Carl Jung Psychoanalyzes Hitler: “He’s the Unconscious of 78 Million Germans.” “Without the German People He’d Be Nothing” (1938)

Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not sug­gest­ing that you do—you would find your­self hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semi­te and a Nazi sym­pa­thiz­er. Many sites con­demn or exon­er­ate him; many oth­ers cel­e­brate him as a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can be nau­se­at­ing­ly dif­fi­cult at times to tell these accounts apart. What to make of this con­tro­ver­sy? What is the evi­dence brought against the famed Swiss psy­chi­a­trist and one­time close friend, stu­dent, and col­league of Sig­mund Freud?

Truth be told, it does not look good for Jung. Unlike Niet­zsche, whose work was delib­er­ate­ly bas­tardized by Nazis, begin­ning with his own sis­ter, Jung need not be tak­en out of con­text to be read as anti-Semit­ic. There is no irony at work in his 1934 paper The State of Psy­chother­a­py Today, in which he mar­vels at Nation­al Social­ism as a “for­mi­da­ble phe­nom­e­non,” and writes, “the ‘Aryan’ uncon­scious has a high­er poten­tial than the Jew­ish.” This is only one of the least objec­tion­able of such state­ments, as his­to­ri­an Andrew Samuels demon­strates.

One Jun­gian defend­er admits in an essay col­lec­tion called Lin­ger­ing Shad­ows that Jung had been “uncon­scious­ly infect­ed by Nazi ideas.” In response, psy­chol­o­gist John Con­ger asks, “Why not then say that he was uncon­scious­ly infect­ed by anti-Semit­ic ideas as well?”—well before the Nazis came to pow­er. He had expressed such thoughts as far back as 1918. Like the philoso­pher Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, Jung was accused of trad­ing on his pro­fes­sion­al asso­ci­a­tions dur­ing the 30s to main­tain his sta­tus, and turn­ing on his Jew­ish col­leagues while they were purged.

Yet his biog­ra­ph­er Deirdre Bair claims Jung’s name was used to endorse per­se­cu­tion with­out his con­sent. Jung was incensed, “not least,” Mark Ver­non writes at The Guardian, “because he was actu­al­ly fight­ing to keep Ger­man psy­chother­a­py open to Jew­ish indi­vid­u­als.” Bair also reveals that Jung was “involved in two plots to oust Hitler, essen­tial­ly by hav­ing a lead­ing physi­cian declare the Führer mad. Both came to noth­ing.” And unlike Hei­deg­ger, Jung strong­ly denounced anti-Semit­ic views dur­ing the war. He “pro­tect­ed Jew­ish ana­lysts,” writes Con­ger, “and helped refugees.” He also worked for the OSS, pre­cur­sor to the CIA, dur­ing the war.

His recruiter Allen Dulles wrote of Jung’s “deep antipa­thy to what Nazism and Fas­cism stood for.” Dulles also cryp­ti­cal­ly remarked, “Nobody will prob­a­bly ever know how much Prof. Jung con­tributed to the allied cause dur­ing the war.” These con­tra­dic­tions in Jung’s words, char­ac­ter, and actions are puz­zling, to say the least. I would not pre­sume to draw any hard and fast con­clu­sions from them. They do, how­ev­er, serve as the nec­es­sary con­text for Jung’s obser­va­tions of Adolph Hitler. Nazis of today who praise Jung most often do so for his sup­posed char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Hitler as “Wotan,” or Odin, a com­par­i­son that thrills neo-pagans who, like the Ger­mans did, use ancient Euro­pean belief sys­tems as clothes hang­ers for mod­ern racist nation­al­ism.

In his 1936 essay, “Wotan,” Jung describes the old god as a force all its own, a “per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of psy­chic forces” that moved through the Ger­man peo­ple “towards the end of the Weimar Republic”—through the “thou­sands of unem­ployed,” who by 1933 “marched in their hun­dreds of thou­sands.” Wotan, Jung writes, “is the god of storm and fren­zy, the unleash­er of pas­sions and the lust of bat­tle; more­over he is a superla­tive magi­cian and artist in illu­sion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.” In per­son­i­fy­ing the “Ger­man psy­che” as a furi­ous god, Jung goes so far as to write, “We who stand out­side judge the Ger­mans far too much as if they were respon­si­ble agents, but per­haps it would be near­er the truth to regard them also as vic­tims.”

“One hopes,” writes Per Brask, “evi­dent­ly against hope, that Jung did not intend” his state­ments “as an argu­ment of redemp­tion for the Ger­mans.” What­ev­er his inten­tions, his mys­ti­cal racial­iza­tion of the uncon­scious in “Wotan” accord­ed per­fect­ly well with the the­o­ries of Alfred Rosen­berg, “Hitler’s chief ide­ol­o­gist.” Like every­thing about Jung, the sit­u­a­tion is com­pli­cat­ed. In a 1938 inter­view, pub­lished by Omni­book Mag­a­zine in 1942, Jung repeat­ed many of these dis­turb­ing ideas, com­par­ing the Ger­man wor­ship of Hitler to the Jew­ish desire for a Mes­si­ah, a “char­ac­ter­is­tic of peo­ple with an infe­ri­or­i­ty com­plex.” He describes Hitler’s pow­er as a form of “mag­ic.” But that pow­er only exists, he says, because “Hitler lis­tens and obeys….”

His Voice is noth­ing oth­er than his own uncon­scious, into which the Ger­man peo­ple have pro­ject­ed their own selves; that is, the uncon­scious of sev­en­ty-eight mil­lion Ger­mans. That is what makes him pow­er­ful. With­out the Ger­man peo­ple he would be noth­ing.

Jung’s obser­va­tions are bom­bas­tic, but they are not flat­ter­ing. The peo­ple may be pos­sessed, but it is their will, he says, that the Nazi leader enacts, not his own. “The true leader,” says Jung, “is always led.” He goes on to paint an even dark­er pic­ture, hav­ing close­ly observed Hitler and Mus­soli­ni togeth­er in Berlin:

In com­par­i­son with Mus­soli­ni, Hitler made upon me the impres­sion of a sort of scaf­fold­ing of wood cov­ered with cloth, an automa­ton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. Dur­ing the whole per­for­mance he nev­er laughed; it was as though he were in a bad humor, sulk­ing. He showed no human sign.

His expres­sion was that of an inhu­man­ly sin­gle-mind­ed pur­po­sive­ness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be a dou­ble of a real per­son, and that Hitler the man might per­haps be hid­ing inside like an appen­dix, and delib­er­ate­ly so hid­ing in order not to dis­turb the mech­a­nism.

With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a med­i­cine man, a form of spir­i­tu­al ves­sel, a demi-deity, or even bet­ter, a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would nev­er be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a col­lec­tive. He is not an indi­vid­ual, but a whole nation. I take it to be lit­er­al­ly true that he has no per­son­al friend. How can you talk inti­mate­ly with a nation?

Read the full inter­view here. Jung goes on to fur­ther dis­cuss the Ger­man resur­gence of the cult of Wotan, the “par­al­lel between the Bib­li­cal tri­ad… and the Third Reich,” and oth­er pecu­liar­ly Jun­gian for­mu­la­tions. Of Jung’s analy­sis, inter­view­er H.R. Knicker­bock­er con­cludes, “this psy­chi­atric expla­na­tion of the Nazi names and sym­bols may sound to a lay­man fan­tas­tic, but can any­thing be as fan­tas­tic as the bare facts about the Nazi Par­ty and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by mere­ly call­ing them gang­sters.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Jung Explains Why His Famous Friend­ship with Sig­mund Freud Fell Apart in Rare 1959 Audio

Carl Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in a Rare Inter­view (1957)

Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Pro­vide Door­ways to the Uncon­scious, and Maybe a Way to Pre­dict the Future

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness