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By Alexander Jacob, University of Toronto
Vol. 33, Mankind Quarterly, 06-01-1993, pp 379.
The purpose of this paper is to identify the philosophical difference
between the two most influential psychological systems of the modern age,
those of Freud and Jung, in order that we may better appreciate their
differing social implications. This is significant in so far as the Freudian
psychoanalytical movement is essentially rooted in ancient beliefs capable of
being traced back through the Cabala even to distant Babylonian traditions,[1]
whereas Jungian thought is rooted in a more distinctly Western tradition.[2]
It may be stated at the outset that, as has been well recognized, Freud's
psychological concepts were deeply rooted in ancient Middle Eastern traditions
through his deep understanding of the great wealth of the Jewish cultural
heritage. Yet we may also perceive in some of his writing a deliberate attempt
to find alternatives to the major philosophical principles of the European
civilization which surrounded him, yet regarded him as alien. In The
Interpretation of Dreams, for instance, Freud admitted that he saw himself as
a modern Hannibal who would take vengeance on Rome, which symbolized European
culture in general and the Catholic Church in particular.[3] That he should
have succeeded to a great extent in his undertaking is part of the dilemma of
the modern West.
Marthe Robert, in her book on Freud's sense of his own identity, From
Oedipus to Moses,[4] has revealed the conflict between the ethnic roots of the
psychologist and the classical foundations of the European society in which he
lived. We may recall here that the Jews were emancipated only in 1867 in
Austria and two years later in the North German Confederation, and Freud must
therefore have been very conscious of being an "outsider" in gentile Viennese
society. The acceptance of the Jewish people into Central European society was
slow and marked by suspicion and strife between the two communities. Thus, as
Jacques Maritain has pointed out: "at the bottom of Freudian metaphysics there
is - the resentment, Freud himself has explained, of a soul insulted and
humiliated since childhood, a resentment, as it seems, against human nature
itself. "[5] In many ways Jewish scholars were more free to see gentile
European clearly, free from the sense of involvement that might cloud the
minds of gentile scholars. On the other hand, they must also have had problems
in comprehending just how the Europeans themselves felt about the social
behavior they observed. In a sense they were in the same position as Europeans
studying African and Asian societies. From the outside some things seemed
familiar, but those same things could not be understood easily when one was
not brought up with them from childhood. It is not surprising, therefore, that
Freud told his fellow members in a talk before the B'nai B'rith that: "Because
I was a Jew I found myself free from many prejudices which restricted others
in the use of their intellect; and as a Jew I was prepared to join the
Opposition and to do without agreement with the 'compact majority".[6] Freud's
persistent representation of civilized society to man's sexual instincts may
therefore have been more than simply a product of a purely materialistic
psychology, it may indeed have been, as Robert called it, a conscious attempt
to turn "the world upside down by revealing the impure source of all the
creations of the spirit".[7]
The chief assumption of Freudian psychology is that all the effects of
so-called culture and civilization are social manifestations of infantile
instincts which, first and last, retain their primitive character as sexual
and aggressive. This limited view of human nature and its spiritual products
is due to Freud's inadequate scheme of the psyche as being constituted of
three main elements, the id, the ego, and the super-ego. There is no clear
demarcation between the id (or libido), and the ego, or rational intellect,
since the unconscious, instinctual drives of the id are present with the ego
throughout its development and characterize it strongly even in its highest,
"civilized" state. As for the so-called super-ego, this is not really an
integral part of the self, but a product of the interaction between the
individual self and the societal psyche which serves as an admonitory agent,
or "conscience", to the ego. Indeed, Freud maintains that conscience is
derived from the earliest childhood experiences of a person, so that the
superego is the parental image internalized. Conscience is actually a form of
aggressiveness which, strangely enough, "does not so much represent the
severity which one has experienced from [the parent] or which one attributes
to [him]; it represents rather one' s own aggressiveness towards it".[8] It is
true that Freud admitted "archaic vestiges" in the superego, and so he came
close to admitting that the unconscious cannot really be entirely dependent on
its conscious interaction with external reality, as Jung was later to
establish. [9] But the general attribution of the moral faculty to familial
circumstance and society in Freud's system, rather than to the individual
psyche itself is a distortion of idealistic philosophy which is typical of a
rational-materialistic philosophical trend which embraced both Spinoza and
Marx. We shall see later how Jung corrected this inadequate view of conscience
through his system of archetypes. Indeed, the major defect of the Freudian
psychology, as Reinhold Niebuhr has admirably shown, is that "[S]ince Freud's
system is a consistently naturalistic one, it can not, despite the subtleties
of its analyses of the intricacies of human selfhood, do full justice to the
transcendent freedom of spirit of which the self is capable and it cannot
survey the creative and destructive possibilities of that freedom".[10]
Niebuhr insists that the self is always more than mere reason: "No doubt the
self uses all of its rational faculties as instruments of this freedom. The
freedom is however more than the capacity for discursive reason and the
creative capacities of this freedom do not prevent it from being used
destructively or egoistically".[11]
Freud's view of the development of human civilization is akin to Hobbes' s
since it repeats the Hobbesian thesis of the state of nature as being one of
strenuous efforts to satisfy physiological hunger and appease the mutual
physical strife between individuals. However, unlike Hobbes, Freud does not
envisage a Leviathan as a political solution to the problem of human
nature,[12] but, more like Spinoza, believes that rational understanding will
usher in a well-balanced society of men who will reconcile their ego with
their id and be freed of the adult illusions of civilization derived from
their diverse infantile complexes.[13] It is true that Freud also concedes
love (i.e. the life-instinct), or Eros, a role in the gregarious formation of
early societies,[14] but in an ambiguous a way that it is strongly allied to
envy. Thus the root of gregariousness itself is located in the envious
feelings that a child feels with regard to his parent's attentions to his
brothers and sisters.[15] According to Freud, this envy is satisfied
vicariously through the identification of the desires of each individual in a
group with the desires of others in it.
Indeed, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud even proposes a mythic
model of the formation of early society borrowed from the Oedipus story
according to which the fate of all civilization derives from an Oedipal envy
of a primal father figure and an incestuous desire for a primal mother figure.
But anyone who is not deceived by the charm of novel mythological theories can
see that the Oedipal complex is by no means a universal phenomenon and, even
if it were, it clearly could not have been the chief impetus to the lofty
creations of the spirit which are the hallmark of high civilization.
Certainly, there is no indication in Sophocles's plays themselves that any of
the events relating to one specific royal family of Thebes are supposed to
represent the birth of either Greek or human civilization, as, for instance,
the overtly mythic story of Prometheus is supposed to do.[16] Indeed, it has
been argued that Freud's conception of the drama of early society could
probably be a projection onto humanity of his own psychological complexes. In
maintaining that all early societies were formed when the sons of a certain
patriarch collectively killed and devoured their father since he represented
an obstacle to their craving for power, [17] Freud was partly rationalizing
and universalizing his own unhappy experiences with his Chasidic father, Jakob
Freud, who represented the Jewishness from which the psychologist sought
unconsciously to free himself. This hypothesis is reinforced in his essay on
'Moses and Monotheism' (1939), in which he describes the killing of Moses[18]
by the Jews who followed him: Moses is the father of the Jewish religious
ethos from which the Jews attempted in vain to free themselves, since the
Yahwist religion which succeeded the Mosaic system gradually acquired the
characteristics of the latter.
However we see this, according to Freudian theory all civilization was
rooted in unpleasant origins and developed over time into a system which
imposed an ever greater control on the primal instincts, aided by
super-egoistic activity. Thus, in this view, religion, philosophy, and art,
the columns of higher human civilization, are all equally "illusions" of
instinctual life that have been sublimated. Religion is but a product of the
child's need of a protecting father:
Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are
situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a
result of biological and psychological necessities. But religion cannot
achieve this. Its doctrines bear the imprint of the times in which they arose,
the ignorant times of the childhood of humanity. Its consolations deserve no
trust . . . If we attempt to assign the place of religion in the evolution of
mankind, it appears as a permanent acquisition but as a counterpart to the
neurosis which individual civilized men have to go through in their passage
from childhood to maturity.[19]
Religious teachings are, as it were, "neurotic relics" and Freud suggests
that "the time has probably come for replacing the effects of repression by
the results of the rational operation of the intellect".[20] Art and
philosophy, too, are akin to neuroses. In fact:
It might be maintained that a case of hysteria is a caricature of a work
of art, that an obsessional neurosis is a caricature of a religion, and that a
paranoiac delusion is a caricature of a philosophical system.[21]
That is, they differ from one another only in degrees of intensity and not
in kind. The illusory character of philosophy is highlighted by Freud in the
following manner:
Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves like a science and works
in part by the same methods; it departs from it, however, by clinging to the
illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without
gaps and is coherent, though one which is bound to collapse with every fresh
advance in our knowledge. It goes astray in its method by over-estimating the
epistemological value of our logical operations and by accepting other sources
of knowledge such as intuition.[22]
Art is a more harmless product of the transference of instinctual activity
to the imagination since it does not pretend to be anything but an
illusion.[23]
According to Freud, the unfortunate aspect of the repression of the
instincts which constitutes human culture is that it causes the individual to
suffer an increasing malaise within the confines of civilized life and
produces the various psychic disorders which Freud himself and his followers
took it upon themselves to cure. One of the obvious results of civilization,
according to Freud, is that "The sexual life of civilized man is . . .
severely impaired; it sometimes gives the impression of being in the process
of involution as a function, just as our teeth and our hair seem to be as
organs".[24] As for the instinct of aggression, Freud maintains that civilized
men seek outlets for this instinct through the forcible creation of nations
and wars between these nations. Moreover, by the time Freud wrote Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920), the experience of the Great War had prompted him to
identify, in addition to instinct of self-preservation or 'life- instinct'
(related to the libido), a 'death-instinct' characteristic of the human ego
and inbuilt in the entire social system which the ego creates.[25] This
death-instinct is indeed capable of bringing about the ultimate extinction of
all mankind.[26]
In this dark theory of the state, Freud shows himself to be a strict
psychological determinist with little understanding of the full scope of the
human spirit which is characterized by a creative force of will and
independent of both the Eros and Ananke identified by Freud as the motive
powers of civilization. The alarming defect of Freud' s psychological system
therefore is that it is, as Maritain puts it, "pervaded and overwhelmed on
every side . . . by a pseudometaphysics of the most vulgar character . . .
because it combines all the prejudices of deterministic, mechanistic scientism
with all the prejudices of irrationalism"[27] Indeed, in this narrowly
deterministic mode of thought, Freud's theories parralel the limited economic
conception of man postulated by that other major nineteenth century Jewish
thinker, Karl Marx, and for such reasons as these some have maintained that
there is a tendency in the Jewish psyche to limit itself to empirical-
rationalistic materialism.[28] According to Freud's psychological innovations,
man is a prisoner of his lower unconscious and therefore deprived of a
capacity for ethical behavior. As Gerard Bonnot puts it:
On a confondu le diable et le bon Dieu, le bien et le mal, l'humain et
l'inhumain dans le meme determinisme psychologique . . . Liberateur equivoque,
Freud nous interdit d'elaborer de nouvelles valeurs morals en nous privant du
seul attribut qui puisse les fonder: notre liberte. II nous livre a la
dictature d'une necessite qui, pour etre inconsciente, n'apparait pas moins
implacable que les lois de la physique.[29]
What is worse is that the "cure" that Freud and his followers propose to
this pathetic state of affairs is, explicitly or implicitly, a rational
liberation of the libido. For, if civilization is a cause of psychic
disorders, then the only way to remedy these personal defects is to undo the
repressions of the societal super-ego. Such an aim is clearly more congenial
to animals than to men, since it is easier for the former to live in agreement
with their instincts than it is for us. Indeed, the logical result of Freud's
doctrine is that man as a natural being must be considered a "freak", as he,
not surprisingly, is in the left-Freudian Erich Fromm:
Self-awareness, reason and imagination disrupt the "harmony" which
characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly,
into the freak of the universe.[30]
The link between the Freudian view of man and the chaos of modernism,
marked by what A.H. Williamson calls its "anti-historical orientation, its
insistence upon discontinuities, its focus upon the fragmented, its moral
ambiguities" and its attempt "to discount national experience, delegitimize
patriotism, dissolve social ties, reject dominant philosophic and religious
truths"[31] is as obvious as it is, in the highest degree, deplorable.[32] The
pervasive influence of Freudian thought on the western, especially American,
mind cannot be doubted.[33] As H.M. Ruitenbeck put it, "In the structure of
the American unconscious, psychoanalysis has, for some people, replaced
earlier ideologies, and even certain religious consolations".[34] The
penetration of the social fabric by the Freudian psychology is readily evident
in the widespread use of psychoanalytic terminology in daily parlance,
especially terms such as "guilt feelings, personal insecurity, unstructured
personality, instability, "internalization" . . . frustration, aggressive
tendencies, trauma, and the all-inclusive . . . 'tensions'", with a
concomitant' absence of such positive terms as "personal integrity,
self-reliance, responsibility, or . . . 'moral courage'", as Richard LaPiere
has pointed out.[35] The encouragement of self-expression on the
psychoanalyst' s couch is linked in no uncertain way to the vulgar, and often
violent, freedom of expression
physical as well as vocal - which characterizes modern society in
general and is the glaring opposite of the restraint typical of social
conduct in a genuine civilization. As for the various revolts, primarily in
America, in the sixties, against the so-called "establishment", and the
increasing racial and sexual permissiveness that they have led to, these may
indeed be considered the final triumph of a man who revealed his scientific
intentions in the Virgilian epigraph to his most famous work, The
Interpretation of Dreams: 'Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta
movebo'.[36]
The defects of Freud's psychology are best highlighted by juxtaposing it
to a study of the discussions of the psyche and its role in society contained
in the writings of the German-Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).
Jung clearly realized that psychoanalysis is:
. . . the psychology of neurotic states of mind, definitely one-sided, and
its validity is confined to those states . . . it is not a psychology of the
healthy mind, and . . . this is a symptom of its morbidity . . . it is based
on an uncriticized, even an unconscious, view of the world which is apt to
narrow the horizon of experience and limit one's vision.[37]
Unlike the limited, rational materialistic conception of the ego and the
id propounded by Freud, which is rather a physiological unconscious or
subconscious,[38] Jung's Psyche or the objective Unconscious is a metaphysical
sphere of universal life or energy that ranges between spirit and matter:
Just as, in the lower reaches, the psyche loses itself in the organic
material substrate, so in its upper reaches it resolves itself into a
"spiritual" form about which we know as little as we do about the functional
basis of instincts. What I would call the psyche proper extends to all
functions which can be brought under the influence of a will.[39]
Indeed, Jung, rather like the philosopher Schopenhauer, considers matter
and soul, or Will, as two aspects of a single primal reality:[40]
Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and
moreover are in continuous contrast with one another and ultimately rest on
irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly
probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and
the same thing.[41]
The ultimate nature of both matter and spirit is "transcendental, that is,
irrepresentable". And "the only reality which is given to us without a medium"
is the psyche and its contents. The psyche is a kind of non-physical space in
which energy operates, and energy is cosmic as well as human. The human
psyche, according to Jung, has three layers, consciousness, the personal
unconscious, and the objective or collective unconscious. It is the last that
constitutes one radical difference between Jung's psychology and that of
Freud. For the collective unconscious is that level of the psyche that is
prior to and larger than the individual personal experience. It is not merely
psychic but, first, spiritual and transcendental. The nature of this
transcendental reality cannot be determined with our limited reason:
That the world inside and outside ourselves rests on a transcendental
background is as certain as our own existence, but it is equally certain that
the direct perception of the archetypal world inside us is just as doubtfully
correct as that of the physical world outside us.[42]
The reason why it eludes objective definition is that it is intimately
connected to the observing subject:
Hence the reality underlying the unconscious effects includes the
observing subject and is therefore constituted in a way that we cannot
conceive. It is, at one and the same time, absolute subjectivity and universal
truth, for in principle it can be shown to be present everywhere, which
certainly cannot be said of conscious contents of a personalistic nature.[43]
It is, therefore, not merely unconscious as psychic energy, but originally
the higher consciousness, or "absolutes Wissen", of the Self:
If we are to do justice to the essence of the thing we call spirit, we
should really speak of a "higher" consciousness rather than of the
unconscious, because the concept of spirit is such that we are bound to
connect it with the idea of superiority over the ego-consciousness. [44]
This spirit is "above" the intellect:
Spirit is something higher than intellect since it embraces the latter and
includes the feelings as well. It is a guiding principle of life that strives
towards the superhuman, shining heights.[45]
This distinction between ego consciousness and higher consciousness is
completely absent in the psychological system of Freud.
The Psyche, which alone is immediately accessible to us, thus encompasses
not only the lower 'id' of Freud, but also the collective unconscious which is
both "the repository of man's experience and, at the same time, the prior
condition of this experience'.[46] The collective unconscious consequently
consists of both instincts and archetypes. [47] The latter are, as it were,
the "self-portrait" of the instinct, or the "instinct's perception of itself'.
And again, in his essay on "Die Schizophrenie", Jung describes Archetypes as
"inherited, instinctive impulses and forms that can be observed in all living
creatures".[48] The difference between instinct and the archetypes is that the
former is the energetic aspect of the archetypes manifest in matter:
To the extent that the archetypes intervene in the shaping of conscious
contents by regulating, modifying, and motivating them, they act like the
instincts,[49]
while the archetype itself is the "Sinn des Triebs", or its specific
significance. Jung is thus careful to distinguish the archetypal
representations from the archetype itself, which is ultimately transcendent:
The archetypal representations (images and ideas) mediated to us by the
unconscious should not be confused with the archetypes as such. They are
varied structures which all point back to one essentially "irrepresentable"
basic form. The latter is characterized by certain fundamental meanings,
although these can be grasped only approximately . . . it seems to me probable
that the real nature of the archetype is not capable of being made conscious,
that it is transcendent.[50]
This transcendent, irrepresentable quality of the Archetype is the same as
the transcendent reality of Schopenhauer's Will, namely the Self.[51]
The archetypal images of the Psyche are generally a vital formative
activity, akin to the productive imagination:
It is difficult to see why unconscious psychic activities should not have
the same faculty of producing images as those that are represented in
consciousness -the psyche consists essentially of images. It is a series of
images in the truest sense, not an accidental juxtaposition or sequence, but a
structure that is throughout full of meaning and purpose; it is a "picturing"
of vital activities.[52]
Significantly, Jung also emphasizes the fact that the archetypes are
"typical modes of apprehension",[53] thus confirming Schopenhauer' s insight
that the Ideas are, from the point of view of the objectivised Will or the
manifest universe, indeed levels of awareness of the reality of the Will as
the Self. The spirit is apt to be manifested in symbolical ways in the
phenomenal realm. In Die Psychologie der Ubertragung Jung declares that the
self is:
both ego and non-ego, subjective and objective, individual and collective.
It is the "uniting symbol" which epitomizes the total union of opposites. As
such and in accordance with its paradoxical nature, it can only be expressed
by means of symbols. These appear in dreams and spontaneous fantasies.[54]
These empirical manifestations of the self bear the numinous quality of
their original, and are thus unbounded by space or time. In Psychologie und
Alchemie, Jung suggests that the self is apt to manifest itself in dreams
"since night after night our dreams practice philosophy on their own
account".[55] This account of the larger archetypal significance of dreams is
in stark contrast to the empirical interpretation of dreams as
wish-fulfillment in Freud.
The symbolization of the Archetype of the Self or of the Absolute
Unconscious is witnessed not just in individual egos but also, in its most
basic and universal psychological form, in mythology. The collective
Unconscious thus typically represents itself through mythological motifs. The
mythological archetypes are underlying patterns of symbol formation which,
according to racial and cultural inheritance, change their particular
manifestations at any time or place.[56] The collective unconscious thus not
only binds individuals among themselves to the race, but also unites them
backwards with the peoples of the past and their psychology.[57] Although the
collective unconscious as a whole is so far from human consciousness that the
latter cannot really comprehend it, a basic understanding of the collective
psyche behind the individual is vital for a healthy social and historical
life. The importance of the unconscious as a "determining influence of
history" is indeed evident throughout European history. For example,
Only in the age of enlightenment did people discover that the gods did not
really exist, but were simply projections. Thus the gods were disposed of. But
the corresponding psychological function was by no means disposed of; it
lapsed into the unconscious, and men were thereupon poisoned by the surplus of
libido that had once been laid up in the cult of divine images . . . The
unconscious is prodigiously strengthened by this reflux of libido, and,
through its archaic collective contents, begins to exercise a powerful
influence on the conscious mind. The period of the Enlightenment closed, as we
know, with the horrors of the French Revolution. And at the present time, too,
we are once more experiencing this uprising of the unconscious destructive
forces of the collective psyche.[58]
Since Jung is careful to differentiate the archetype of the Self[59] from
the individual archetypes related to the rational ego, he can logically
maintain that it is the archetypes of the ego alone which need to
differentiate themselves through psychic evolution, from the primitive
identification of an individual self with the world around him to the rise of
self-consciousness and its consequent separation from the life of nature which
is the domain of the ego. Jung disagrees with Freud's view of civilization as
a result of the sublimation of instincts, which can only mean a subtle form of
repression. Jung maintains, instead, that "sublimation is not the
"transmutation" of instincts but the spontaneous "transfer" of energy from one
instinctual form to another, from a physical instinct, for example, to its
corresponding archetypal form".[60] As he put it:
Freud's sexual theory of neurosis is grounded on a true and factual
principle. But it makes the mistake of being one-sided and exclusive; also it
commits the imprudence of trying to lay hold of unconfinable Eros with the
crude terminology of sex. In this respect Freud is a typical representative of
the materialistic epoch, whose hope it was to solve the world riddle in a
test-tube.[61]
As for the so-called "Oedipuscomplex" Jung suggested that that may be more
than a mere paternally oriented sexual complex and, in fact, "evidence of a
notable release from the fatalities of the family Situation".[62] Jung
expressly denounced the Freudian concept of the super-ego, and insisted that
the super-ego be properly considered as 'conscience', which is not a late
result of the interaction between individual and society whereby the latter
appears in the form of a patriarchal God of injunctions, but rather an
autonomous archetypal constituent of the psyche. Jung argued that:
The Freudlan superego is not . . . a natural and inherited part of the
psyche's structure; it is rather the consciously acquired stock of traditional
customs, the 'moral code' as incorporated, for instance, in the Ten
Commandments. The superego is a patriarchal legacy which as such is a
conscious acquisition and an equally conscious possession. If it appears to be
an almost unconscious factor in Freud's writings, this is due to his practical
experience, which taught him that, in a surprising number of cases, the act of
conscience takes place unconsciously.
The Freudian superego, in short, is, according to Jung, "a furtive attempt
to smuggle the time-honored image of Jehovah in the dress of psychological
theory". Conscience is, indeed, not the same as moral precept since the former
may often be in opposition to the latter. In such conflicts the proper
solution is delivered by a creative instinct which springs from an active
connection between the rational consciousness and the nonrational unconscious.
Unlike Freud's opposition between the collective demands of society and the
rebellious instincts of the individual, the judgement of the creative instinct
of man in fact possesses "that compelling authority not unjustly characterized
as the voice of God"?[63]
It should not be surprising that, with the theory of the collective
unconscious,Jung points not only to the relation between the Self and the ego
in the unfolding of human civilization but also to the basic psychological
differences between races and to the psychological influences that occur
between them. An example of the exclusivity of racial archetypes is in fact
offered by the modern history of Europe. Jung considers one of the chief
causes of the wars, schisms, and strife of modern Europe as being due to the
anomalous position of Christianity amongst the European peoples. As he sees
it, "'German Christians' are a contradiction in terms".[64] In 'Wotan' Jung
explains the catastrophes of wartime Germany as due to the emergence, under
stress, of the native spirit of Wotan, the ancient Germanic god of war and
thunder, among the German people. The lesson to be learnt from this example is
that the nationalistic awareness of a people is as essential as the
self-awareness of its individual constituents: "Nationalism-disagreeable as it
is - is therefore a sine qua non, but the individual must not remain stuck in
it. On the other hand, in so far as he is a particle in the mass he must not
raise himself above it either".[65]
Jung clearly insists on the need to apply different psychological
categories in considering different racial groups. Thus in The Relations
between the Ego and the Unconscious, he declared that
it is a quite unpardonable mistake to accept the conclusions of a Jewish
psychology as generally valid . . . . No doubt, on an earlier and deeper level
of psychic development, where it is still impossible to distinguish between an
Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic, or Mongolian mentality, all human races have a common
collective psyche. But with the beginning of racial differentiation essential
differences are developed in the collective psyche as well".[66]
Jung criticizes Freud's mistaken application of Jewish categories
"indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic Christendom" for "Because of this the
most precious secret of the Germanic peoples - their creative and intuitive
depth of soul - has been explained as a morass of banal infantilism". He
continues:
[Freud] did not understand the Germanic psyche any more than did his
Germanic followers. Has the formidable phenomenon of National Socialism, on
which the whole world gazes with astonished eyes, taught them better? Where
was that unparalleled tension and energy while as yet no National Socialism
existed? Deep in the Germanic psyche, in a pit that is anything but a
garbage-bin of unrealizable infantile wishes and unresolved family
resentments. A movement that grips a whole nation must have matured in every
individual as well . . . And that is why [the] scope [of medical psychology]
must be widened to reveal to the physician's gaze not just the pathological
aberrations of a disturbed psychic development, but the creative powers of the
psyche laboring at the future; not just a dreary fragment but the meaningful
whole" .[67]
Pointing out that neither Freud nor Adler is "a universally valid
representative of European man," Jung suggests that the Jewish psychology is a
representation of "the shadow that accompanies us all" for, he charges:
The Jews have this peculiarity in common with women; being physically
weaker, they have to aim at the chinks in the armour of their adversary, and
thanks to this technique which has been forced on them through the centuries,
the Jews themselves are best protected where others are more vulnerable.
Because, again, of their civilization, more than twice as ancient as ours,
they are vastly more conscious than we of human weaknesses, of the shadow-side
of things, and hence in this respect much less vulnerable than we are.[68]
The psyche of the Germanic peoples contrasts with the
predominantlyrational ego-consciousness of the Jews, Jung argues, and that
this accounts for the greater creativity of the former:
The "Aryan" unconscious . . . contains explosive forces and seeds of a
future yet to be born, and these may not be devalued as nursery romanticism
without psychic danger. The still youthful Germanic peoples are fully capable
of creating new cultural forms that still lie dormant in the darkness of the
unconscious of every individual . . . The Jew, who is something of a nomad,
has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see
never will, since all his instincts and talents require a more or less
civilized nation to act as host for their development.[69]
While the archetypes of the collective unconscious are generally
racebound, according to Jung, they can be distorted by chthonic influences on
the lower soul, or the subconscious. Thus Jung points to the influence that
the mind and manners of a conquered people have on their conquerors. In
America, for example, the Europeans have inevitably developed Indian
morphological characteristics as well as psychological symbolisms. Some of
their culture, on the other hand, is derived from the Negro:
American music draws its main inspiration from the Negro', and so does the
dance. The expression of religious feeling, the revival meetings, the Holy
Rollers and other abnormalities are strongly influenced by the Negro.[70]
Though Jung does not declare this mingling of racial characteristics to be
entirely harmful, he extols the virtue of retaining one's links with one's
native soil for "he who is rooted in the soil endures". [71] If we gloss this
section of Jung's writings with the description of the Archetypes as
constituted both of a priori forms and residues of empirical experience, as
well as the Schopenhauerian elucidation of archetypes or Ideas as levels of
Self-knowledge, we will see that these interactions of racial archetypes
indeed entail alterations of the capacity of the individual egos to apprehend
the inner reality of life or Psyche.
However, despite the racial and nationalistic dimensions of the Collective
Unconscious, the aim of historical evolution, according to Jung, is indeed
"individuation". Individuation is the fullest development of personality, and
is a "Passion des Ich,":
a conscious and deliberate self-surrender which proves that you have full
control of yourself, that is, of your ego. The ego thus becomes the object of
a moral act, for "I" am making a decision on behalf of an authority which is
supraordinate to my ego nature. I am, as it were, deciding against my ego and
renouncing my claim . . . Hence it is quite possible for the ego to be made
into an object, that is to say, for a more compendious personality to emerge
in the course of development and take ego into its service. Since this growth
of personality comes out of the unconscious, which is by definition unlimited,
the extent of the personality now gradually realizing itself cannot in
practice be limited either. But unlike the Freudian super-ego, it is still
individual. It is in fact individuality in the highest sense.[72]
It is not the continued assertion of the individual ego against the
external world but rather the subsumption of this ego in the higher
consciousness of the Absolute Self:
But again and again I note that the individuation process is confused with
the coming of the ego into consciousness and that the ego is in consequence
identified with the self, which naturally produces a hopeless muddle.
Individuation is then nothing but ego-centeredness and autoeroticism. But the
Self comprises infinitely more than a mere ego . . . It is as much one's self,
and all other selves, as the ego. lndividuation does not shut one out from the
world, but gathers the world to oneself.[73]
The aim of individuation is the renewed participation of the individual
self in the transcendent Self. For, the individual ego extends beyond
consciousness to the realm of the spirit, or the Godhead. This Jung tries to
illustrate by the example of the divinity of Christ:
In the world of Christian ideas, Christ undoubtedly represents the self.
As the apotheosis of individuality, the self has the attributes of uniqueness
and of occurring once only in time. But the psychological self is a
transcendent concept, expressing the totality of conscious and unconscious
contents, it can only be described in antinomial terms (Just as the
transcendent nature of light can only be expressed through the image of waves
and particles) . . . As an historical personage Christ is unitemporal and
unique; as God, universal and eternal. Likewise the self.' as an individual
thing it is unitemporal and unique; as an archetypal symbol it is a God-image
and therefore universal and eternal.[74]
Jung's answer to the problem of loss of religion consequent on Freud' s
theories of civilization was thus not the traditional Judaeo-Christian one of
a God in Heaven but a more philosophical interpretation of the symbolic
significance of Christ using the ideal archetype of the self as an image of
divinity. Jung also uses as an illustration of his ethical goal the Hindu
doctrine of the immersion of the Atman in the Brahman, terms which served as
sources of his conception of the Ich and the Selbst.[75] Jung insists that the
ultimate consciousness of the Self is not the same as the ego, but rather a
higher transcendent entity that is consequent on psychic evolution or the
union of the individual ego with the unconscious anima. This higher reality is
also the domain of real freedom, since the individual self is now integrated
into the subject of the Psyche which is the absolutely free and creative Self.
As Dieter Spies puts it:
Im Selbst ist das Ich integriert in das grossere Subjekt der Psyche, es
ist sozusagen . . . identisch mit dem "Anordner" der Psyche. Und in diesem
Sinn ist der individuierte Mensch frei yon jedem psychischen Zwang, denn
Unterordnung unter die psychische Anordnung bedeutet nicht mehr Unfreiheit; es
handelt sichjetzt gewissermassen um die eigene Anordnung! Es ist Freiheit im
transzendentalen Sinn. Alles Reden yon und alle Sehnsucht nach Freiheit sind
nut Antizipationen dieser Freiheir des Selbst-Seins.[76]
This freedom that comes with the realization of the individual as the
Absolute Self is, also, not a selfish rejection of the world, according to
Jung, but rather a realization of the identity of the individual self with
that of other beings:
the self is our life's goal, for it is the completest expression of that
fateful combination we call individuality, the full flowering not only of the
single individual, but of the group in which each adds his portion of the
whole.[77]
This liberation of the ego is made possible by the fact that, in Jung' s
idealistic metaphysic, as we have noted earlier,[78] the external world of
nature too is not matter alone but ultimately spiritual:
Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit. Were that not so, the only
source of spirit would be human reason. It is the great achievement of
Paracelsus to have elevated the "light of nature" to a principle . . . The
lumen naturae is the natural spirit, whose strange and significant workings we
can observe in the manifestations of the unconscious now that psychological
research has come to realize that the unconscious is not just a "subconscious"
appendage or the dustbin of consciousness, but is a largely autonomous psychic
system for compensating the biases and aberrations of the conscious attitude,
for the most part functionally, though it sometimes corrects them by force . .
. The unconscious is not limited only to the instinctual and reflex processes
of the cortical centres; it also extends beyond consciousness and, with its
symbols, anticipates future conscious processes. It is therefore quite as much
a "supraconsciouness".[79]
By contrast, the Freudian discovery of the subconscious is only of the
"mirror-image" of the consciousness which contains only "distorted reflections
of conscious contents".[80]
Given this metaphysical basis of his psychology, it is not surprising that
Jung, unlike the materialist philosophers or psychologists, does not consider
the realization of the ideal society to be dependent on modifications of
social relationships. On the contrary, according to Jung, individual changes
are the necessary condition of social changes. Jung's ideal of a spiritually
regenerated mankind was completely opposed to the mass mentality of modern
times parading in the guise of democracy, fascism, or communism. For, only the
enlightened individual is capable of a truly impersonal social life in that he
alone has realized the metaphysical identity of his individual self with that
of the others. In fact, there are specific dangers in the communal models
posited by both communism and fascism, since the communal ideal "puts a
premium on the lowest common denominator, on mediocrity, and 'on everything
that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way'."[81] This leads
to a gradual lowering of culture by restricting the possibilities of
individual development, so that "the one source of moral spiritual progress
for society is choked up".[82] Whereas Freud pointed to the dangers of the
repression of instinct in civilized life, Jung points to the greater dangers
of the suppression of the individual psyche in a heavily communalized society,
for the repressed elements of the psyche fall into the unconscious and are
"transformed into something essentially baleful, destructive, and
anarchical".[83] We have here an explanation of the negative social results of
the Freudian ethic discussed above.[84] The resulting "inexorable moral
degeneration of society" can be checked only by the enlightened individual who
has comprehended and assimilated the full range of his unconscious.
It may be mentioned that Freud, in his epistolary essay "Why War?" (1933),
proclaimed that society would be best organized when the masses were
subordinated to an elite who have subjected their instincts to "the
dictatorship of reason".[85] Jung, on the other hand, saw the fascist state as
resulting precisely from the rationalistic system of Hegel:
The victory of Hegel over Kant dealt the gravest blow to reason and to the
further development of the German and, ultimately, of the European mind, all
the more dangerous as Hegel was a psychologist in disguise who projected great
truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself had created. We
know how far Hegel's influence extends today . . . [In Hegel we find] the
practical equation of philosophical reason with Spirit, thus making possible
that intellectual juggling with the object which achieved such a horrid
brilliance in his philosophy of the State.[86]
Freud, who is Hegelian insofar as his repudiation of the instinctual life
of man for being productive of the "illusions" of religion and civilization is
directed by his admiration of reason, deserves the same rebuke that Jung aimed
at Hegel. It is indeed significant that, in spite of his apparent "elitism",
Freud considered the two principal upper castes, the church and the army, as
two "artificial groups" bound, as all groups are, by libidinal ties to the
leader, either Christ or the Commander-in-Chief, as well as to the other
members in it. These ties, like all other ideal relationships, are considered
to be based on the "illusion" that the leader loves all the members equally.
Jung's idea of a national leader, on the other hand, was of one totally
conscious of his self and his racial/archetypal identity:
the true leader is always one who has the courage to be himself, and can
look not only others in the eye but above all himself- It is perfectly natural
that a leader should stand at the head of an elite, which in earlier centuries
was formed by the nobility. The nobility believe by the law of nature in the
blood and exclusiveness of the race.[87]
Jung, therefore, had a quite different understanding of the
racialpsychological ideal which governs an idealistic nobility than Freud
proposed in terms of his narrowly limited psychological categories.
Indeed, Jung was opposed to the deracinated individualism which calls
itself "modernism." While commending democracy since it "takes account of
human nature as it is and makes allowance for the necessity of conflict within
its own national boundaries",[88] he definitely repudiates the "modern man"
who is unhistorical and denies the past to live wholly in the present. Jung
also deplores the projection of the personal desires and fears of the
individual psyche onto society at large either in the form of patriotism,
where the nation is considered a father or mother that is to be depended on or
obeyed with complete obedience, or in the form of anarchic rebellion against
this collective parent. For, as he put it, "resistance to the organized mass
can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality
as the mass itself".[89] Until the individual attains a considerable degree of
self-recognition, he will remain vulnerable to mass movements and leaders who
may use him as a pawn to further their personal ambitions. The truly modern
man will be one who considers the present as a creative transition point
between the past and the future, while the pseudo- modern men "appear by the
the of the truly modern man [as] uprooted wraiths, blood-sucking ghosts whose
emptiness casts discredit upon him in his unenviable loneliness".[90] The
truly modern man is indeed proficient and creative in mastering the traditions
of his culture and contributing his own spiritual creations to them.
Unfortunately, the years following the second world war have witnessed the
triumph of the Freudian ethic over the Jungian. The widespread influence of
the limited rational-materialistic psychology of Freud with its restricted
understanding of the constitution and powers of the human mind can be said to
have contributed to the inexorable vulgarization of the pseudo-modern man.[91]
The corrective to this fragmented view of the world, wherein all civilization
is reduced to its lowest psychological and social sources rather than traced
to archetypal ideas which prefigure the spiritual possibilities of man, is
perhaps to be found in the integrative psychology of Jung with its crucial
dimension of spirit as the ultimate reality of the psyche, both individual and
collective.
1 See Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, David Bakan, Beacon
Press, Boston, 1975.
2 I must stress that my intention is not to evaluate the scientific
achievements of Freud and Jung in their entirety but only to highlight those
aspects of their systems which have a significant bearing on questions of
social philosophy.
3 The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in The Standard Edition of the
complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (henceforth referred to as SE),
IV, p.196f.
4 Marthe Robert, From Oedipus to Moses, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books,
1976.
5 Jacques Maritain, "Freudianism and Psychoanalysis: a Thomist view" ,
Freud and the 20th Century, ed. B. Nelson, Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1963,
p.253.
6 Marthe Robert, op.cit., p.4.
7 p.55.
8 Civilization and its Discontents (1930), in SE, XXI, p.129..
9 See C.G. Jung, "A psychological view of conscience' in Collected Works,
Vol.X, p.440: "first, the unconscious is, ontogenetically and
phylogenetically, older than consciousness, and secondly, it is a well-known
fact that it can hardly be influenced, if at all, by the conscious will."
10 R. Niebuhr, "Human creativity and self-concern in Freud's though" , in
Freud and the 20th century, p.269.
11 Ibid.
12 Cf. p.30 below.
13 See The Future of an Illusion (1927), in SE, XXI.
14 See Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) Ch.IV, in SE,
XVIII, p.92, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in SE, XVIII, p.50.
15 Group Psychology, Ch.IX, 'The Herd Instinct', in SE, XVIII, p.120f.
16 Freud points to the passage in Oedipus Rex where Jocasta comforts the
tragic hero by reminding him that his crime is perhaps not so unnatural as he
must think since it often occurs in the dreams of men (The Interpretation of
Dreams in SE, IV, p.264). But the very fact that Sophocles is aware of this
dream-wish and yet does not make it the moral basis of his drama reveals that
for him the fear of the gods represented by the chorus is much more
significant for the health of the nation than the unconscious indulgence of
repressed desires. The emphasis on the latter that Freud provides in his
system is totally un-European and typically modern.
17 Totem and Taboo (1913), in SE, XIII, p.141f.
18 Moses is depicted by Freud as an Egyptian prince, when the biblical
story of Moses makes complete psychological sense only if the central figure
were a Jew expelled from Egypt for his revolutionary religious invention, just
as Abraham earlier was expelled from Chaldea for his inability to adapt to the
philosophical constitution of the Chaldeans (see Josephus the Jew, Jewish
Antiquities, I, 157; cf. Philo the Jew, De mutatione nominum, 72-76, and De
migratione Abrahami, 184).
19 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho Analysis(1933), Lecture XXXV in
SE, XXII:168.
20 Ibid.
21 Totem and Taboo, II, in SE, XIII, p. 73; cf. 'Preface to Reik's Ritual:
Psycho-analytic studies' (1919) in SE, XVII:261.
22 New lntroductory Lectures in SE, XXII: 160f; see Jung's crucial
evaluation of intuition in the Germanic peoples.
23 Ibid.
24 Civilization and its Discontents, in SE, XXI, p.105.
25 See Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in SE, XVIII.
26 See 'Why War'(1933) in SE, XXII, p.211.
27 Maritain, in op.cit., p.249.
28 It has been suggested that the philosophical outlook of the Semitic
peoples is closely related to their "imperfectly" inflected speech and their
lack of mythological imagination. The importance of a fully developed language
for philosophical speculation was argued by nineteenth century linguists such
as Wilhelm yon Humboldt (1767-1835) and Ernest Renan (1823-1892). Humboldt,
for instance, in the published introduction (Einleitung uber die
Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einflubeta auf die
geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts) to his projected work Uber die
Kawisprache auf der Insel Java, declared that
It is self-evident that a language whose structure is moat extensively
suited to the intellect and which most intensively stimulates its activity
must also posses the most enduring power to produce from its reservoir of
linguistic materials new conformations, brought forth by the lapse of time and
the destinies of peoples -- if the Sanskritic tongues have for at least three
millennia given proof of their productive capacity, this is simply an effect
of the intensity of the creative linguistic action in the peoples to which
they belonged" (Wilhelm von Humboldt. Linguistic Variablity and Intellectual
Development. tr, George C. Buck and Frithjof A. Raven, Coral Gables, Florida:
Univ. of Miami Press, 1971, p.162)
Humboldt actually argued that the Semitic languages were "deficient" :
In contrast, it seems more certain to me than what has been discussed to
this point, and more important for determination of the relationship of the
Semitic languages to intellectual development, that the intimate linguistic
sense in the case of these peoples was still lacking the necessary acuteness
and clarity with respect to the material meaning and to the relationship of
words . . . Inflected words in the Semitic languages do not contain
inflectional modifications of original tones; rather they contain
complementations that produce the true phonetic form. Now, since the original
root morpheme cannot become, in addition to the inflected one, perceptible to
the ear in connected speech, the animate distinction between semantic and
relational expression suffers.
Renan, a Semitic scholar, also saw the difference between the IndoEuropean
and the Semitic languages as being one between organic and inorganic forms.
Thus he declared,
On peut dire que les langues ariennes, comparees aux langues semitiques,
sont les langues de l'abstraction et de la metaphysique, comparees a celles du
realisme et de la sensualite. Avec leur souplesse merveilleuse, leurs flexions
variees, leurs particules delicates, leurs mots composes, et surtout grace a
l'admirable secret de l'inversion, qui permet de conserver l'ordre naturel des
idees sans nuire a la determination des rapports grammaticaux, les langues
ariennes nous transportent tout d'abord en plein idealisme, et nous feraient
envisager la creation de la parole comme un fait essentiellement
transcendental. Si l'on ne considerait, au contraire, que les langues
semitiques, on pourrait croire que la sensation presida seule aux premiers
acres de la pensee humaine et que le langage ne fut d'abord qu'une sorte de
reflet du monde exterieur (Histoire generale et systeme compare des langues
semitiques, Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1878, Bk.I, Ch.I, p.22).
Thus, the Semitic consciousness was perceived by these writers as being
rigid and narrowly focussed: "L'abstraction leur est inconnue; la metaphysique
impossible" (Ibid.).
29 G. Bonnot, Ils ont tue Descartes: Einstein, Freud, Pavlov, Paris:
Editions Denoel, 1969.
30 E. Fromm, The Sane Society, N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955,
p.23.
31 A.H. Williamson, "The cultural foundations of racial religion and
anti-semitism",in Lingering Shadows: Jungians, Freudians, and AntiSemitism,
ed. A. Maidenbaum, S.A. Martin, Boston: Shambala Press, 1991, p.151.
32 See also Jung, 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud' (1939) in CW, XV:47:
Freud's psychological method is and always was a cauterizing agent for
diseased and degenerate material, such as if found chiefly in neurotic
patients -- Later when the new ideas met with ample recognition, this grew
into an aesthetic defect, and finally, like every fanatacism, evoked the
suspicion of an inner uncertainty".
33 For the development of Freudian psychology in Europe, see H.
Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The history and evolution of
dynamic psychiatry, London: Penguin Press, 1970; for its influence in America,
see H.M. Ruitenbeck, Freud and America, N.Y.: Macmillan Co., 1966.
34 H.M. Ruitenbeck, op. cit., p.24.
35 Richard LaPiere, The Freudian Ethic, N.Y.: Duell, Sloan and Pearce,
1959, p.64; see also H.J. Eysenck, The Decline and Fall of the Freudian
Empire, Scott Townsend Publishers, Washington D.C. 1991, 202ff: "Psychonalysis
is at best a premature crystallization of spurious orthodoxies; at worst, a
pseudo-scientific doctrine that has done untold harm to psychology and
psychiatry alike --- The time has come to treat it as a historical curiosity,
and to turn to the great task of building up a truly scientific psychology"
(p.208).
36 This line from the Aeneid, VII, 312, "If I cannot bend the higher
powers, I will move the infernal regions", used to represent the operation of
repressed instinctual impulses, may well serve as the motto of Freud's entire
intellectual production.
37 'Freud and Jung: Contrasts' (1929), in Collected Works, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-21, (henceforth referred to as CW) IV:335.
38 A transcendental realm of the spirit was alien to the thought of Freud.
As L. Frey-Rohn puts it: "[Freud] erkannte ein An-Sich, es war aber --
ausschlieBlich ein An-Sich des Triebes, ja des Stoffes (Leblosen!). Ein
geistiges An-Sich ein transzendentaler Sinn war ihm frernd. Hinter der
psychischen Wirklichkeit stand in letzter Linie der Korper mir seinen
Anforderungen -- Warm immer der Ausdruck "Geist" vorkam, war es in der
Bedeutung yon Seele, yon geistigen Interessen oder auch yon "ruach"
(Windhauch). In jedem Fall wies der Geist aufeinen Gegenpol zur Sinnlichkeit
bzw. auf etwas "mit dem Gesicht Wahrgenommenes hin", Liliane Frey-Rohn, Von
FreudzuJung, Zurich: Rascher, 1969, pp. 391,393.
39 'On the Nature of the Psyche' ("Theoretische Uberlegungen fiber das
Wesen des Psychischen", 1954) in CW, VIII: 183. cf., also, 'The Psychology of
the Child Archetype' ('Zur Psychologie des Kind-Archetypus' , 1940), iii, 2,
in CW, IX, i:173: "The deeper 'layers' of the Psyche lose their individual
uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. Lower down, that
is to say, as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become
increasingly collective, until they are universalized and extinguished in the
body's materiality, i.e. , in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply
carbon. Hence 'at bottom' the psyche is simply 'world'."
40 We may remember that matter is characterized in the system of
Schopenhauer as the visibility of the Will, while Soul or Psyche itself is the
Will as ideal Nature, that is, the Will with a tendency to manifest itself
through matter. But above the Will as ideal Nature is the Will as the
ineffable Self. See below p. 17, and A. Jacob, "From the World- Soul to the
Will: The natural philosophy of Schelling, Eschenmayer, and Schopenhauer",
Schopenhauer Jahrbuch, 1992, 19-36, rpt. in A. Jacob, De Naturae Natura,
Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1992, Chs. IX and X.
41 'On the Nature of the Psyche' in CW, VIII:215.
42 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-56), VI, Art. 10 in CW, XIV:551.
See also 'On the Nature of the Psyche' in CW, VIII:228: "We are fully aware
that we have no more knowledge of the various states and processes of the
Unconscious as such than the physicist has of the processes underlying
physical phenomena. Of what lies beyond the phenomenal world we can have
absolutely no idea, for there is no idea that could have any other source than
the phenomenal world."
43 "On the Nature of the Psyche' in CW, VIII:230; cf. A. Schopenhauer, The
World as Will and Representation, Art.2: "That which knows all things and is
known by none is the subject. It is accordingly the supporter of the world,
the universal condition of all that appears, of all objects . . . We never
know it, but it precisely that which knows wherever there is knowledge" (tr.
E.FJ. Payne, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1966, I:5). See also, in this
connection, A. Jacob, op.cit. (note 39 above).
44 'Spirit and Life' (Geist und Leben', 1926) in CW, VIII:335.
45 Commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower. Das Geheimnis der
goldenen Blute, 1957) in CIY, XIII:9.
46 On the Psychology of the Unconscious (Uber die Psychologie des
Unbewussten, 1943), The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious', in
CW, VII:95.
47 "The instinct and the archetypes together form the 'collective
unconscious"', "Instinct and the unconscious' ('Instinkt und Unbewusstes' ;
1928); in CW, VIII: 133.
48 'Schizophrenia'('Die Schizophrenie', 1958) in CW, II1:262.
49 'On the Nature of the Psyche' in CW, VIII:205.
50 Ibid.. VIII:213.
51 See above p.17.
52 'Spirit and Life' in CW, VIII:325f.
53 'Instinct and the Unconscious' in CW, VIII:137.
54 The Psychology of the Transference (Die Psychologie der Ubertragung,
1946), in CW, XVI:264.
55 Psychology and Alchemy (Psychologie und Alchemie, 1952) Part II, Ch.3,
in CW, X11:182.
56 Jung, "Synchronizitat als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhange" (1952),
in Naturerklarung und Psyche, p.104, (Gesammelte Werke, VIII, p.575f).
57 See On the Psychology of the Urconscious in CW, VII:77.
58 Ibid., in CW, VII:92.
59 The former is the absolute Self itself and equally the Form of God:
Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as
such. but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self. It
is this archetype from which we can no longer distinguish the God-image
empirically ('Answer to Job' in CW, XI:469).
60 W. Odajnyk, Jung and Politics, N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1976, p.179.
61 On the Psychology of the Unconscious, in CW, VII:27. Jung himself
describes Eros as belonging "on the one side to man's primordial animal nature
which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is
related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he only thrives when spirit
and instinct are in right harmony".
62 Ibid.
63 'A psychological view of conscience' ('Das Gewissen in psychologischer
Sicht' (1958), CW, X:455. Jung's explanation of conscience differs from
Hitler's, as cited by Hermann Rauschning, "Considence is a Jewish invention.
It is a blemish, like circumcision" (H. Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, London,
1939, p.220). Yet Hitler was expressing the view that in pre-Judaeo-Christian
Germanic society morality sprang from the desire to be loyal to the values of
the group instead of from any individually internalized "conscience" that
could turn the individual against the mores of the group.
64 "Wotan" (1936) in CW, X:190.
65 Jung to Dr. James Kirsch, May 26, 1934 in C.G. Jung, Letters, ed. G.
Adler, A. Jaffe, R.F.C. Hull, Princeton: PUP, 1975, Vol. I, p. 162. That
Jung's political views were always intimately related to his psychological
ones, despite his public repudiation of the Nazi regime in 1946, is
demonstrated by S. Grossman in his article "C.G. Jung and National Socialism",
Journal of European Studies, 9 (1979), 231-59.
66 The Relation between the Ego and the Unconscious (Die Beziehungen
zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten), 1928), Part I, Ch.2, in CW, VII:149n.
67 'The state of psychotherapy today' ('Zur gegenwartigen Lage der
Psychotherapie', 1934), in CW, X:165.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
70 'Mind and Earth' ('Seele und Erde', 1931) in CW, X:46. cf. also 'The
Complications of the American Psychology' (1930) in CW, X:508: "The inferior
man has a tremendous pull because he fascinates the inferior layers of our
psyche, which has lived through untold ages of similar conditions - "on
revient toujours a ses premiers amours" -- The barbarian in us is still
wonderfully strong and he yields easily to the lure of his youthful memories.
Therefore he needs very definite defenses -- the defenses of the Germanic man
reach only as far as consciousness reaches. Below the threshold of
consciousness the contagion meets with little resistance".
71 'Mind and Earth' in Collected Works, X:49.
72 Jung, 'Transformation Symbolism in the Mass' ('Das Wandlungssymbol in
der Messe', 1954), IV, ii, in CW, XI:258. As Aniela Jaffe puts it,
"Individuation muss, in religioser Sprache, als Verwirklichung eines
"Gouttlichen" im Menachen verstanden wetden", Aniela Jaffe, Der Mythus yore
Sinn, Zurich: Rascher, 1967, p.89.
73 'On the Nature of the Psyche' in CW, VIII:226. cf. Jung's letter, dated
23 August 1953: "Becoming conscious means continual renunciation because it is
an ever-deepening concentration" (Letters, tr. R.F.C. Hull, Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1973-75, 11:120); cf. also 'Spirit and Life' ('Geist
und Leben' 1926), in CW, VIII:325.
74 Aion (1951), V, in Collected Works, IX,ii:62f.
75 See The Psychology of the Transference, in CW, XVI:264.
76 Dieter Spies, Das Weltbild der Psychologie C.G.Jungs,
FellbachOeffingen: Bonz, 1984, p.192.
77 'The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious' in CW, VII:240.
78 See above p.
79 'Paracelsus as a spiritual phenomenon' ('Paracelsus als geistige
Erscheinung', 1942) in CW, XIII:184f; cf. 'The phenomenonology of the spirit
in fairy-tales' ('Zur Phanomenologie des Geistes im Marchen' , 1948), in CW
IX,i:239, and Symbols of Transformation (Symbole der Wandlung, 1952), II, in
CW V:430.
80 The Relations between the ego and the unconscious, II in CW
VII:185.
81 Odajnyk, Jung and Politics, p.58.
82 The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, in CW VII: 150.
83 Ibid.
84 See above p.14.
85 'Why War', in SE, XXII, 213.
86 'On the Nature of the Psyche' in Collected Works, VIII:169-70.
87 C.G. Jung speaking, ed. W. McGuire and R.F.C. Hull, Princeton: PUP,
1977, pp.59-66.
88 'The Fight with the Shadow' (1946), in CW, X:225.
89 'The Undiscovered Self' ('Gegenwart und Zukunft', 1957) in CW, X:278.
90 'The spiritual problem of modern man' ('Das Seelenproblem des modernen
Menschen', 1928), in CW, X:76.
91 While this is especially true of American society, the increasing
influence of America on the mind of Europe should not be ignored either.
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