Ideological Possession and the Rise of the New Right

The Political Thought of Carl Jung

Laurie M. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000007329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political theorist Laurie M. Johnson deals with Jung's analysis of the effects of modern scientific rationalism on the development of communism, fascism and Nazism in the 20th century and applies this analysis to the rise of the New Right in the 21st century.

Jung's thought provides much needed insight into contemporary ideologies such as neoliberalism, Identitarianism and the Alt-Right. Johnson explains Jungian analytical psychology as it relates to these topics, with a chapter devoted to Jung's views of Friedrich Nietzsche, who exemplifies the modern problem with his proclamation that God is dead, and an in-depth discussion of Jung's views on truth and the psychological function of religion as a safeguard against deadly mass movements. She then turns to Jung's treatment of anti-Semitism and the Nazi movement, and his views on race and racism.

Johnson applies these historical insights to the current manifestations of mass psychological disruption in the clash between neoliberals and the right-wing populist and Identitarian movements on the rise in North America and Europe. She concludes by discussing the search for an authentic and meaningful life in a West that rejects extremism and is open to authentic spiritual experiences as a counterbalance to mass mindedness.

Ideological Possession and the Rise of the New Right will appeal to both undergraduate and graduate students of psychology and intellectual history. The book will also be of interest to those wishing to understand the new nationalist, nativist and Identarian movements.

1

JUNG’S POLITICAL THOUGHT

An Introduction

This book is ultimately about dangerous ideological movements, what causes them and what might be done to prevent future outbreaks of extremism and violence. Carl Jung’s analysis of the destructive ideological movements of the 20th century is worth contemplating to see if it can bear on the rising ideologies of our own times, particularly (for purposes of this book) the rise of ethno-nationalist/New Right movements in Europe and the United States. To that end, in this chapter I will lay out the basics of Jung’s thought as it relates to the creation of mass ideologies. Other chapters in this book will provide the building blocks for a more nuanced picture of Jung’s views. I will spend time on what Jung thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and his proclamation that “God is dead,” Jung’s analysis of the psychological value of religion in his work Answer to Job, as well as his views on the Nazis and on race and racism. In the latter two chapters, I will not only explore what Jung thought of fascism and racism but the possibility that his own views were tainted by these pernicious views. After these steps, I will turn to a Jungian reading of the current signs of mass psychosis in the Western world in the rise of Identitarian/ethno-nationalist movements.

Here, I hope to explain the building blocks of the psychological theory Jung used to analyze totalitarian communism, fascism and Nazism. According to Jung, each individual psyche contains a personal consciousness or ego and a personal unconscious containing repressed and forgotten memories. But our psyches also contain the “collective unconscious.” As we will see, Jung’s “cure” for various personal as well as political ills is a healthy awareness and expression of this common, ancient and unchanged part of ourselves. The collective unconscious can either help people become whole individuals who can resist the lure of ideological extremism or drive them to become little more than drones in some tyrannical political framework. The problem is, most people in the Western world were, in his view, alienated from the collective unconscious because of modernity’s rejection of authentic spiritual experience. But, to understand why this is so, we must first learn what Jung meant by the collective unconscious.

The Collective Unconscious

Jung claims that the collective unconscious is a stratum of the unconscious that is shared by everyone, regardless of their different civilizations and cultures. As Progoff points out, “collective” means that its contents are prior to the appearance of genuine individuality. Its origins are therefore very ancient and primitive. Beyond these observations, Jung concludes that it is impossible to answer the metaphysical question of how or exactly when the collective unconscious was first expressed—all we have are symbolic expressions that came, no doubt, long after they had already bubbled up in action and non-written communication.¹ The visible symbols by which the collective unconscious expresses itself will differ according to civilization, culture and time, even though the archaic ground from which these symbols arise is “identical in all individuals.”² In “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious,” he states that the archetypes “owe their existence exclusively to heredity.”³ However, the exact mode of transmission remains unclear.

Suffice it to say that Jung theorized something like a layered memory bank in the human psyche. Most of the time, only the most recent layers were accessible to our consciousness. But the symbols used in the past, even the very distant past, to express the archetypes of the collective unconscious in that age and place, were still stored in the lower levels of our unconscious along with the archetypes themselves. For instance, Progoff writes that ancient Druid or Etruscan symbols can be found buried in the modern Irish and Italian psyche. Today, ancient symbolism is still found in dreams, myths and even religions. If Jung’s theory is correct, then the individual is a repository of ancient history.⁴

Why do symbols change over time within cultures even as the archetypes they express remain the same? Sometimes the change is forced by conflict, as it was during the Roman conquest of pagan Europe. Jung believed, for instance, that Europe and United States were still dealing with the consequences of the imposition of Christianity on the pagans. Christian symbols had largely usurped the pagans’ symbols, but there was intermingling, and paganism lay beneath the surface, coming out in dreams. Also, symbols sometimes changed due to the slow erosion of the psychic power or life of a civilization. Such was the case with Rome in the days before the Christian conversion.

Philosopher Charles Taylor’s argument in A Secular Age resonates with Jung’s analysis of the collective unconscious. Taylor’s book is perhaps the best chronicle to date of how not only the modern scientific mentality, but certain developments within Christianity itself, produced a disproportionate rationalism in man. This rationalism and subsequent diminishment of spiritual openness in turn destroyed the “porous self” which could have direct spiritual experiences. It created growing “disenchantment” or disbelief in the possibility of the supernatural or numinous experience, producing the “buffered self.” Along with disenchantment, Taylor writes, came a great “disembedding,” in which human beings lost their sense of oneness with their society and became autonomous, isolated and atomistic. According to both Jung and Taylor, along with disenchantment and disembedding, doubt crept in as to the validity and meaning of Western society’s religious rituals and symbols. They began to lose their life and force. Individuals were cut loose into a sort of painful isolation in search of new meaning and new symbols which could recapture the power of the old.

We now see the aftermath of the great spiritual and psychological challenges of modernity. The collective unconscious is a powerful force that needs proper expression, and contemporary individuals still attempt to break through the modern “buffered self” to new experiences of identity, unity and spirituality. Attempts in our time are often mediated by technology. Disconnected individuals seek a feeling of wholeness. For instance, some people in the West follow counter-culture icons past and present, figures such as Terence McKenna, Duncan Trussell, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, into a syncretistic spirituality, and even the use of psychedelics as a spiritual vehicle. At the level of psychological function, these esoteric pursuits might not be that dissimilar to other attempts to connect to something larger than the individual. For instance, some Americans have followed Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer into the white identity movement.⁵ From a Jungian perspective, each attempt is aimed at finding some lost unity and some missing transcendent meaning.

The symbolic contents of the collective unconscious are the archetypes. Archetypes are ideas or forms imprinted on the human mind by innumerable and ancient experiences. Jung sometimes links the archetypes to the Platonic forms, though it is likely that he feels he has a more concrete handle on what these ‘Ideas’ are than did Plato:

In former times, despite some dissenting opinion and the influence of Aristotle, it was not too difficult to understand Plato’s conception of the Idea as supraordinate and pre-existent to all phenomena. “Archetype,” far from being a modern term, was already in use before the time of St. Augustine, and was synonymous with “Idea” in the Platonic usage.⁶

These archetypes within the collective unconscious can produce numinous or transcendent experiences. That is, they can affect us as if they are not a part of us, but some outside, superior force. This is what Taylor would call the experience of the porous self, a self which is open to perceiving and experiencing powerful transcendent forces. The most common manifestation of this in our everyday experience would be a foul mood which descends on someone and cannot be lifted despite her and everyone else’s best efforts. In earlier times such a funk might be seen as the work of evil forces, and to this day it is experienced as something beyond our control. Plato pointed out that in ancient times there was a difference between the rational, conscious will and whatever it was that produced moods, feelings, irrational prejudices, hatreds and rage.⁷ The consciousness struggles against feelings and even ideas as if they were invading enemies, but modern psychology tends to explain this situation as the result of chemical imbalances.

To be clear, Jungian archetypes are not images we observe such as church friezes or paintings. Rather, they are instances of the “inner, unconscious drama of the psyche” itself.⁸ This makes them harder to grasp because, while we may be able to acknowledge similarities in the outward cultural symbols of different peoples, places and times, and even recognize their power and importance for cultures, it seems impossible to witness first-hand the inner unconscious drama. But, defending himself against the charge that the idea of archetypes were products of his imagination, Jung claimed that the idea was not really all that novel:

Mythological research calls them “motifs”; in the psychology of primitives they correspond to Levy-Bruhl’s concept of “representations collectives,” and in the field of comparative religion they have been defined by Hubert and Mauss as “categories of the imagination.” Adolf Bastian long ago called them ‘elementary’ or ‘primordial thoughts.’ From these references it should be clear enough that my idea of the archetype—literally a pre-existent form—does not stand alone but is something that is recognized and named in other fields of knowledge.⁹

Jung stated that “there is not a single important idea or view that does not possess historical antecedents.”¹⁰ Symbols old and new shared the same origin in the archetypes. Jung looked to the events of his own times as indicators of the continuing existence within the psyche of the older symbols. He characterized the Nazis as possessed by ancient symbols and gods. The persecution of the Jews was a “revival of the medieval persecutions,” and the Nazi salute revived the ancient Roman salute (a recent example of this can be seen in Richard Spencer’s infamous speech in Washington DC in 2016, whose rousing “Hail Trump” lines elicited Roman salutes from several in the crowd). The “archaic swastika” was an ancient rival of the Christian cross.¹¹ These types of comparative observations may at first seem sweeping and unwarranted, even trivializing of specific historical events. What further proof does Jung have that the collective unconscious and the archetypes exist?

To answer that question, we need to more deeply understand the theory which underlies Jung’s claims. Jung says that in primitive societies the archetypes are not originally thought but are instead experienced directly as outward things. As I have suggested, this is what Taylor would call the experience of the porous self. Men encountered gods, spirits, bush-souls, etc., as real beings with independent powers, and they did so collectively as socially embedded beings. These types of phenomena are difficult if not impossible for moder...