Suchergebnisse

The reputation of Carl Gustav Jung has been clouded by allegations that he was anti-Semitic and a Nazi sympathizer. This dissertation began as an effort to research these charges but developed the more comprehensive goal of documenting the cultural and political views he held throughout his life. My thesis is that Jung was an avant-garde conservative whose progressive ideas about education and therapy were often overshadowed by his conservative social and political opinions. A Basel native, he was influenced by the writings of Jakob Burckhardt and fascinated with Nietzsche, adopting the philosopher s aristocratic disdain for mass democracy and other modern trends. Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who became Freud s crown prince but left the psychoanalytic movement for a variety of reasons. By 1918 he would be characterizing Freud s psychology in a racial terminology related to that of such thinkers as Le Bon. Jung saw Jews like Freud as agents of modernity because of their preference for atheism and radical ideas. After World War I Jung was promoted in Germany by Oscar A. H. Schmitz who introduced him to Count Hermann Keyserling and to Prince Karl Anton Rohan. Jung became active in Rohan s Kulturbund and frequently published in his Europäische Revue which has been identified as one of the period s leading neo-conservative journals. In 1933 Jung became the president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. Within the year he publicly expressed approval of the Führerprinzip and attacked psychoanalysis. At the same time he sought to internationalize the organization and amend its by-laws to protect Jewish members. Jung s use of the concept of the Volksseele is most obvious in his article Wotan. Since his university years Jung had been tracking developments in Germany s religious life, especially through the writings of Eduard von Hartmann and Arthur Drews. Jung was convinced that the Nazi movement should be understood more as a religious phenomenon than a political one. He interpreted what was going on in ...