History of European Ideas, Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 359}373, 1998 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain. PII: S0191-6599 (99) 00010-8 0191-6599/99 $ - see front matter
NATIONAL TYPOLOGIES, RACES, AND MENTALITIES IN C.G. JUNG:S PSYCHOLOGY PETTERI PIETIKAINEN Department of History, University of Helsinki, PL 59, 00014 Helsingin Yliopisto, Finland
One of the novel and distinguishing features of psychoanalysis was that it did not toy with the notion of hereditary degeneration, which was very much in vogue in the psychiatric professions at the turn of the century. The discourse on degeneration was inaugurated by the French psychiatrist B.A. Morel in 1857 with his book ¹raite& des de& ge& ne& rescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales, and in the decades to come it proved to be especially attractive not only for psychiatrists but also for racial hygienists (eugenicists) and social darwinists, who combined the notion of degeneracy with heredity and elitist social doctrines, which were based on the assumption that &men of lesser qualities' constitute a threat to society and that the governing bodies of the society should therefore take precautions against this threat. Imprecise and complex as the term °eneration' itself was, it became the ultimate signi"er of pathology, and while Freud was well aware of this prevailing preoccupation with ancestry, he himself discounted the theory of hereditary degeneration, not least because as an Austrian Jew he belonged to an ethnic minority that was largely considered not only di!erent from but also threatening to the Gentile population. Following Freud, who was his one-time colleague, teacher, and friend, psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875}1961) refrained from discussing hereditary degeneration as an explanatory category, although he may have entertained some doubts concerning the hereditary quality of the maternal side of his own family.
JUNG'S RACIAL AND NATIONAL TYPOLOGIES While being a distinguished member of the Freudian psychoanalytic movement in 1907}1913, Jung did not make any racial remarks about Jews. Although Freud made allusions to his former crown prince's &racial prejudices' in his polemical history of the psychoanalytic movement, which he wrote after Jung's &defection', it seems quite certain that anti-Semitism played no role whatsoever in the eventual break between Freud and Jung. However, after establishing an independent career as a depth psychologist, Jung, a German-speaking Swiss, started to make &psychological pro"les' of di!erent ethnic groups, and in contradistinction to his &cosmopolitan' years in the psychoanalytic movement, 359
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he now identi"ed himself more markedly as &German'. Jung's revered paternal grandfather, also Karl Gustav, was German, and he became rector of the University of Basel and Grand Master of the Swiss Freemasons. Like his grandson, Karl Gustav senior was a medical doctor and, according to the legend in Jung's family tradition, an illegitimate son of Goethe's. Jung contrasted the German racial identity with that of the Jews, and his letter from 1913 that has surfaced just recently has shed new light on the issue of his alleged anti-Semitism: in that letter to the Swedish psychoanalyst Poul Bjerre he said that &until now I was no Anti-Semite, [but] now I'll become one, I believe'. In the last year of the First World War (1918), which resulted in the total collapse of the German Empire, Jung proclaimed his &Teutonic' identity by announcing that in contradistinction to Jews (like Freud and Alfred Adler) &we Germans have a genuine Barbarian in us'. This notion of &barbarism' has not as negative a ring for Jung as one might easily assume, because he sees the primitive, undeveloped aspect of man not only as something inferior and doubtful but also as something that gives him stamina, youthfulness, and vigour. It is precisely this positive dimension of barbarism that the Jews more or less lack, because they belong to a more re"ned and developed, if not degenerate, race. It is this particular appreciation of the &youthfulness of the German soul' that made Jung initially observe the birth of the Third Reich with a visible enthusiasm. It was only after the utterly violent and destructive nature of National Socialism had shattered his illusions about the positive nature of the &Aryan myth' and of the collective psychic (and irrational) forces that he changed his attitude in the late 1930s and became suspicious towards the Third Reich. He started to distinguish more decidedly between his own Swiss identity and that of the Germans, and after the fall of the Third Reich, he spoke not of wir Germanen anymore but of Germany as the victim of a mass movement. Now he liked to remind his readers that he had discussed the barbaric aspect of the Germans already in 1918 (in the same paper where he referred to himself as German) when he had evoked the image of the &blond beast'. After he had left Freudian psychoanalysis, Jung started to develop a doctrine of the collective unconscious and its archetypes, where the notion of genetic inheritance was connected with the assumption that the di!erences between nationalities, races, and mentalities were largely accountable by the way the deep structures of the psyche shape our &mental infrastructure'. Jungian archetypes are inherited supraindividual predispositions of the collective unconscious, and they manifest themselves as symbolic images, ideas, and ways of experience, which are structured according to a predetermined archetypal pattern. Archetype itself (an-sich) is empty and purely a formal structure, only a possibility which is given a priori, as distinguished from the archetypal representations to which it gives rise. Since Jung maintained that the &deeper layers' of the human psyche are everywhere the same, people living in di!erent cultures are united by these archetypes in the sense that there are universal human experiences which are structured by them. With its biological-vitalist elements, Jung's theory of the collective unconscious can be seen as an o!spring of early nineteenth-century German Naturphilosophie. Small wonder, then, that with his unshaken "delity to outdated
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hereditary factors, Jung became an increasingly solitary "gure in the 1930s and 1940s, when almost all factions in psychology, anthropology, and cultural studies held to a scienti"c world view which emphasised social interaction and the principal importance of environment as compared with heredity. From the scienti"c perspective, the main problem in Jung's theory is perhaps that while it seems to be able to explain almost everything about the &unconscious', there is no real possibility of veri"cation (or, following Karl Popper, falsi"cation) of the theory itself and in this sense it is an invulnerable theory*either you just believe it, or you don't. Theories that cannot lose are not of much use in science. The proper "eld of study*genetics*which could verify or falsify the theory of the inheritance of archetypes, has so far not given any evidential support for this theory. In fact it has not even given any attention to the whole matter, and neither has evolutionary psychology, that new discipline which appears to be in a position to raise relevant issues concerning human behaviour and its historical evolution, although it is disputable whether it can avoid reductionist explanations in its attempt to bring the sub"elds of psychology together and to integrate psychology into natural sciences (especially biology). Equipped with his own doctrines, Jung created a depth-psychological version of the Romantic notion, "rst propounded by Herder, of the &spirits of the peoples', which marked the beginnings of nationalism. However, just as the cultural nationalism of the early nineteenth-century Europe was still devoid of political overtones in its stress on the interrelations among history, culture, and language, Jung's comments on the &psychological spirits of the peoples' were devoid of any explicit political program. They were mainly manifestations of two interrelated &unit-ideas'. First was the theory of psychological types (introversion /extraversion), which he removed from the sphere of individual psychology and applied to nations and races. This psychological classi"cation was originally devised as Jung's intellectual explanation of his divergences with Freud (and Adler), which he presented for the "rst time at the Fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress in MuK nich in September 1913; that is, after his personal break with Freud. During the 1920s and 1930s, after having classi"ed di!erent psychological types and functions in Psychological ¹ypes (1921), he carried this typologising tendency over into the domain of nations and races. His characteristic habit of explicating cultural di!erences with depthpsychological vocabulary resulted in his crude typologies, which prompted him to argue for the inherent psychological di!erences between such ethnic groups and nationalities as &Jewish', &German', and &Chinese'. His typology had some in#uence on contemporary anthropologists: Charles Seligman, a British scholar with a training in psychology, applied depth psychological insights to anthropology, and in his 1924 lecture at the Royal Anthropological Institute Seligman discussed the encounter between psychology and anthropology and recommended Jung's theory of psychological types as a tool for the racial analysis of psychological di!erences between the civilised and the primitive nations. Second, his intensifying a$nity with things German in his &postpsychoanalytic' years inspired Jung to search for &folk psychological' (vo( lkerpsychologische) determinants to rationalise his own German identity, the
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&inherent' di!erences between the psychic constitutions of the Jewish (Freud, Adler) and the &Aryans' (he himself). With the help of these two frameworks, Jung was in a position to claim that due to these national and racial characteristics one (i.e. Freud) is not entitled to claim universal validity for one's theories. In 1933, Jung wrote as the new editor of Zentralblatt fu( r Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete: &The di!erences which actually do exist between Germanic and Jewish psychology are no longer to be glossed over, and this can only be bene"cial to science'. Jewish psychology has sprung from the Jewish racial spirit, and it bears the unique qualities of &Jewishness', just as the validity of German psychology is restricted to the Germans.
PRIMITIVE AND DEVELOPED MENTALITIES In addition to racial and national divisions, Jung also di!erentiated between the &primitive' and the developed mentalities. The main di!erence between them is that in respect to the developed mentality the &primitive' mentality denotes a lower and correspondingly a more intense level of unconsciousness. When Jung studied the mental life of the primitives, he noticed the &fact' that the activities of the primitive are directed by his unconscious rather than by conscious planning: Primitive mentality di!ers from the civilized chie#y in that the conscious mind is far less developed in scope and intensity. Functions such as thinking, willing, etc. are not yet di!erentiated; they are pre-conscious, and in the case of thinking, for instance, this shows itself in the circumstance that the primitive does not think consciously, but that thoughts appear. The primitive cannot assert that he thinks; it is rather that &something thinks in him'.
Thinking requires special e!ort in the mind of the primitive, because the spontaneity of the act of thinking lies in his unconscious and not in his conscious mind. If he aims at having consciously constructed thoughts, he must "rst put himself into the &mood of willing'. This shows how in the mind of the primitive the unconscious is constantly threatening his consciousness. In the archaic world (&archaic' in the meaning of ancient, very old) &deeds' were never invented, they were just done and thus archaic man followed Goethe's words in Faust: &In the beginning was the deed' (im Anfang war die ¹at). When archaic man began systematically to re#ect upon the reasons for his activities, he attained a new level in the development of consciousness. Many rituals of the modern-day primitives are examples of such acting without conscious motives. What Jung is saying here is that the primitives represent the earlier stages of linear psychological evolution, the stages that the developed societies (of white man) have passed a long time ago. Psychologically, the primitive mentality is animated by the basic structure of the human mind, particularly that psychological layer which is the collective unconscious in us. When we experience things at this level of the &objective psyche', we are incapable of psychological discrimination and di!erentiation,
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and when things occur in our immediate environment, we cannot tell exactly whether they happen to you or to me, or, to both of us, since at this collective level there exists an experiential unity that cannot be divided. With his pseudo-scienti"c concept of the collective unconscious, Jung could argue that at the deepest level of the human psyche there are no crucial di!erences between a modern technocrat and a primitive tribesman. Indeed, how could there be, if the &lowest strata' of the human psyche has remained the same throughout the centuries? In fact, by studying the mind of primitive man, the psychologist has relatively easy access to the &objective' unconscious psyche, much more easily than in the case of a modern neurotic with his defences and rationalisations. Therefore, the study of the primitives and their myths could function as a sort of laboratory where the archaic level of the human mind is on display and ready for psychological observation. Jung described the archaic, unconscious sense of unity with the term participation mystique, which was coined by the French scholar Lucien LeH vy-Bruhl in How Natives ¹hink (1910), his "rst study of the mental functions of primitives. This work won a lot of attention in the scholarly "elds where the elementary forms of human culture were studied and its author was to write "ve more books, dealing each time essentially with the same theme: primitive mentality. As a professor of philosophy at the University of Sorbonne in Paris, LeH vy-Bruhl used the same method as many other &armchair anthropologists' before him: he collected a wide variety of reports and observations of other scholars, missionaries, and travellers who had "rst-hand experience with the natives. After analysing this source material, he created a much-discussed theory of collective primitive mentality, which in#uenced Jung a great deal. Indeed, Jung's whole approach to the &psychology of the primitives' was based on some key concepts derived from LeH vy-Bruhl. What are the characteristics of this &primitive mentality'? First, in contrast to the logical thinking in the West, the logic of the primitives*e.g. the aboriginals in Australia, American Indians, and various ethnic groups or &tribes' in equatorial Africa*follows distinctive rules of its own. Whereas &we' search for the natural and causal reasons for phenomena, the primitives explain them with the peculiar causality of participation mystique, mystic participation. According to this &law', which excludes or substitutes the law of causality, there exists a participation between the subject and the object, and this participation is connected to the collective representations. Inconceivably for us, in these representations things and phenomena can at the one and same time be themselves and yet di!erent from themselves. In an equally inconceivable way, these things and phenomena possess powers, capabilities, properties, and mystical e!ects, while simultaneously acting as receptacles of these powers. They are things and phenomena which can become mysteriously noticeable in apparently nonrelated contexts and situations without ceasing to be what they are. For example, when a certain Indian tribe is about to begin a hunting trip, the success of the venture depends on the way the women in the camp refrain from certain activities, such as eating certain food. According to the law of mystic participation, things and properties are connected with each other through reciprocal in#uences, as a sort of &action at distance', and the primitives see no incongruity
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in one thing being two things (having two identities) at the same time. For this reason the mentality of the primitives can be described as &prelogical'. LeH vy-Bruhl is not saying that the primitives do not have any logic or conceptuality, because he knew very well that this allegation could be discredited by the fact that even elementary primitive societies have developed complex languages. Yet, the concepts they operate with di!er from our conceptual system, and therefore the mentality that shapes these concepts and applies them is not only prelogical but also mystical. This mystical character of mentality determines the way the primitives perceive things, but in its determination it also in#uences the way they conceptualise and generalise. The prelogical mind is capable of abstraction, but the basis for this abstraction is, in most cases, the law of participation. LeH vy-Bruhl emphasised that the primitive mentality is neither antilogical nor alogical, and with the concept of &prelogical' he only wanted to demonstrate how the primitives overlook the (Aristotelian) laws of thought, which are the alpha and omega of Western principles of logic. Because primitive logic is just oriented di!erently from ours, primitives do not simply yield to arbitrary contradictions, but neither do they think of avoiding them. Their attitude towards the law of non-contradiction is in this sense indi!erent, and this is the principal reason why their logical operations are so di$cult to follow. The crucial point in LeH vy-Bruhl's theory is the thesis that the orientation of the primitive mentality is di!erent from ours, because it is directed to mystical relations and properties, the fundamental law of which is the law of participation. Participation mystique became one of Jung's favourite concepts and in his vocabulary its use was not restricted to &primitive psychology'. He often employed the term when he spoke of the e!ects of the unconscious at the social or collective level, especially when he referred to situations where there occurs an unconscious identi"cation of oneself with an object in such a way that all distinctions are obliterated. Jung endorsed LeH vy-Bruhl's suggestion that among the primitives the &law' of mystical participation is in operation in place of causality. He claimed that this can be seen very clearly in primitive man's attitude towards the arbitrary power of chance, which primitive man regards as a much more important factor in the physical world than natural causes. Primitive man projects his own psychic contents onto external reality so completely that these projections cannot be distinguished from objective, physical occurrences. He externalises or attributes his own psychic contents to causes outside himself and thus he lives most of the time in the world of projections. He is really a man of two worlds: for him, the physical world is at the same time the spiritual reality, and psychic events take place not within his own mind but outside him in an objective fashion. His &perception of objects is conditioned only partly by the objective behaviour of the things themselves, whereas a much greater part is often played by intrapsychic facts which are not related to the external objects except by way of projection'. Primitive man is (in this sense) unpsychological. Jung sought support for his theory of the collective unconscious not only in cultural products (myths, religions, art), or in individual psychic manifestations (dreams, ideas, and fantasies) of modern man, but also in the mental life of the primitives. He held that alongside psychiatric skills, knowledge of mythology
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and primitive psychology should be required of future doctors. As for the reason to engage in these extra-curricular studies, he mentioned the existence of the objective psyche (i.e. the collective unconscious), which has a speci"c structure and activities corresponding to the structure and activities of the objective physical body. In a 1935 letter to a German doctor, he outlined the proposition for a psychotherapeutic curriculum, and among the eight di!erent requirements he included studies of primitive psychology, comparative religion, and mythology. He remarked that there are naturally only few people (besides himself!) who can ful"l these interdisciplinary requirements. This suggestion of including non-medical and non-clinical subjects in psychiatric and psychotherapeutic training indicates how seriously he regarded mythology and primitive psychology as important "elds of psychological studies. In another letter from 1947, Jung "rst explains how he studied comparative religion and the psychology of the primitives for many years, and &partly in immediate contact with them', and how all this research, which took place after he had studied modern Westerners with empirical and medical methods, only con"rmed the conclusions that he had already drawn before. Then he emphasises that in his psychology there is not a single a$rmation that is not based essentially on authentic experience. During his travels in America (1924}1925) and Africa (1925), Jung met Pueblo Indians in Arizona and New Mexico and the Elgonyi tribesmen in Mount Elgon in Kenya, observing their behaviour and beliefs. However, these journeys should not be seen as anthropological "eld trips in the true sense of the word, simply because he only stayed for a few days or weeks among the natives and although he had learnt some Swahili the majority of the Elgonyi people knew only their own native language. Nevertheless, he seemed genuinely to believe that his travels in &exotic' places gave him enough empirical material to draw valid psychological conclusions regarding those imaginary homogeneous groups of people referred to as &primitives'. Unlike a growing number of anthropologists (Malinowski, Radcli!e-Brown, and Alfred Haddon among them), Jung did not take into serious consideration the suggestion that the di!erences between the so-called primitive and developed mentalities may mostly be due to environmental factors and hence not explainable by hereditary arguments (in Jung's case, by archetypes). When Jung refers to the contemporary ethnic peoples and their basically foreign minds as a distinguished psychological authority, there is not only a risk of using attributes that can be considered scienti"cally false, but also an additional risk of legitimising certain general prejudices and political purposes. There is even a further danger of insulting either the people he is writing about or those who identify themselves as the proponents of these people. In Jung's case, his racial assumptions have caused him understandable trouble, both during his life and after his death.
SCIENTIFIC RACISM Jung displayed many racial prejudices of his time in his attitude towards non-European peoples. In his thick, confusing monograph Psychology of the
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;nconscious (1912), Jung referred to &inferior races' (niedrigstehende Menschenrassen) and described how &Negroes' and Indians often appear as sexual symbols in the dreams of white Americans. Just as in the case of a civilised European a vagabond or a burglar represents his own repressed, primitive sexuality, which is looked upon as an inferior part of the personality, a Negro or an Indian has an equivalent function in the unconscious complexes of the American. In the 1920s and -30s Jung referred a number of times to his "rm belief that the white man living in black Africa represents a diminishing minority and &must therefore protect himself from the Negro', for he is in danger of losing his Western identity and of gradually and unconsciously assuming the identity of a primitive African. The white man can become &psychically a Negro', and Jung claimed that in Africa there is a well-known &technical' expression for this: &going black'. What is more contagious, asks Jung, than to live side by side with a rather primitive people? He warns that the inferior man in &us' has a tremendous pull because he fascinates the inferior layers of our psyche. The defences of the &Germanic' man, in contrast to the Latin people, who are historically &older', reach only as far as his consciousness reaches. Below that level the psychic &contagion' meets with little resistance. In his paper ¹he Complications of American Psychology (1930), he notes how the coloured man lives not only in our cities and in our houses (as servants, of course!)*he also lives subconsciously under our skin. This contagion works both ways: &Just as every Jew has a Christ complex, so every Negro has a white complex and every American a Negro complex. As a rule the coloured man would give anything to change his skin, and the white man hates to admit that he has been touched by the black.' Jung regards &racial infection' as the &most serious mental and moral problem where the primitive outnumbers the white man'. In another paper around the same time (Mind and Earth, 1931), Jung again describes the &great psychological in#uence of the Negro' on the general character of the Americans and American culture, but here he states that, unlike in Africa, the Negro is in a minority in America, and thus he &is not a degenerative in#uence, but rather one which, peculiar though it is, cannot be termed unfavourable*unless one happens to have a jazz phobia'. Jung did not always use patronising attributes when he discussed Africans or African-American peoples. When he was in the United States in 1912, he visited a mental hospital in Washington and inquired about the dreams of the black inmates there. To his credit, he did not make conclusions about the inferior mental level of the blacks but found instead con"rmation for his later theory of the collective unconscious by detecting motifs from the Greek myths in the dreams of the hospitalised blacks. Jung did not restrict himself to the African and African}American peoples in his psychological &observations' of other races. When he went to India in 1938 to receive honorary doctorates, he discovered the peculiar &fact' that an Indian (&inasmuch as he is really Indian') does not think, at least not in the sense &we' understand it. He rather perceives or takes notice of the thought, and in this respect he resembles the primitive, even though he actually is not primitive! What characterises the primitive's reasoning is that it is &mainly an unconscious function, and he perceives its results'. With these descriptions Jung refers to
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the primitive way of taking a passive attitude towards one's own mental capacities: instead of using his brain actively and at will, the primitive just lets his thoughts happen to him. With his racial prejudices Jung was of course not an exceptional representative of the Western attitude in regard to other races. A historian of scienti"c anti-racism, Elazar Barkan, begins his study with the following remark: &Racism is a universal a%iction, but its representation as an oppressive and dogmatic ideology captured centre stage only during the years between the World Wars. Prior to that time, social di!erentiation based upon real or assumed racial distinctions was thought to be part of the natural order'. Even the term &racism' was not used as a derogatory neologism in English until the 1930s, although its appearance suggests that the rejecting of race theories had begun sometime earlier. Barkan and other scholars, who have studied the di!erent strategies of scienti"c racism and various movements (like eugenics) of the early twentieth century which exploited the achievements of science, have demonstrated how in the "elds of anthropology, biology, and medicine, racist conceptions were popular both in Anglo-Saxon countries and in Continental Europe until the Second World War. Bearing this fact in mind, it can be seen more clearly how Jung in his prejudices, Eurocentrism, and patronising attitudes re#ected the prevalent contemporary conceptions of races and primitive mentality. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mental superiority of the white European in respect to non-whites was a truism, an unmistakable scienti"c fact both in its philosophical and popular versions, and as a &fact' it required no further discussion. G. Stanley Hall, the founding father of American psychology, who invited Freud and Jung to the United States in 1909, expresses this attitude succinctly in his large-scale study of &adolescence': &As we are gradually putting the child-world into schools of the latest type, so the primitive men and women of the world are coaxed or constrained to take up the burden of the white man's civilisation, and those who cannot or will not are following to extinction the larger wild animals about them that resist domestication2 Never, perhaps, were lower races being extirpated as weeds in the human garden, both by conscious and organic processes, so rapidly as today. In many minds, this is inevitable and not without justi"cation'. Inevitably, Western civilisation was seen to have attained the most advanced cultural level and the achievements of other*non-white*cultures were always evaluated not independently but in regard to their similarities to and di!erences from the superior West. The outspoken scienti"c racism began to wane in the 1920s and 1930s when the ontological status of race became increasingly problematic and some of the central biological tenets of physical anthropology were discredited by geneticists and a new generation of biologists. Simultaneously with this development, Jung and a number of other famous intellectuals of that period (Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, and even the champion of anti-racism, Franz Boas, among them), came to modify their racial views and assumed a more egalitarian and relative attitude towards non-Western cultures. To a considerable degree this change, which gradually took place in the Western cultural sphere in general, can be explained by the intensifying scienti"c and cultural critique of crude
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biological-evolutionist theories, which classi"ed di!erent cultures according to their alleged evolutionary stage. Jung's more emphatically explicated egalitarian views after the Second World War and during the period of decolonisation in the 1950s mainly expressed the growing tendency among the educated classes in Europe to view critically the Western imperialistic and colonialist policy. Is it then legitimate to say categorically that Jung was a racist, as F. Dalal did when he contended that Jung equated the modern black adult with the white child, the modern black conscious with the white unconscious, and the modern black with the prehistoric human? One can reply to the e!ect that &surely Jung was a racist, but the point is: who was not racist at that time?' Two harsh critics of scienti"c racism, Dennis Howitt and J. Owusu-Bempah, hold that racism in psychology has a long and visible history, and it characterises not only the discipline's early years but also its present. They contend that the careers of numerous individual psychologists (like William McDougall, Hans Eysenck, and Arthur Jensen) are tarnished by racism, and they raise a provocative question: who is not racist in psychology? They believe that &psychology breathes in the air of racism' even today, and that the origins of modern psychology are to be found &in a climate of slavery, of domination and exploitation of black people, notably Africans'. Far from being the only one who equated the modern black adult with the white child in the "rst half of our century, Jung rather manifested a taken-for-granted assumption in the European cultural sphere. Psychoanalysis was born in the heyday of imperialism, and although Freud and his colleagues rejected the concept of race as an explanatory tool, they did not question the prevailing evolutionary notion of superior and inferior races. What some of Freud's closest Jewish disciples did question was the trustworthiness and credibility of the &Teutonic' Jung. After Freud's angry assault on Jung's personality and theories in 1914, the "rst accusations of anti-Semitism were thrown at Jung at the beginning of 1934 when he had just become the (acting) president of the re-organised International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. German psychotherapists, now under National Socialistic rule, were by far the largest national group in the International Society, which was decidedly not Freudian in its outlook, for although there had been a growing academic interest in the unconscious in the Weimar Germany, &it was in no way related to Freudian psychoanalysis'. As Jung's name continued to be associated with psychoanalysis after his break with Freud, the German aversion to the &Freudian school' had e!ects on Jung's popularity until the emergence of the Third Reich. In his study of psychotherapy in the Third Reich, Geo!rey Cocks holds that after 1933 Jung was favoured in the psychotherapeutic professions in Germany not only because he had a world-wide reputation but also because by this time he had become popular and respected in Germany and so the new type of German psychotherapy both unambiguously rejected Freudian theories and rallied around the Jungian #ag. Cocks points out that for both Jung and M.H. GoK ring, the leading psychotherapeutic "gure in the Third Reich and the head of the German section of the International Society (and a cousin of the Nazi leader Hermann GoK ring), Freudian psychoanalysis was a &creation of the Jewish mind for the Jewish mind, and that race was a determining factor in
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any psychotherapeutic situation'. Recent analyses of Jung's writings and the relevant historical studies of psychological and scienti"c anti-Semitism indicate that Jung had a biased attitude towards Jews at least until the end of the Second World War and as this bias is relatively well-documented (see, e.g. his abovementioned letter to Poul Bjerre), it prevents us from exonerating him from the accusations of some degree of anti-Semitism.
CONCLUSION: THE EVOLUTION OF JUNG'S RACIAL VIEWS In comparison with the accusations of anti-Semitism, the charges of Jung's alleged racism are much more recent and re#ect the modern egalitarian and anti-racist tendencies in the social sciences and in Western culture in general, as well as the growing awareness of the prevalence of racism in the history of science. Still, two aspects should be borne in mind: "rst, Jung's racism was relativised by his increasing appreciation of non-European cultures and his idea of the collective unconscious, which in its metaphysical emphasis on the unity of mankind represents a deep-seated bond between people from di!erent societies and stages of cultural development. If his "rst-hand experiences of the &primitives' in the mid-1920s cannot be classi"ed as anthropological or ethnological "eld trips, at least they made him both qualify his characterisations of natives and re#ect upon the assumed superiority of the white man. Second, Jung's intensifying critique of Western culture is not aimed at just some negatively felt symptoms of modernity: he questions the whole idea of the supremacy of Western civilisation and the idea(l) of the continuous progress of Western culture. These characteristic features of Jung's psychology relativise his identity as another Eurocentric racist and vo( lkisch-nationalist advocate of the white/Aryan supremacy. The non-racist and &cosmopolitan' elements in Jung's mature thought manifested themselves in his rather egalitarian approach to cultural traditions. At the same time, he emphasised the importance of one's own historical background and considered it essential that the Westerners should not abandon their own &spiritual soil' and uncritically assimilate the spirit of the &alien' sophisticated religions like Hinduism or Buddhism. In this warning he anticipated the upsurge of Oriental wisdom in the West during and after the 1960s. Even though Jung regards Christianity and other world religions as much more developed cultural forms than the religions of the primitives, he nevertheless manages to avoid the most obvious pitfalls of psychological colonialism. &Leave the primitives alone with their own gods and spirits' seems to be Jung's message, and even as great a doctor and Christian humanist as Albert Schweitzer should give up his idea of making his belief &credible to primitive people, when it would be so much more fruitful to bestow these much needed e!orts on the white man2 People like him are needed much more urgently in Europe'. The idea of spreading the Christian gospel to non-Christian peoples is not only a waste of time and resources, it is also positively detrimental to them. Christian missionaries are harmful in their e!orts to make &pagans' adopt a totally unsuitable religious creed, and if African &Negroes' are converted to Christianity, it will have
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destructive results, because their culture is totally di!erent from Western culture. In the mid-1930s, Jung contends that the ones who are truly in need of the Christian message are modern white Europeans, those &godless' and &soulless' creatures who are creating vast profane kingdoms called states in their desperate craving for a substitute religion. Occasionally Jung judged harshly the aggressive violence of the Western nations towards other nations and races, and this manifestation of a relativistic and critical attitude gives a di!erent picture of Jung than his racist and stale psychological assumptions. This exercise in cultural &self-criticism' is discernible in his late statement (1957) about the &crimes' the white man has committed &against the coloured races during the process of colonisation. In this respect the white man carries a very heavy burden indeed'. Instead of presenting portraits of the primitive mentality and the strange, exotic behaviour of natives, Jung now preferred contrasting the &spirituality, naturalness and mythical wisdom' of non-Western peoples (like Pueblo-Indians) with the rootlessness and unbalanced mentality of the West. Although in Jung's eyes the primitives live most of the time at the level of participation mystique, he is not willing to leave them* and Western children*in their unconscious state and help the modern white (male) adult ascend the throne of the highest degree of consciousness. The unconscious has e!ects upon the cultivated Westerner, too, even though it is often not easy for him to recognise, still less admit, this fact. In contrast to the primitives, who live in harmony with their environment and psyche, &we Westerners' live in constant disharmony and tension. We like to think that we, unlike the primitives, have left the jungle, but this is a vain hope: we have simply taken the old jungle with us, and it lives in our unconscious. In modern-day Europe people are outwardly civilised, but &inwardly they are still primitives'. Already in the early 1930s Jung pointed out that the modern Westerners admire &Negro' art (e.g. jazz and Negro spirituals), and he toyed with the notion that &our redeemer' could be a Negro. Notwithstanding these anti-colonialist and pro-native statements, Jung's patronising, simplistic manner of speaking about nations and races gives strong support to the argument that in the 1920s and 1930s there were streaks of racist (including anti-Semitic) ideologies in his racial psychology. Jung considered himself a representative of the disinterested science of psychology when he discussed the psychological di!erences of races, nations, and ethnic groups, when in fact he was expressing his own social, political, and racial views, which re#ected the prevalent prejudices and biased attitudes of his culture. The fact that he o!ered help to some Jewish psychotherapists in Nazi Germany and had many Jewish pupils and colleagues reveals for its part the bewildering contradiction in his personality: he displayed racist and Eurocentric prejudices on one hand and appreciation of non-Western cultures (like China) on the other. From his role as a critic of Western culture and its imperialistic attitude towards non-European nations he could in no time turn into a proponent of Eurocentrism. In a post-war essay on Nazi Germany (After the Catastrophe 1945) he criticises the &pseudoscienti"c race theories' of the Germans but does not mention any possible defects in his own previous assumptions about races and racial typology. However, after the Second World War
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he seemed to feel a little ashamed of his utterances about the Jews and Nazis in the 1930s, and in a rare mood of remorse he confessed to rabbi Leo Baeck that he &slipped up' (Jawohl, ich bin ausgerutscht). It seems as if Jung had learnt his lesson, for during the rest of his long life (he died in 1961) he was careful not to meddle with issues that had to do with races, national typologies, or mentalities. Perhaps he felt that the danger of &slipping up' again was too acute.
NOTES 1. Henri Ellenberger has noticed that in the late nineteenth century &almost all diagnostic certi"cates in French mental hospitals began with the words de& ge& ne& rescence mentale avec2' H. Ellenberger, ¹he discovery of the unconscious (New York: 1970), p. 281. 2. In his study of the &faces of degeneration', Daniel Pick notes how in the late nineteenth century &the dominant scene of degeneration2 was displaced from the individual and even the family to society itself*crowds, masses, cities, modernity. But the nuances of the medico-psychiatric theory were still present and sometimes signi"cantly productive in the social visions of new sciences of the crowd and elitist theories of &&civilisation and its discontents'''. D. Pick, Faces of degeneration (Cambridge: 1989), p. 4. 3. The question of his Jewish identity was a very complex issue for Freud, as Sander Gilman has demonstrated in his studies. Gilman holds that the category of race had real signi"cance for Freud during his whole life and points out that in 1911 he joined the International Society for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform, which advocated, e.g. racial health and selective breeding. S. Gilman, Freud, race and gender (Princeton: 1993), pp. 16, 22. 4. See R. Noll, ¹he Jung Cult (Princeton: 1994), pp. 20, 145, 267}269. 5. See S. Freud, On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914) (Standard edn, Vol. 14, London: 1957), p. 43. 6. Quoted in R. Noll, ¹he Aryan Christ (New York: 1997), p. 114. The letter was found among Bjerre's papers that are kept in the Kungliga Biblioteket in Stockholm, Sweden. 7. C.G. Jung, ¹he Role of the ;nconscious (1918), Collected Works (henceforth CW) (Vol. 10, London and Henley: 1981), p. 14. 8. See, for example, &An Interview on Radio Berlin' in W. McGuire (Ed.), C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (Princeton: 1977). 9. C.G. Jung, ¹he Fight with the Shadow, CW 10 (1946), pp. 219}222. 10. C.G. Jung, ¹he Role of the ;nconscious, p. 13. Cf. C.G. Jung, Epilogue to Essays on Contemporary Events, CW 10 (1946), p. 227. 11. About evolutionary psychology, see D.M. Buss, &Evolutionary psychology: a new paradigm for psychological science', Psychological Inquiry, 6 (1995). 12. This aspect of Jung's psychology is critically examined in A. Samuels, Politics and Psyche (London and New York: 1993), chap. 12}13. 13. &Thanks to Jung, Seligman could reinforce the distinction between the civilised and primitive, attributing to the latter a state of irrationality without its pathological aspects.' E. Barkan. ¹he Retreat of Scienti,c Racism (Cambridge: 1992), p. 32. 14. C.G. Jung, Editorial, CW 10 (1933), p. 533. 15. When I use the word &primitive', I only refer to the historical use of the word and it neither carries value judgement nor presents an ontological statement.
