The archetype that is not universal

Carrie B. Dohe opens with a problem that Jungian reference works do not acknowledge. Jung defined the archetype in two ways that cannot both be true. In one definition, archetypes are innate to all human beings and appear universally and in identical form; in the other, an archetype belongs to a particular race or Volk and is not the property of humanity at large. The lexica and introductions to Jungian thought transmit the first definition and pass over the second in silence. Dohe’s contention is that this silence has a history. It was produced partly by the controversies of the Nazi period, when the racially delimited archetype became indefensible, and partly by a documented pattern of erasure in the English Collected Works, so that Anglophone readers meet a Jung already cleaned. What connects the two definitions is not confusion but a specific theory: a collective unconscious stratified by race and religion. On that account the exclusivist archetype is not a marginal aberration to be quarantined from the good Jung. It is the bridge, and the universalist claim rests on it.

Where Jung’s ideas came from

The book’s second move is genealogical, and it is the move that removes Jung’s originality where originality has been assumed. Jung did not discover the Germanic psyche in the consulting room or in dreams; he inherited a discourse roughly two thousand years old. Dohe traces the barbarian image from Caesar and Tacitus, through the fifteenth-century humanist recovery of the Germania, into nineteenth-century philology, Aryan mythography, and evolutionary anthropology. Her governing tool is Klaus von See’s model, which does two things at once. First, it shows how Tacitus’s account of primitive virtue was reread as the permanent essence of Germanness, not as a rhetorical foil. Second, it shows how Tacitus’s antithesis to Rome was expanded into a general structure requiring a hostile other, with the result that “the Jew” could later occupy the position Rome had held. This explains the valorization of the barbarian and the antisemitic substitution as a single mechanism, not two accidents. The consequence for Jung is direct: his psychological profiles of Germanic, Jewish, and “primitive” peoples were drawn in large measure from the scholarly literature he was reading, not from clinical observation. What looked like empirical psychology was substantially inherited philology.

Science, spirituality and the master’s role

Dohe then asks what kind of authority Jung was constructing, and finds it deliberately placed between science and religion. Using Joachim Wach’s typology of the master and the teacher, she shows that Jung’s self-presentation matches the spiritual master far more closely than the scientist he insisted he was—the relation to disciples, the claim to a knowledge grounded in personal experience, the transmission by attachment, not argument. The positioning answered a real demand. For a rationalized, largely Protestant, largely educated clientele who could not return to the church but could not live without a religious attitude, Jung translated religious concepts into psychological terminology: Otto’s numinous, Söderblom’s mana, Ergriffenheit. Individuation on this reading is a psychologized bourgeois religion of self-redemption with a Nietzschean inflection. Dohe’s point is not debunking for its own sake. It is that Jung was an instance of a widespread phenomenon, not a lone genius standing outside his period, and that a theory built to satisfy this demand will carry the demand’s assumptions—including its assumptions about whose spiritual inheritance is being recovered.

Two primitivities: the infantile and the primordial

The analytic core of the book is a distinction Jung never made explicit but consistently used. “Primitive” carries two opposed valences in his writing. In one, it means infantile, instinct-bound, undeveloped, arrested. In the other, it means primordial, embryonic, regenerative, close to the source. Dohe demonstrates that Jung distributed these unevenly along racial lines. Jews are described as at once over-civilized and infantile, rootless, parasitic upon a Wirtsvolk, incapable of creating their own cultural forms. Germanic peoples are described as youthful, barbaric, and pregnant with a future they have not yet borne. The same word does opposite work depending on who is being described, and the assignment is not argued but assumed. She reads this against Jung’s own spatial models of the psyche—the multi-storied house and the mountain-range model of personality’s geological layers—and registers a telling absence: the diagram contains no stratum for humanity as such. The layers run from the individual through family, clan, nation, and racial group to the animal, with no floor marked human. This is the structural evidence for her thesis, and it is where she states plainly that Jung’s psyche as a whole differs by race and religion, with no universal ground. The model was less concerned with a common human ground than with connecting modern Europeans to an original wellspring that was theirs and not everyone’s.

Wotan, Ergriffenheit and the afterlife of a racial archetype

The most consequential finding is philological. The English Collected Works renders Ergriffenheit as “possession,” and Dohe’s judgment is unsparing: the translation of the term as “possession” is simply wrong, for this would be Besessenheit in German. The error inverts the 1936 essay. Jung was not describing Germans as demonically possessed but as gripped, deeply moved in the sense of an original religious encounter with the Holy, a state he compared to the descent of the Pentecostal Spirit. Read from the German, the Wotan essay is a largely favourable diagnosis of National Socialism as collective individuation and as kairos—the right moment arriving. The mistranslation has allowed generations of English readers to take a text of qualified enthusiasm as a warning. Dohe then follows the essay forward. Ethnic and racist Heathen and Ásatrú groups quote it as prooftext, using Jung’s standing as a scientist to argue that religion is inherited genetically, that gods belong to bloodlines. She is precise about the divergence: Jung’s own version of racial essence worked through climate and soil, not genes, so these groups have altered what they cite even as their argument depends entirely on his authority. The tension the book leaves open is the practical one. If the exclusivist archetype remains structurally central, then no amount of editorial silence disposes of it, and analytical psychology inherits the obligation to say what in its instrument still carries that weight.