Carl jung controversy 1930s

The most consequential and contested episode in Jung's biography is his acceptance, in 1933, of the presidency of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy — an organization based in Germany at the precise moment the Nazi regime was consolidating power. The controversy has never been fully resolved, and the fault lines it opened run through the Jungian tradition to this day.

The immediate occasion was the resignation of Ernst Kretschmer, who found the political situation too "complicated." Jung, then vice-president, stepped into the chair. His stated rationale was pragmatic and, in his own telling, morally urgent: psychotherapy in Germany was gravely threatened, and a neutral Swiss president might preserve the organization's international character and protect Jewish colleagues who were being expelled from German medical societies. One of his first acts was to modify the society's constitution so that German Jewish doctors could maintain individual membership even after being excluded from all German professional bodies — a fact his defenders cite as evidence of genuine protective intent.

The damage came through the society's journal, the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, of which Jung became editor. In the December 1933 issue, he published an editorial distinguishing between "Germanic" and "Jewish" psychology, arguing that the differences between them had long been recognized by perceptive observers and that applying Jewish categories indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic psychology was a scientific error. The same issue carried a manifesto by Matthias Göring — cousin of Hermann Göring — saturated with pro-Nazi rhetoric. The juxtaposition was devastating. As Stein (1998) notes, Jung was walking a moral tightrope: the world was watching, and every move he made influenced public opinion.

Jung states that perceptive people have for a long time recognised that science would only benefit from recognising that there is a difference between German and Jewish psychology. The impact of this statement was made the greater by the inclusion in the same issue of an article by Matthias Göring full of pro-Nazi rhetoric. In this way, Jung's remarks could be used to underwrite the racist claims of the Nazi regime.

Jung's own defense, offered in a rejoinder to the Swiss psychiatrist Gustav Bally who attacked him in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, was that distinguishing between psychologies implied no hierarchy of value — no more than speaking of "the peculiar psychology of the Oriental" implied depreciation of the Chinese. Clarke (1994) notes that this defense is precisely where the argument collapses: the comparison with the Chinese is as objectionable as the comparison with the Jews, and both betray an overly simplistic conception of national psychology that overrides individual variation and historical complexity.

The Göring manifesto appearing under Jung's editorial name was, by his own account, a blunder he had not authorized. He wrote to colleagues in March 1934 expressing his displeasure and demanding that the Zentralblatt be kept free of domestic German politics for foreign subscribers. The letters make clear that he was operating in conditions of extreme institutional pressure, where "one unforeseen decree follows another" and even well-intentioned actors could not control what appeared under their names. Yet the letters also reveal that Jung had advised German psychotherapists to "submit without hesitation" to National Socialist requirements — a posture that, whatever its tactical logic, sits uneasily with any claim to principled resistance.

The deeper charge, pressed most forcefully by Andrew Samuels, is not merely that Jung made injudicious remarks under political pressure, but that his ambition to become a psychologist of nations — to read collective psyches as he read individual ones — led him into territory where psychological categories became instruments of racial ideology. Papadopoulos (2006) cites Micha Neumann's claim that Jung unconsciously identified with Nazi symbols and ideology, and that his complicated father-son relationship with Freud left him with a blind spot toward Jews specifically. In Zurich in 1946, Jung admitted to Rabbi Leo Baeck that he had "slipped up" — a confession whose brevity has itself been criticized.

What the episode discloses, from a depth-psychological vantage, is the shadow side of Jung's own theory: the collective shadow operating precisely in the man who named it. Von Franz (1974) observed that the collective shadow is particularly dangerous because people support each other in their blindness, and that even individuals who are anti-Nazi in private can be "possessed" in a group setting. Jung, who wrote that "in Hitler, every German should have seen his own shadow," appears to have been insufficiently immune to the same constellating force.

The controversy is not a footnote. It is the point at which the question of whether depth psychology can be politically neutral — whether the psyche can be studied without ideological consequence — becomes unavoidable.

  • shadow — Jung's concept of the unconscious inferior personality, personal and collective
  • complex — the autonomous affective cluster at the center of Jung's empirical psychology
  • individuation — the process of becoming a whole self, and its political limits
  • Marie-Louise von Franz — on the collective shadow and its mechanisms of possession

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1964, Civilization in Transition
  • Jung, C.G., 1973, Letters Volume 1: 1906–1950
  • Jung, C.G., 1975, Letters Volume 2: 1951–1961
  • Stein, Murray, 1998, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction
  • Papadopoulos, Renos K., 2006, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology
  • Clarke, J.J., 1994, Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1974, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales