Jungian psychology and fascism

The question has two distinct registers that must be kept separate: the historical question of Jung's personal conduct during the National Socialist period, and the theoretical question of what analytical psychology offers as a diagnosis of fascism as a psychological phenomenon. Conflating them produces neither good history nor good psychology.

Jung's Conduct, 1933–1940

The historical record is genuinely compromised. In 1933, Jung accepted the presidency of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy — an organization operating under Nazi approval — and became editor of its journal, the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie. What followed was, at minimum, a serious failure of judgment. A political manifesto by Professor M. H. Göring, committing the German section to Hitler's ideological principles, appeared in the Zentralblatt under Jung's editorial name. Jung's own letters make clear he was not consulted and was dismayed:

To my great surprise and disappointment Professor Göring's political manifesto was suddenly printed in the current issue of the Zentralblatt. I do not doubt that there were inside political reasons for this, but it was one of those lamentable tactical gaffes which were the bane of German foreign policy even in the Wilhelm era. In this way my name unexpectedly appeared over a National Socialist manifesto, which to me personally was anything but agreeable.

His defense — that he was trying to preserve psychotherapy as a discipline inside Germany, that medicine must serve suffering humanity under any government — has a certain internal logic. But it does not account for the more damaging material: his editorial remarks distinguishing "Jewish" from "Aryan-Germanic" psychology, published at the precise moment when such distinctions carried lethal political weight. Clarke (1994) notes that while Jung's stated aim was to rescue psychotherapy from what he saw as the dogmatic narrowness of Freudian categories, "the remarks were not only offensive and insensitive in the light of the Nazis' anti-semitic ideology, but betray once again an overly simplistic conception of national psychology." In Zurich in 1946, Jung admitted to Rabbi Leo Baeck that he had "slipped up." The admission is real; it does not dissolve the problem.

The shadow chapter in Papadopoulos (2006) offers a useful clinical frame: Jung appears to have been seized by what he himself theorized — a shadow power complex, dazzled by the mythological charisma of a collective movement. The irony is sharp. The man who theorized projection as the mechanism by which unconscious contents are experienced as belonging to an external object enacted precisely that mechanism in relation to the Nazi phenomenon, at least for a period.

Analytical Psychology as a Diagnosis of Fascism

Whatever the personal failures, the theoretical resources Jung and his circle developed for understanding fascism remain among the most penetrating available. The core move — treating mass political catastrophe not as a political phenomenon requiring political explanation but as archetypal possession diagnosable with clinical precision — is the argument of Civilization in Transition (1964). A nation seized by an archetype functions identically to a patient seized by a complex, differing only in scale. The Wotan essay makes this explicit: Germany had been possessed by an archaic force, a god of storm and frenzy, and the nation was behaving like a patient in the grip of a complex it could not see.

Neumann's contribution sharpens the diagnosis considerably. In Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949), he identifies what he calls "pleromatic mysticism" — the soul's attempt to escape the shadow problem by identifying with a redemptive collective:

The liberation of the individual from his moral problems and the assumption of responsibility by the collective is the real basis for the redemptive character of all collective movements. Nowadays, this redemptive character generally takes a political form, but it is not difficult to see how, in this case, politics is the "opium of the people," and, in fact, a substitute for religion.

This is the ratio of the mother turned collective: if we are held enough, redeemed enough, absorbed into something large enough, we will not have to suffer the weight of individual moral consciousness. The leader-figure becomes the mana-personality of the collective unconscious; his doctrine replaces individual conscience; the shadow is projected outward onto the scapegoat. Neumann's argument is that National Socialism is not an aberration but the logical terminus of what he calls the "old ethic" — conscience identified with collective values, shadow mechanically expelled onto a carrier. The scapegoat is not incidental to fascism; it is its psychological engine.

Von Franz (1975) extends the analysis: mass-mindedness (Massenhaftigkeit) — the loss of individual specific weight, the dissolution into collective affect — is the precondition for totalitarian capture. The atrophy of inner symbolic life, the disappearance of the living symbol as mediating structure, leaves the psyche available for possession by political imagery that functions as pseudo-symbol. Individuation, on this reading, is not a private therapeutic luxury but a structural requirement of political order.

Patricia Berry (1982) adds a useful distinction: Jung's most negative sense of "the collective" is precisely the mass — Hitler's Germany — where archetypes appear "titanically as compulsion or mass, formless energy," and organization is "split off and arranged from above by system and dictatorial edict." The split between a dictatorial ruling principle and a formless mass energy is visible in the dreams of analysands, and it is visible in the political structure of fascism. The psychological and the political are not analogous; they are the same phenomenon at different scales.

The honest accounting, then, is this: Jung's personal conduct during the Nazi period was compromised in ways he himself eventually acknowledged, and the compromises were not trivial. But the theoretical apparatus he and his circle built — shadow, projection, mass-mindedness, the scapegoat mechanism, pleromatic inflation — constitutes one of the most rigorous psychological accounts of how fascism works from the inside. The two facts coexist without resolving each other.

  • shadow — the unconscious repository of what consciousness refuses to carry, and the mechanism by which it is projected outward
  • projection — the operative pathology behind collective scapegoating and mass political movements
  • Erich Neumann — portrait of the analytical psychologist who gave the shadow problem its fullest ethical elaboration
  • Civilization in Transition — Jung's sustained application of clinical method to collective historical catastrophe

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C. G., 1964, Civilization in Transition
  • Jung, C. G., 1973/1975, Letters Volumes 1 & 2
  • Neumann, Erich, 1949, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1975, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time
  • Berry, Patricia, 1982, Echo's Subtle Body
  • Clarke, J. J., 1994, Jung and Eastern Thought
  • Papadopoulos, Renos K., 2006, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology