Jung: Political, Cultural and Historical Context

Abstract

The long-foreshadowed, traumatic breakdown of the close relations between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung was the inevitable result of a struggle for power. This struggle, recorded for succeeding generations in The Freud/Jung Letters,¹ ranged over theory and language, and was particularly concerned with the infringement of psychoanalysis on religious and occult territory. It enacted a personal combat for dominance over an emerging cultural movement. The correspondence of Freud and Jung delineates a relationship in which it is now impossible to separate passion, ambition, warring ideas and antagonistic cultures. Indeed, The Freud/Jung Letters serve as a reminder of how a personal drama can be written through ideological conflict and how a discourse such as Jungian theory is saturated with history. This chapter will consider some of Jung’s sources, to look at his relation to esotericism and to a contemporary Germanic culture which was breeding nationalism, anti-Semitism and Nazism. It will further consider Jung’s historical role in his dealings with Nazi Germany before the Second World War. I will draw on recent research, particularly by Richard Noll in The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (1994), F.X. Charet in Spiritualism and the Foundations of C.G. Jung’s Psychology (1991) and two articles by Andrew Samuels on ‘National Psychology, National Socialism, and Analytical Psychology’ in the Journal of Analytical Psychology (1992).²