Totalitarianism occupies a pivotal position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a political-historical category, a psychological diagnosis of collective pathology, and a philosophical limit-concept marking the boundaries of human comprehensibility. The dominant voice is that of Hannah Arendt, whose Origins of Totalitarianism serves as the gravitational center around which virtually every engagement with the term revolves — from its genealogy in antisemitism and imperialism through to its consummation in the extermination camp as the 'most consequential institution of totalitarian rule.' Jung and his interpreters approach the phenomenon from a complementary angle: where Arendt theorizes radical evil and total domination, Jung diagnoses totalitarianism as a religious regression — the deification of the State and the dictator arising when legitimate metaphysical functions are expelled from individual consciousness. Ulanov synthesizes these traditions, reading the totalitarian attitude as a psychological incapacity to tolerate ambiguity, an involuntary one-sidedness that Jung associated with barbarism. A persistent tension runs through the corpus between the concept's analytic precision — as Arendt developed it through the sui generis horror of the Nazi camps — and its inflationary political misuse as a rhetorical label for terrorism, Islamism, and other modern threats. This tension renders totalitarianism not merely a historical phenomenon but an ongoing hermeneutic problem for political psychology.
Totalitarianism was finally shorthand for total domination and absolute terror, yet even these locutions remained abstractions incapable of capturing radical evil.
This passage argues that Arendt's concept of totalitarianism, while analytically indispensable, ultimately proves inadequate to the radical evil of the camps, which exceeds all available language and conceptual frameworks.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
Totalitarianism was finally an invention intended to explain the inexplicable, a device by which those 'most consequential institutions of totalitarian rule' could be made accessible to human imagination.
This passage situates totalitarianism as Arendt's heuristic instrument for rendering the Holocaust's incomprehensible horror imaginable, while acknowledging the conceptual strain such an explanatory burden imposes.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
The problem with the totalitarian attitude is that it cannot stand ambiguity. Increasingly trapped in its one-sided attitude, it becomes increasingly unable to be anything but one-sided.
Drawing on Jung's distinction between cultural one-sidedness and barbaric involuntary one-sidedness, Ulanov diagnoses the totalitarian attitude as a psychopathology of irresolvable rigidity that must suppress all competing perspectives.
, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971thesis
radical evil really is I don't know, but it seems to me it somehow has to do with the following phenomenon: making human beings as human beings superfluous... This happens as soon as all unpredictability — which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity — is eliminated.
Arendt's three-stage analytic model of total domination identifies the elimination of spontaneity — the rendering of human beings superfluous — as the defining logic of totalitarian rule, rooted in a delusion of omnipotence.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
totalitarianism rests on the myth that 'everything is permitted, everything is possible' — according to which the master can manufacture a new man.
Ricoeur traces Arendt's intellectual trajectory from Origins of Totalitarianism to The Human Condition through the thesis that totalitarianism's defining myth is the omnipotence to fabricate human nature itself.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Religion, in the sense of conscientious regard for the irrational factors of the psyche and individual fate, reappears—evilly distorted—in the deification of the State and the dictator.
Jung argues that totalitarian state-worship is not a novel political phenomenon but a psychic regression in which suppressed religious function returns in pathological form as the worship of Caesar or the dictator.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964thesis
It is my contrarian thesis here that there is a great deal of wisdom in claiming otherwise — at least if one wants to understand the term 'totalitarianism,' or if one cares about the
Barber argues against the inflationary post-9/11 application of 'totalitarianism' to terrorism and Islamism, contending that such usage distorts rather than illuminates Arendt's carefully circumscribed concept.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
totalism is their tendency. We are all totalitarians now! Aside from the myriad contradictions that set these many definitions against one another, not one really captures the peculiar kind of decentralized
The passage surveys competing scholarly definitions of totalitarianism — from Platonic essentialism to Enlightenment democracy to convergence theory — and finds all of them inadequate to Arendt's more precise genealogical account.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
complicity came the possibility of choice and hence resistance, making totalitarianism less of a preordained death sentence.
Arendt's analysis of victim complicity is read as a way of introducing contingency into the iron logic of totalitarian essentialism, suggesting that behavior and choice could alter the trajectory toward extermination.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
totalitarianism antisemitism and imperialism and, 6 Cold War politics and Arendt's theories on, 85–7 conflicting definitions of, 272–3... evil in, 345, 350–6 historical origins of, 107–9 international law and human plurality and, 219–43
This index entry maps the full conceptual range of totalitarianism in the corpus, situating it at the intersection of antisemitism, imperialism, international law, evil, sovereignty, and terrorism.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt claimed that imperialism is one of the problems to which totalitarianism is a 'fantastical attempted solution'
Arendt's argument that totalitarianism is a fantasmatic political solution to the unresolved structural problems of imperialism is invoked to caution against reducing her thought to a simple democracy-versus-totalitarianism framework.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
No system is finally immune to the seductions and the horrific consequences of radical evil. The 'banality' of an American Eichmann is, thank God, still a long shot in America
Barber warns that American exceptionalism cannot permanently insulate democratic societies from the seductions of radical evil that produced totalitarianism, drawing on Arendt's concept of the 'banality of evil.'
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
The initial Cold War reception of Origins was marked by a singular focus on Arendt's concept of totalitarianism
This passage notes that the Cold War reception of Arendt's Origins privileged the totalitarianism concept at the expense of her equally significant analysis of imperialism, distorting the work's theoretical architecture.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
International Law and Human Plurality in the Shadow of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin
The passage frames a comparative study of Arendt and Lemkin as an investigation into how totalitarianism's assault on human plurality necessitated new frameworks in international criminal law, including the Genocide Convention.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
the policy of the State is the supreme principle of thought and action... the mass man grants the individual a right to exist only in so far as he is a function of the State.
Jung anatomizes the psychology of the mass man under totalitarianism, identifying the absolute subordination of individual existence to state function as the hallmark of collective unfreedom.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964supporting
in the attempt to define the qualitative difference of totalitarian genocide from its colonial precursors, Arendt seems cavalier or even callous in her seeming lack of moral outrage at the scale of colonial violence.
Critics contend that Arendt's insistence on the qualitative singularity of totalitarian genocide relative to colonial violence creates a morally and analytically problematic hierarchy of historical atrocities.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
a conference was held at the New School for Social Research that had been originally planned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Impassioned participants debated whether the al-Qaeda movement and Islamic Jihadism could be considered 'totalitarian'
The post-9/11 debate at the New School illustrates how Arendt's totalitarianism concept was immediately mobilized — and contested — as a framework for understanding transnational Islamist terrorism.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside