Theos-Talk Archives (April 1996 Message tl00386)

liesel@dreamscape.com (liesel f. deutsch) wrote:

> Tim,
>
> Your source wasn't the first one to accuse Jung of being a Nazi
> collaborator. I read Jung's biography a few months back, & it was mentioned
> in there. I forget what it was Jung did that made people say that, but he
> did *not* collaborate with the Nazis. If he did, I'd disown him.

Jung saw that the Nazi movement was a phenomenon of the collective
unconscious. Initially he thought it would have a positive effect on the
German psyche. He later admitted his mistake. Many thought Jung was too late
in confessing and too silent during the early part of the Nazi movement.

Third hand quotes from FREUD & JUNG (Scribners 1988):

-Jung's colleague C.A. Meier remembered that at one of the meetings of
the International Society, Jung had been asked to have a psychiatric
consultation with Hitler.  Meier recalled the H. Goering had arranged
for Jung and Hitler to meet in Berlin on the occasion of a big military
parade.  Jung and Meier had come to Berlin as planned.  The night before
the parade, Meier recalled, the hotel room he shared with Jung was
carefully searched by secret police.  The next day Jung was fascinated
by his glimpse of Hitler standing at the parade only yards away.
"Hitler made upon me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of wood
covered with cloth, an automaton with a mask, like a robot."   Jung then
said, "With Hitler, you are scared.  You know you would never be able to
talk to that man;  because there is nobody there."  Meier was never sure
whether it was Jung or Hitler who at the last moment refused to
participate, but the consultation did not take place.-

And ...

-Although Jung never treated Hitler, he proposed a cure for him.  "I
would send him East,"  he would tell an American correspondent in
October 1938.  "Turn his attention away from the West, or rather
encourage him to keep it turned away... That is the logical cure for
Hitler... Nobody has bitten in Russia without regretting it... Meanwhile
we should be safe, and by we, I mean all of Western Civilization... How
to save your democratic U.S.A.?  It must, of course, be saved, else we
all go under."- (from FREUD & JUNG. Scribners 1988.)