Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘totalitarianism’ is treated not as a merely political category but as a symptom of psychological and civilizational pathology. The dominant voice is Hannah Arendt’s, whose Origins of Totalitarianism provides the conceptual scaffold: totalitarianism is understood as the institutionalization of radical evil, its ‘most consequential institutions’ being the concentration and extermination camps where human beings are rendered superfluous as human beings. Jung’s contribution is complementary but distinct — he locates totalitarianism’s psychic root in the deification of the State and the suppression of the individual’s metaphysical ground, warning that the religious function, expelled by rationalism, returns ‘evilly distorted’ in the cult of the dictator. Ulanov extends this Jungian diagnosis into group psychology, reading the totalitarian attitude as an inability to tolerate ambiguity or creative tension — a pathological one-sidedness that suppresses all opposing poles of psychic life. Fromm’s analysis of the ‘escape from freedom’ runs parallel. A persistent tension in the corpus concerns the term’s proper scope: whether it legitimately names modern terrorism and Islamic jihadism, or whether such application dilutes the concept beyond Arendt’s exacting genealogy of radical evil. The stakes are high — misappropriation of the term risks both moral and analytic failure.
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 ultimately points beyond all available language toward a radical evil that exceeds every analytical formulation, including her own.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
making human beings as human beings superfluous (not using them as means to an end, which leaves their essence as humans untouched and impinges only on their human dignity; rather, making them superfluous as human beings).
Arendt’s three-stage analytic model identifies the distinctive logic of totalitarian domination as the elimination of spontaneity and the consequent rendering of persons superfluous as human beings.
, 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.
Ulanov, drawing on Jung, diagnoses the totalitarian attitude as a psychological pathology of one-sidedness — the inability to sustain the creative tension of opposing viewpoints — that entropically reinforces itself.
, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971thesis
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 the pathological return of the suppressed religious function, Nature reasserting herself through the cult of the dictator when driven out by rationalism.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964thesis
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.
The passage frames Arendt’s concept of totalitarianism as an epistemological instrument — a genealogy of radical evil designed to render the horror of the camps comprehensible to those who did not experience them.
, 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, following Arendt’s trajectory from Origins to The Human Condition, identifies totalitarianism’s foundational myth as omnipotence — the belief that human nature itself can be remade.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Secular-ism and not religion is their essence, and totalism is their tendency. We are all totalitarians now!
This passage surveys competing theoretical genealogies of totalitarianism — Platonic, democratic, and industrial-convergence theses — exposing the irreconcilable contradictions among them.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
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 contests the post-9/11 application of ‘totalitarianism’ to Islamic terrorism, arguing that such usage betrays Arendt’s rigorous concept and obscures the real nature of decentralized modern terror.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
complicity might render evil comprehensible, even conquerable. For with complicity came the possibility of choice and hence resistance, making totalitarianism less of a preordained death sentence.
The passage traces how Arendt’s analysis of the Eichmann trial introduced the concept of victim complicity as a means of breaking the iron determinism of totalitarian essentialism and opening space for contingency and resistance.
, 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, 273n31 contemporary views of, 259 decline of Western civilization and, 100
This index entry maps the full thematic range through which Arendt’s corpus treats totalitarianism, connecting it to antisemitism, imperialism, evil, sovereignty, international law, and contemporary terrorism.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
both totalitarianism and the councils are a response to ‘the age’s problems.’ … it would be a leap to think that the same logic explained her opposition to the American war in Vietnam, as if she thought that America was on its way to totalitarianism.
The passage argues that Arendt understood totalitarianism and democratic council forms as rival responses to modernity’s structural problems, cautioning against overly schematic applications of her framework to American politics.
, 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 America’s historical exceptionalism provides no permanent immunity against totalitarian tendencies, particularly as the logic of total war and radical evil increasingly encroaches on democratic self-understanding.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
can any serious historian, any genuine moralist, really believe that our experience of terrorism, however brutal, warrants calling the perpetrators ‘totalitarian’?
The passage argues that applying the term ‘totalitarian’ to post-9/11 terrorism is historically indefensible, as terrorism lacks the centralized, essentialist, and world-annihilating character that defines Arendt’s concept.
, 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 — especiall
This passage documents how Cold War political imperatives dominated early reception of Origins, narrowing the text to its totalitarianism concept and obscuring Arendt’s broader analysis of imperialism and modernity.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
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.
The passage engages the postcolonial critique of Arendt, examining the tension between her insistence on totalitarian genocide’s qualitative novelty and the moral weight of its colonial precursors.
, 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
This passage situates Arendt’s concept of totalitarianism within international legal theory, exploring its relationship to Lemkin’s genocide framework and the foundations of post-Holocaust jurisprudence.
, 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 characterizes the totalitarian mass-man as one who has surrendered individual autonomy entirely to state authority, recognizing no extramundane counterpoise to political power.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964supporting
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’
This passage records the post-9/11 scholarly debate over whether Arendt’s concept of totalitarianism could legitimately be extended to jihadist movements, illustrating the term’s contested contemporary currency.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside
That Britain neither became a totalitarian state nor were its political institutions undermined by imperialism is often taken … to be the strongest rebuttal of the causal claims of Arendt’s analysis of imperialism.
The passage identifies the standard objection to Arendt’s imperialist genealogy of totalitarianism — namely, that Britain’s exemption from totalitarian collapse undermines her causal argument.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside