bland bunch of buildings in fucking Camden. It's why you see a mix of burnouts and pompous fucks teaching there, because they're in this crossfire between state funding and the reality that no one there is doing research that is worth a shit to anyone. It's why you have a ridiculous situation where they've spent millions on a new cafeteria, a new gym and new dorms while the primary building for classes rots with sewage, roaches, and the occasional dead heroin addict. It's how you can have administration clamoring for more students, year after year, with no resources to back them up. It's why the biology department decided it was time to open a PhD program with no building or staff. Rutgers-Camden is not Rutgers, yet it is entirely dependent on Rutgers for everything. All money and data go through New Brunswick first. All power goes through New Brunswick first. But the willing ignorance of that is what causes all the problems for Rutgers-Camden, and precisely why this is now happening. You had it coming.

(As an aside, this is all also why certain alumni couldn't wait to get the hell out of dodge.)

It's been a sinking ship for a while guys. They've just taken the flag with the Big Red R off the top of it. Hell, I don't want to see people lose jobs or get fucked over, but this plan probably does make sense from New Brunswick's perspective. Instead of protesting the inevitable, people should start making plans to find a better boat.

Bob Log #10: A Synchronous Moment

Tonight I experienced what Jung called 'synchronicity'. Synchronicity is Jung's idea of two events, typically one physical and the other psychic, with no plausible connection occurring near or precisely at the exact same time, and thus evoking a meaningful response to the person(s) perceiving these events. They are 'meaningful' coincidences. An example would be of someone fantasizing or dreaming of a particular house being on fire while that house is on fire on or around that exact same moment. This is arguably the most radical of Jung's theories, because in it he is basically suggesting an organizing principle in nature that goes beyond typical cause-and-affect explanations bound by space and time.

I went to London this evening, partially to make amends for spending all of last week in bloody Colchester, also to lift my moods. I was feeling a bit melancholic at the time. Now, whenever I get off at Liverpool St. Station, the song 'Baker Street' immediately comes into my head. Why? I don't know. There's already the actual Baker Street Station elsewhere in London, so you'd think I'd associate the song with that location instead. But there's something about the architecture to Liverpool St. Station- huge glass ceiling contrasted by dark brick walls- that evokes a feeling that also goes off when I hear 'Baker Street' the song. I also associate this song with certain other emotions that may or may not be obvious. Basically, my mood at the time fit all this perfectly. I let it sink in before I went about my night.

A few hours later I was trekking across the walking bridge between Whitewall and the Eye of London. The eye of London is lit up on one side of the Thames, Big Ben on the other; to be standing over the river and taking this all in on a autumn night is absolutely marvelous. So I pause to do just that, to enjoy the moment, when I hear a saxophone in the distance. A saxophone playing a very familiar melody. Ludicrous, I think at first. But after an underground train passes on the adjacent bridge, I can hear it clearly. I'm listening to some performer on the walkway play Baker Street.

Random chance? That's the strongest rebuke against any idea of synchronicity. But it certainly was a meaningful coincidence for me.

Baker Street~Gerry Rafferty

First Essay for School

This isn't anything special, nor is it particularly good, but it's the first written work for the course I've had to do; a review of an scholarly article about Jung. It's ungraded; the professors just go over it to give your recommendations on your writing. The article had to review was from a guy who seems a bit too high on Jung the man for my tastes, so I ripped into him for this. That said, the limited word count (1500 words) caused me to do a lot of editing, and I don't think my argument is very clear anymore. So I'm not too happy with the product, but here it is:

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Critical Commentary on 'Understanding Jung: recent biographies and scholarship' by F.X. Charet

“Understanding Jung: recent biographies and scholarship” is a survey of Jungian history and literature by F.X. Charet, who attempts to prove that Jungian psychology is not a cul-de-sac derivative of psychoanalysis, but rather an important field in its own right, especially in terms of spiritualismⁱ. To do this, Charet focuses on Jung's fallout with Freud as accounted for in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, before claiming that the spiritual aspects of Jung separate from traditional grounds of depth psychology (and consequently the psychoanalytic community that excommunicated him) are the chief reasons for the success of Jungian thought. Several contemporary threads that run concurrent to this argument, such the research of biographers and historians, and to a lesser extent the work of the Post-Jungian developmental school in cooperation with Post-Freudian psychoanalysts, are also discussed.

Charet's aim is to indisputably establish Jung as a vital contributor to contemporary thought while at the same time to dispense with his secondary status to Freud and psychoanalysis. But Charet's favoritism towards the spiritual Jung is at expense of the more clinical, philosophical, and purely psychological aspects of analytical psychology, and his disdain towards Freudian views of Jung prevent him from expounding upon the considerable amount of common ground between Post-Jungian and psychoanalytic thought. Thus, I intend to show that, in his efforts to promote the mystical side of analytical psychology, Charet in effect cripples his own argument for the importance of Jung in modern thought.

Jung's History: Freud or Facts?

From the outset Charet argues that the expulsion of Jung from psychoanalysis in turn allowed Jung and Jungians to further enrich their thought and scholarship fully removed from the shadow of Freud. That Freud and Jung are no longer strongly associated with one another is a premise that Charet largely attributes to the damnation Freud and many psychoanalysts have cast down upon Jung and the Jungians even prior to the 1912 split. Charet is largely influenced by the narrative of this story found in Jung's biography Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He uses those notable quotes from Jung where Freud dramatically asked for Jung's allegiance with his sexual theory against the tide of occultism. According to Jung's account of his life recorded fifty years later, it was at this point he knew that he could never hold Freud's attitude towards things such as philosophy, religion, and “the rising contemporary science of parapsychology”.ⁱⁱAccording to Charet, it was at this point that Jung was prepared to reject Freud's sexual reductionism “in favour of a more profound understanding of human experience.” The rest of it, at least how the Jungian myth often goes, is history: Jung is ostracized from the psychoanalytic community, Freud and his followers paint him as a psychotic with a few good ideas mired by his own delusions, and Jung valiantly wrestles with his own unconscious to emerge with his superior psychological theory.ⁱⁱⁱ

There are problems with this romantic account. What of the alternative historical views concerning Freud and Jung, as well as certain facts regarding Jung's behavior throughout their relationship? Hayman's exhaustive work, A Life of Jung, is just one biography that comprehensively illustrates that, far from being resolute, Jung consistently floundered on his position towards Freud's dogma, often expressing full commitment to the psychosexual approach while simultaneously engaging with his symbolic pursuits^iv. At the same time Renos Papadopoulos demonstrates in Carl Gustav Jung: Critical Assessments that it is possible that the feud had actually very little to do with occultism at all. Using his hypothesis that Jung's work centered around his lifelong philosophical concern of the 'Other', or parts of his own psyche beyond consciousness, he analyzes the correspondence between Jung and Freud to show that not only was Jung's work in The Symbols of Transformation, the book often cited as the cause of the break, simply trying to expand upon libido theory in ways that Freud had already endorsed, but that Freud was actually enthusiastic about Jung's foray into myth!^v Jung had entered the psychoanalytic school in hope that it would help explain the 'Other' in the psyche, but had slowly begun to see Freud would not be the key to answering to his problematic. Likewise, Freud had seen the vigor and brilliance in Jung and had been hopeful that he would fully embrace the sexual reductionism of psychoanalysis. It was not to be.

Charet fatally ignores such insights into the Freud-Jung story, instead promoting the hotly contested version found in MDR. This leads us to the second flaw in his views here: he uses the events and ideas found in MDR to sell the idea of Jung's importance being tied to spiritual pursuits, but even still he must acknowledge the work of those like Shamdasani who show how production of MDR is dubious at best^vi! Furthermore, the idea that Jung is no longer linked to Freud is simply untrue on metapsychological grounds. Jung is tied with Freud still because analytical psychology and psychoanalysis are both depth psychologies, and thus of the same ilk and thus can possibly be of immense benefit to one another. Yet Charet seems bent on suggesting that the success of analytical psychology has taken place outside the sphere of psychoanalytic thought, and that this success is due primarily not to any psychological application, but rather to the realm of spiritualism.

Jung's Legacy: New Age or New Science?

There is no question that Jung has been of great influence to the New Age movement, and that his work has tremendous theological and spiritual implications. Charet convincingly makes this point when he cites points such as Jung's equation of the self with the God-image.^vii At the same time he veritably derides Jungians who feel spiritualism is but one aspect of analytical psychology, and perhaps not the most pressing subdivision for investigation. Charet refers to them as being “embarrassed” about their heritage, and rather than laud the efforts of developmental Post-Jungians, a term coined by Andrew Samuels to describe those Jungians more concerned with the growth of the personality than with archetypal images and the numinous^viii, Charet chides them for their attempts to use psychoanalysis to expand upon weaker aspects of Jung's ideas, especially those pertaining to childhood. He states that it “should not surprise” us that Jung's psychology is more concerned of things of a transpersonal nature, and instead spins the topic around to remind us when the psychoanalytic community rejected Jung they severed ties with things “that transcend the immediate physical realities of life.”^ix He then ends his thoughts on Post-Jungian research by stating that:

“...the two tendencies in the Jungian community, to distance from Freud or to seek a

reconciliation, reflect a certain division in Jung himself and this becomes clearer with a more careful and more sophisticated understanding of his personality.”^x

In effect, Charet is dismissing an entire realm of Jungian thought, not just the developmental school, but also applications of theory into art and science. Charet is a fundamentalist Jungian¹: to him dialogue within the depth psychologies is not an exciting endeavor to further clarify how the mind works, but simply an extension of Jung's personality.

The fundamentalism and reverence to Jung presented in this paper is akin to the gnostic views found more commonly in Jung's later work, ignoring the more clinical and arguably scientific approach taken in earlier essays. This is akin to what Papadopoulos warns as the difference between Jung's “socratic ignorance” and “gnostic epistemology,” the latter of which is often stigmatizing and lacking of any proof due tautological self-assurance.^xi Indeed, Charet implicitly argues that Analytical Psychology has to some extent fulfilled Jung's vision of a “substitute for traditional religion.^xii

Charet never embraces the obvious implications of the censorship surrounding MDR in contrast to the facts found in other, more reputable sources, and although he revels in attacks on Freud and his methodology, he is mute on the arguably louder shots that have been taken at Jung, as he keeps his discussion of Jung's antisemitism relatively brief.^xiii In short, Charet attributes the success of analytical psychology not to the theory itself and those wishing to expand it, but rather to Jung the man. Ironically, he dismisses a part of Winnicott's review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections where Winnicott speculates that Jung's psychology was really an elaborate attempt to cure himself of his own mental disturbances. Is this not, virtually by his own omission, what Jung did in his confrontation with the unconscious? Does this not align very much with the idea that Jung spent his life focused on the problem of the 'Other' in his head?

The irony that Charet seems to be implicitly suggesting throughout the piece is that in recent times it is Freud who has been defamed by popular criticism, and that by banishing Jung from psychoanalysis, it is analytical psychology that has been allowed to flourish. And yet, it is precisely that dogmatic spiritual side of Jungian psychology that threatens its very existence^xiv

Conclusion

Charet attempts to distance Jung from psychoanalysis, instead focusing on his life and biography and impressions on spiritualism as the key factors of his success. By doing this, he effectively removes Jung from depth psychology and all the fields and applications that go with it. He refuses to accept working ground between Jungians and Freudians as anything more than an appendix of Jung's own personality. Either Charet is a fundamentalist Jungian, or he is grossly misinformed on the nature of analytical psychology. For if analytical psychology is to survive, it most not laud itself as the new religion, but rather continue to expand as a psychological science.

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1By Fundamentalist Jungian, I am using the terminology first stated in Andrew Samuels' essay “New developments in the Jungian Field,” found in The Cambridge Companion of Jung (see bibliography). Per Samuels, a fundamentalist Jungian is “stigmatizing” and views Jung as a religious leader. His life is seen as the “Jungian way”.

iF.X. Charet, “Understanding Jung: recent biographies and scholarship,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 45, (2000): 195-216

iiC.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). p.150-151

iiiCharet, p. 197

ivR. Hayman, A Life of Jung (New York: Norton & Company, 1999). Ch. 12

vR.K. Papadopoulos (ed.) Carl Gustav Jung: Critical Assessments, vol. 1 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) p.405-406

viS. Shamdasani, “Memories, Dreams, Omissions,” Spring. 57, 115-37

viiCharet, p.201

viiiA. Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians (London and New York: Routledge, 1985) Ch.1

ixCharet. p.208

xCharet. p.208

xiR.K. Papadopoulos, “Jung's Epistemology and Methodology,” in The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice, and Applications, ed. By R.K. Papadopoulos (Brunner/Routledge, 2005) Ch. 1

xiiCharet. p.200

xiiiCharet. p.202

xivSamuels. Cambridge Companion. Ch.1

Bibliography

-Charet, F.X. “Understanding Jung and recent biographies and scholarship,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 45, (2000): 195-216

-Hayman, R., A Life of Jung (New York: Norton & Company, 1999)

-Jung, C.G., Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, (New York: Vintage Books, 1973)

-Papadopoulos (ed.) Carl Gustav Jung: Critical Assessments, vol. 1 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)

-Papadopoulos (ed.) The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice, and Applications (Brunner/Routledge, 2005)

-Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians (London and New York: Routledge, 1985)

-Shamdasani, “Memories, Dreams, Omissions,” Spring. 57, 115-37

-Young-Eisendrath, Dawson (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Jung (Cambridge Press, 1997)