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Jung spent much of 1934 explaining in letters that this article was not meant to be antiSemitic. 57 He said to one correspondent after another that merely to describe psychological differences between Jews and Christians is not to deprecate the former. Occasionally he permitted himself to be a bit testy about the "hypersensitivity" of Jews. It is clear also that Jung's conflict with Freud was still an open wound, for he referred to the Viennese doctor's alleged dogmatism and denial of his own Jewish roots, at the same time complaining that the conflict was oversimplified by "German" doctors into in issue of Christian versus Jewish psychotherapy. In a letter to Gerhard Adler, Jung spoke of the rootlessness of the "Jewish rationalist," but added, "So when I criticize Freud's Jewishness I am not criticizing the Jews but rather that damnable capacity of the Jew, as exemplified by Freud, to deny his own nature." He called on religious Jews to ''summon up the courage to distinguish themselves clearly from Freud." 58
The gross stereotyping of the original article, and that more or less unconsciously displayed in the apologetic letters, was perhaps slightly more acceptable in Jung's time than today, and one does not need to be a Nazi to at least raise the issue of the distinctive psychological qualities of different peoples, including Jews. 59 But two points stick in one's mind, even apart from the crudity and plain erroneousness of this particular example of comparative psychology. First, the appalling lack of moral judgment on Jung's part in choosing to write on racial psychology, including that of Jews, precisely at a time when such rhetoric could only fan the flames of racial fanaticism, and when the relative heat of such fanaticism could well be a matter of life or death for Jews.
Jung seemed to recognize something of this issue, though by no means the full consequences, in a letter of Abraham Aaron Roback of 19 December 1936:
"Unfortunately the political events in Germany have made it quite impossible to say anything reasonable about the most interesting difference between Jewish and non
Jewish psychology." (The difference under discussion was the alleged Jewish ability, much greater than that of gentiles, to extend consciousness into the subconscious mind, which ability brought with it a "tendency of consciousness to autonomy with the risk of severing it almost entirely from its instinctive sources.")60
Second, the sweeping, unqualified manner in which Jung applied various attributes to Aryans and Jews as such suggests the truly breath
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taking extent to which he was prepared to think only in terms of the collective unconscious when dealing with social and political matters, and not with individual differences. Closely connected to this capacity is Jung's obvious volkish predilection to think of a Jew—Freud or any other Jew—first and foremost only as a Jew, and so as Other, always profoundly different from "us." Like him or dislike him, one never loses awareness that the person is not just a person, but a Jew.
Richard Stein contends that despite his protestations Jung became identified with the image of the "mana personality," a condition that led to an inflation with the power and vitality of the Third Reich. Stein sees Jung's attitude toward Jews as a manifestation of his father complex, acted out both toward Freud and toward the God image of the Hebrew Bible. Ambivalent both toward the feminine and his own father, the son allegedly identified through the "mana personality" with the Reich as
"Great Father." 61 This would explain, in terms of the recondite language of his own system, why Jung could write, from somewhere within himself, what he did about Aryans and Jews while maintaining outward independence. These observations are now chiefly of value insofar as they show how the system itself can support racist and (in a certain sense) reactionary mentalities while at the same time offering a powerful and valuable critique both of the anomie of modernity and the destructiveness of the National Socialist upsurge of irrationalism. After the fact, needless to say, Jung offered trenchant diagnoses of Germany's "epidemic insanity." 62 After "Wotan''
and 1936 Jung curtailed all writing on race and Jews considerably. At the end of the war, he is reported to have said he "slipped up" in his first assessment of Nazism. 63
It may be added that the Nazis themselves made cynical propaganda use of Jung, as they did of Nietzsche, Hegel, and others, citing those writings of Jung that appeared to endorse their regime, while banning books and articles from Zurich that did not. If one were only familiar with the Nazipropaganda Jung, he would appear in a bad light indeed. Yet, as Frank McLynn has pointed out, in a sense he had only himself to blame. "He ran too much with the hare and the hounds, sometimes appearing to endorse 'the mighty phenomenon of National Socialism,' at other times mocking it." 64 Afterward, he did not clear the air as thoroughly and confessionally as he should have, instead seeking to ignore or even conceal his "slipups." The more sympathetic writer Laurens van der Post, in Jung and the Story of Our Time, concedes that "There was a brief moment at the beginning when this
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stirring of unconscious forces he saw in Germany seemed to him capable of a positive potential," but "within two years he had changed his mind. His warnings against events in Germany became more frequent, urgent, and unqualified, ending in such outright condemnation that when the war broke out his own books were banned in Germany and he himself was placed on the Nazi blacklist for liquidation at the first opportunity." 65
Certainly by the beginning the war, Jung had no illusions whatsoever about the New Germany, if his letters of the time are to be regarded, though the proAllied unanimity of Switzerland may be questioned, as we shall see. In writing the distinguished BritishAmerican analytic psychologist Esther Harding on 28 September 1939, in his slightly idiosyncratic English, he declared:
We naturally hope not to be implicated in the war, but there is only one conviction in Switzerland, that if it has to be, it will be on the side of the Allies. There is no doubt and no hesitation; the unanimous conviction in Switzerland is that Germany has lost her national honour to an unspeakable degree, and the Germans inasmuch as they still think know it too. I shouldn't wonder if the most curious things happened in Germany. The situation is completely opaque because of the inhuman terror the whole population is kept under by. 66
In January of 1940 he wrote to Dr. Edward Lauchenauer, "What the public still doesn't know and can't get into its head is that the collective man is subhuman, nothing but a beastman, as was clearly demonstrated by the exquisite bestiality of the young German fighters during the blitzkrieg in Poland. Any organization in which the voice of the individual is no longer heard is in danger of degenerating into a subhuman monster." 67 Though the "mass man" concept may have begun as an aristocratic condescension, in the end it fulfilled its own darkest potential.
To the enigma of C. G. Jung and National Socialist totalitarianism, honesty permits no simple answer. The issue is as complex and multisided as the man himself or, as we shall see, his native Switzerland. For every incriminating word or pose, its seems, a counterquote or deed can be presented; for every argument a counterargument.
Probably the matter can be reduced no further; Jung was a man of many moods and personae who cannot be condensed to a simple essence. Morever, as a prolific writer and speaker he was far from consistent,
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and quite capable of unguarded remarks he must later have regretted. The best he has to give us is the Jungian perspective on the tumultuous times in which he lived.