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16. C.G. Jung, ¹he Psychology of the Child Archetype (1940). (CW 9/1, London: 1968), p. 153. 17. C.G. Jung, &Approaching the Unconscious', in C.G. Jung (Ed.), Man and his Symbols (London: 1978), p. 70. 18. C.G. Jung, ¹he ¹avistock ¸ectures. On the ¹heory and Practice of Analytical Psychology, (CW 18, London & Henley: 1977), p. 42. 19. L. LeH vy-Bruhl, Das Denken der Naturvo( lker (Wien und Leipzig: 1926), pp. 57}59. 20. Ibid., pp. 59, 77, 92}93. 21. C.G. Jung, Archaic Man, CW 10 (1931), pp. 63}65. 22. C.G. Jung, Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype, CW 9/1 (1954), p. 101. 23. C.G. Jung, Schizophrenia (1958). (CW 3, London & Henley: 1981), p. 267. 24. C.G. Jung, Briefe, herausgegeben von Aniela Ja!eH , ZuK rich in zusammenarbeit mit Gerhard Adler, London (Olten: 1972}1973), Band I (1906}1945), p. 243 (March 22, 1935). 25. C.G. Jung, Briefe, Band II (1946}1955), p. 82 (June 18, 1947). 26. See Jung's vivacious account of these travels in chapter 9 of his memoirs Memories, dreams, re-ections, recorded and edited by Aniela Ja!eH (London: 1983). 27. C.G. Jung, =andlungen und Symbole der ¸ibido (Leipzig: 1912), pp. 27, 175. 28. &In Africa2 the white man is a diminishing minority and must therefore protect himself from the Negro by observing the most rigorous social forms, otherwise he risks &&going black''. If he succumbs to the primitive in#uence he is lost.' C.G. Jung, Mind and Earth, CW 10 (1931), p. 47. See also C.G. Jung, =oman in Europe, CW 10 (1927), p. 212; ¹he Complications of American Psychology, CW 10 (1930), p. 507. 29. C.G. Jung, ¹he Complications of American Psychology, pp. 508}509. 30. C.G. Jung, Mind and Earth, p. 47. 31. See, for example, C.G. Jung, ¹he ¹avistock ¸ectures, pp. 38}40. 32. C.G. Jung, =hat India Can ¹each ;s, CW 10 (1939), p. 527. 33. E, Barkan, ¹he Retreat of Scienti,c Racism, p. xi. 34. Ibid., p. 3. 35. See L. Poliakov, ¹he Aryan Myth. A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (London: 1974); R. Proctor, Racial Hygiene. Medicine ;nder the Nazis (Cambridge, MA and London, England: 1988); P. Weingart et al, Rasse, Blut und Gene. Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt: 1988). 36. G.S. Hall, Adolescence, its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education (vol. II, New York and London: 1916), pp. 649, 651. 37. In the early decades of the century, Russell and Huxley expressed explicitly racist views and even Boas &did re#ect the [racist] values of his society', but they all later changed their views towards more egalitarian or even anti-racist stance. See E. Barkan, ¹he Retreat of Scienti,c Racism, pp. 76}90 (Boas); 178}189, 235}248 (Huxley); and R. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp. 179, 380 (Russell). Russell, like many other liberal or left-wing intellectuals in England, also supported the Eugenics movement in his country for some time. 38. F. Dalal, &Jung: a racist'. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 4, 3 (1988), p. 263. 39. D. Howitt and J. Owusu-Bempah, ¹he Racism of Psychology (New York: 1994), pp. 1}3, 16. 40. G. Stanley Hall, for example, expressed the following view in his study of &adolescence': &Most savages in most respects are children, or, because of sexual maturity, more properly adolescents of adult size2 Their faults and their virtues are those of childhood and youth'. G.S. Hall, Adolescence, p. 649.
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41. Jung inserted a circular letter in the December 1934 issue of the Zentralblatt (the o$cial journal of the society), in which he declared the International Society to be neutral as to its politics and creed. C.G. Jung, Circular ¸etter, CW 10 (1934), p. 546. 42. F. Ringer, ¹he Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge, MA.: 1969), p. 383. 43. G. Cocks, Psychotherapy in the ¹hird Reich (New York and Oxford: 1985), pp. 128}129. 44. Ibid., p. 102. 45. See, for example, Richard =ilhelm: In Memoriam (1930), (CW 15, London & Henley: 1979), pp. 58}59. 46. C.G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth, CW 10 (1958), p. 414. 47. J.L. Jarrett (Ed.), Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934}1939 by C.G. Jung (vol. I, Princeton: 1988), p. 98 (June 13, 1934). 48. C.G. Jung, ¹he ;ndiscovered Self, CW 10 (1957), p. 296. 49. C.G. Jung, On the Psychology of the ¹rickster Figure CW 9/1 (1954), p. 269. 50. W. McGuire (Ed.), Dream Analysis. Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928}1930 by C.G. Jung (London: 1984), p. 706 (June 25, 1930). 51. C.G. Jung, After the Catastrophe, CW 10 (1945), p. 202. 52. See Gershom Scholem's 1963 letter to Jung's former secretary, Aniela Ja!eH , where he describes the meeting that took place between Jung and Baeck in ZuK rich in 1946. A. Ja!eH , From the ¸ife and =ork of C.G. Jung (New York: 1971), p. 98.