ABSTRACT
Freud, though Jung kept reassuring himself that he was neurotic al l his life long, was an exceptionally powerful character, distinguished by "a great t ranquil resoluteness and superiority" (to recall Buber's sketch of him), and confronts us as the very image of nobi l i ty . Jung was, for al l o f his protestations o f his health, a sick soul who gives no evidence of having fathomed its own sickness. W i l - l iam James took the sting out of the phrase "sick soul" when he contrasted i t very sympathetically w i t h the "healthy soul" i n his Varieties of Religious Experience. But I am not a l luding to Jung's battle w i t h schizophrenia, wh ich calls for sympathy and even admiration. The sickness he d id not recognize as such was the resentment that kept gnawing at h im all his life. Had he really had any grasp of Nietzsche, of whom he spoke constantly, emphasizing that he, unl ike Freud, had read h im, he wou ld have known that ressentiment can poison a man's character; also how i t can be fought. That he failed to see this is not a minor oversight, rather odd in a man who actually gave seminars of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, but a flaw that in 1934 assumed wor ld historical dimensions. When ressentiment exploded in Germany and prepared for mass murder, Jung felt a profound kinship w i t h what happened across the border and coined a phrase that i n - cluded h im, too: the Germanic soul.
