Jung's Wandering Archetype

Race and religion in analytical psychology

Carrie B. Dohe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138888401
• eBook ISBN: 9781317498070
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is the Germanic god Wotan (Odin) really an archaic archetype of the Spirit? Was the Third Reich at first a collective individuation process? After Friedrich Nietzsche heralded the "death of God," might the divine have been reborn as a collective form of self-redemption on German soil and in the Germanic soul? In Jung's Wandering Archetype Carrie Dohe presents a study of Jung's writings on Germanic psychology from 1912 onwards, exploring the links between his views on religion and race and providing his perspective on the answers to these questions.

Dohe demonstrates how Jung's view of Wotan as an archetype of the collective Germanic psyche was created from a combination of an ancient discourse on the Germanic barbarian and modern theories of primitive religion, and how he further employed völkisch ideology and various colonialist discourses to contrast hypothesized Germanic, Jewish and 'primitive' psychologies. He saw Germanic psychology as dangerous yet vital, promising rebirth and rejuvenation, and compared Wotan to the Pentecostal Spirit, suggesting that the Germanic psyche contained the necessary tension to birth a new collective psycho-spiritual attitude. In racializing his religiously-inflected psychological theory, Jung combined religious and scientific discourses in a particularly seductive way, masterfully weaving together the objective language of science with the eternal language of myth. Dohe concludes the book by examining the use of these ideas in modern Germanic religion, in which members claim that religion is a matter of race.

This in-depth study of Jung's views on psychology, race and spirituality will be fascinating reading for all academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, religious studies and the history of religion.

1 “Something like Wotan”?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315713465-2

Introduction

If you were to stroll into a large American bookstore, one catering to the general public, and then make your way to the gender studies section, you would see several popular books on the mythopoetic men’s movement, an all-male myth-and-ritual movement that gained widespread news coverage in the early 1990s. In the “metaphysics” section, you would discover books on Paganism, such as goddess-oriented Wicca and Germanic Ásatrú, as well as works on New Age Spirituality. These various movements have made headline news from time to time (Gardell 2003, 149–151, 282, 300) and works by some of their authors have spent months on the bestsellers list (e.g. Bly 1990; Kimmel 1995, 4). In the neighboring psychology section, you would find multiple titles by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), founder of analytical psychology. One aspect that connects the aforementioned mythopoetic and new religious movements together is that they all utilize Jungian psychological concepts as doctrine and legitimation of their new spiritualities.

The popularity of Jungian ideas is not limited to Pagan practitioners and New Age Spirituality seekers; indeed, Jung seems to be a household name in the United States, at least among the white, professional or college-educated classes. While researching the present work, I encountered individuals with different occupations and from various walks of life who were acquainted with Jung’s basic concepts: an actress who had had a theater class on archetypes; a life coach who uses Jung’s core process with his clients; a member of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), who has read the correspondence between Jung and AA co-founder Bill Wilson; and a Christian theologian, whose colleagues use Jungian psychology in their pastoral work. Furthermore, Jung seems to be quoted in just about every spiritually oriented book on self-help or unfolding your creativity published in the US, as well as in both scholarly and popular books dealing with new religious movements ranging from goddess spirituality to neo-shamanism to New Age. As the late sociologist of religion Martin Riesebrodt (1948–2014, R.I.P.) once said about the great man of German letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1782): “No one ever reads him anymore, but everyone quotes him.” Whether or not Martin’s quip is applicable to Jung, the regular invocation of Jung’s name indicates the stature Jung has achieved in the English-language world as a psychologist who understood the deeper mysteries of the human soul.

In contrast to the positive reception of Jungian ideas in Anglo-American culture, German responses have often been negative. When I told a cognitive therapist in my dance class in Berlin that I was writing on Jung, her immediate response was, “Wasn’t he a fascist?” Furthermore, when I described the contents of Jung’s “Wotan” essay to a language instructor from Germany, she recoiled; to her, the motif of a collective spiritual rebirth in “Wotan” smacked of National Socialist ideology. The striking disparity between American and German responses to Jung and his ideas may in part be explained by differences in cultural literacy: contemporary Germans learn about the horrors of their country’s National Socialist past in school and therefore more easily recognize discourse that resembles that of Nazism. Like Jung, Nazi ideologies also used the language of holism and rebirth, although they coupled these ideas with those of racial supremacy and anti-Semitism.

What a careful reading of Jung’s works shows is that his ideas are by no means free from racial thinking and a preoccupation with the Germanic. However, the redaction of Jung’s works in English demonstrates a regular pattern of erasure and obfuscation of German-ideological ideas still often found in the German-language edition of Jung’s Collected Works, as will be shown in the following pages. This claim might surprise many readers of Jung, because what appeals to them about his psychology is the more universalist perspective that Jung himself regularly articulated, as the following quote shows:

Over this whole psychic realm there are motifs, that is, certain typical figures, which can be traced far back into history and even into prehistory, and may therefore be referred to as archetypes. They seem to me to be built into the very structure of man’s unconscious, for in no other way can I explain why it is that they occur universally and in identical form.

(Jung CW 16 (1951):254)

According to Jung, archetypes are the inherited, universal “primordial images” (urtümliche Bilder or Urbilder) of humanity that appear in religious symbolism and mythic motifs. Jung located the archetypes in the collective unconscious, an inherited and collective aspect of the psyche of all peoples. The chief archetype in Jungian psychology is the self, which is the center of the psyche and a psychological equivalent of the image of God. Archetypes perform an essential role in the individuation process, which is the psychic journey by which a person shifts the focus of his or her identity from the collectively formed and outwardly oriented ego to the inner center of the psyche to become psychologically whole. Inner psychological processes may correspond with outer events, representing the acausal connecting principle Jung called synchronicity. The concepts of archetypes, the collective unconscious, the individuation process and synchronicity are the chief Jungian terms found in books on and about New Age Spirituality (Tacey 2001), Paganism (Crowley 1995), the mythopoetic men’s movement (Moore and Gilette 1990), and related emerging spiritualities. These works, as well as many lexica on analytical psychology (e.g. Hark 1988, 25–29; Humbert 1992, 307–317; Samuels, Shorter and Plaut, 1986, 26–27) and introductions to Jungian thought (e.g. Meier 1977; Storr 1973), define archetypes as universal mythological motifs in accordance with the aforementioned quote. They regularly overlook the presence of the race-, nation-, or Volk-based archetype attested to in this quote from Jung’s 1936 essay “Wotan”:

Wotan is a [primordial] Germanic datum of first importance, the truest expression and unsurpassed personification of a fundamental quality that is particularly characteristic of the Germans . . . Because the behaviour of a race takes on its specific character from its underlying images we can speak of an archetype “Wotan.”

(Jung CW 10 (1946 [1936]):389, 391)

The reason for the relative silence concerning Jung’s theories of the racially delimited archetype Wotan and a collective Germanic unconscious becomes clear in light of the controversies these ideas engendered throughout the Nazi period and beyond. In 1946, Jung complained to his American patron Mary Conover Mellon (1904–1946) that he felt forced by his critics to republish his Nazi-era statements about Germany (Schoenl 1996, 53–54) in a small booklet called Aufsätze zur Zeitgeschichte (1946), translated into English in 1947 as Essays on Contemporary Events. Allen Dulles (1893–1969), the founding director of the CIA, had personally exonerated Jung after World War II of charges of having collaborated with the Nazis (Wasserstrom 1999, 153). Jung and his students then conducted a campaign to save Jung’s reputation in the English-speaking world through articles such as Ernst Harms’ 1946 article “Carl Gustav Jung – Defender of Freud and the Jews: A Chapter of European Psychiatric History under the Nazi Yoke,” published in the Psychiatric Quarterly. This incurred the wrath of Albert D. Parelhoff, who had already started a letter campaign against Jung in 1945, in the Herald Tribune (Bair 2003, 515). However, controversy continued to dog Jung. In 1949, the Library of Congress Fellows in American Literature awarded the first annual Bollingen Prize in Poetry to the pro-fascist Ezra Pound (1885–1972), engendering a scandal into which Jung’s name was dragged due to his connection to the Bollingen Foundation, publisher of his Collected Works (Bair 2003, 518; Corrigan 1967, 44).

These controversies were offset over the years by positive evaluations of Jung, such as that published by the U.S. weekly news magazine Time. On February 14, 1955, Jung appeared on the magazine’s front cover, along with a banner that read, “Exploring the Soul: A Challenge to Freud.” The magazine’s medical section contained an article about Jung with a title that sounded less scientific than religious: “The Old Wise Man.” The accompanying article portrayed Jung as a scientist who was able to see into the depths of the human soul and find there the solution to the malaise of modern society (Time 2012).

Given the decades-old controversy surrounding Jung and his “Wotan” essay, it is not surprising that scholars regularly consider this text mainly in conjunction with statements Jung made about Hitler and the “Aryan unconscious” throughout the Nazi era. Jung himself set the stage for this interpretation with the previously mentioned post-war publication, Essays on Contemporary Events, with a foreword and afterword written after the end of World War II. This book, republished in 1989, has had a significant influence on the way scholars tend to read the “Wotan” essay – as historically relevant to the Nazi era, but not reflective of Jung’s thinking as a whole.

The foreword to the 2014 edition of Essays on Contemporary Events by the analytical psychologist Andrew Samuels follows a convention among some Jungians, who explain that Jung wrote his controversial wartime writings under the influence of his “shadow” (Samuels 2014; see also Neumann 1991, 288; Speicher 2002, 150). The shadow is a Jungian term indicating psychic contents that are incompatible with the ego and therefore repressed in the unconscious. This suggests that Jung could not have written these texts with clear conscious intent. Given this definition, one must wonder what Jung wished to imply when he explained World War II as Germany’s struggle with its collective shadow. This was a post-war diagnosis that he made in his 1945 essay, “After the Catastrophe,” and during his 1946 radio talk, “The Fight with the Shadow.” Following these lines of interpretation, the German analytical psychologist Günther Langwieler extended the concept of the shadow to Germany’s role in World War I, when he analyzed the so-called Germanic barbarian psyche in Jung’s “The Role of the Unconscious” (1918). He also extended the idea of this barbarian psyche to “Wotan” (1936) to read both texts together as preoccupations with the shadow aspect of this collective psyche (Langwieler 2010, 31). This diagnosis differs radically from the much more hopeful one Jung himself made in “Wotan.”

Besides describing Jung’s wartime writings as influenced by his shadow, certain authors tend to write about Jung and his activities during the Nazi era in a passive voice, implying that Jung was not culpable of his words and actions because he had been “enthralled” by contemporary events (e.g. Buresch-Talley 2002, 51). At the same time, it has been argued that Jung got tangled in his own tendency to see himself as a “Wise Old Man” (e.g. Lewin 2009, 286) and was inflated with ideas similar to those touted by National Socialists (e.g. Ellwood 1999, 61). Finally, it has been argued that Jung’s words could be easily distorted and “interpreted to mean just about anything” (Bair 2003, 521). This hardly seems a good defense; rather, it makes Jung seem like an incompetent writer.

Finally, some authors have dismissed the charges that Jung was an anti-Semite because he helped individual Jews during the war (e.g. Bair 2003, 460). Alternatively, they dismiss these charges as the complaints of Marxists and socialists or as trumped up by psychoanalysts loyal to Freud against the “apostate” Jung (e.g. Ellenberger 1970, 740, note 55). Once again, this claim may have partially originated with Jung. In 1936, Jung complained about a “Freudian propaganda campaign” against him in Holland (Bair 2003, 454) and in 1938, he claimed that a photo of himself, doctored to look stereotypically Jewish with a large nose and glasses, had been produced by Freudian Jews in Germany (Letter from Hauer to Jung, BA N1131/139, fol.13). In sum, these questionable claims have contributed to the incomplete analysis of Jung’s interest in Wotan. What will be argued here is not that Jung was unequivocally pro-Germanic and anti-Semitic; rather, he believed that the group psyche that offered the best possibility for the emergence of a new collective orientation was the Germanic one. The signs of the times – the new religion of self-redemption, calls for collective national rebirth and a completion of the Reformation, and ancient Germanic myth – all told him this must be so.

Mention of a collective Germanic psyche points to a concept logically related to the Wotanic archetype and, like it, left unmentioned by many commentators on Jungian thought. This is Jung’s theory of the racially and religiously differentiated collective or phylogenetic unconscious (but see Lewin 2009; Shamdasani 2003). Jung first discussed the idea in 1912, in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido: Contributions to the History of the Development of Thought, in conversation and competition with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who published his own theory of a phylogenetic unconscious at roughly the same time in his Totem and Taboo (1912–1913). In 1925, Jung illustrated his concept of a phylogenetic unconscious in a private seminar on analytical psychology that he gave in Zurich, calling it “the ‘geology’ of a personality” (Jung 1989, 133).

This idea was not marginal in Jung’s thinking; rather, Jung was renowned for his “paleontology of the soul” (ETH Hs 1056:148) throughout the Weimar period. Furthermore, his disciple Jolande Jacobi discussed it in her 1940 book Die Psychologie von C. G. Jung: Eine Einführung in das Gesamtwerk, mit einem Geleitwort von C. G. Jung, a book that was translated into English two years later (1972, 49). Moreover, Jung discussed the stratified collective unconscious in two volumes that present his core process in full, Psychological Types (CW vol. 6) and Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW vol. 7), as well as in many minor essays. The concept of a raciall...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and readers’ guide
• 1 “Something like Wotan”?
• 2 “Because we Germanic people still have a genuine barbarian in us”: on ancient ethnographers, humanist thinkers, and modern theorists of primitive religion, or where Jung got his ideas
• 3 A “far finer and more comprehensive task for psychoanalysis”: science, religion, and self-redemption in analytical psychology
• 4 The “paleontology of the soul”: the concept of primitivity and Jung’s theory of the stratified phylogenetic unconscious
• 5 “Baldr comes home”: from the paleontology of the soul to the invention of a Germanic mythology
• 6 Wotan and “the archetypal Ergriffenheit”: a tragedy in three parts
• 7 “After the catastrophe”: wandering diagnoses and changing relationships post-“Wotan”
• 8 The “most complicated psychology”: the reception of analytical psychology in contemporary Heathenism
• 9 Conclusion: “man as he was – and will always be”? Racial essentialism, scientific discourse, and new spiritualities
• Index