ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore the sensitive area of Jung’s views of Jews during the interwar period and World War II. Freud sometimes blamed Jung’s alleged anti-Semitism for his former protégé’s departure, and Jung sometimes made observations about Freudian psychology that appear to show prejudice, for instance making distinctions between Jewish and “Aryan” or German psychologies. Jung also theorized that one’s racial or ethnic background had a strong influence on how the archetypes took shape and were expressed. While this theory does not automatically argue for discrimination, Jung was slow to realize that it could be misconstrued and abused under the circumstances. Jung was President of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in the 1930s, and this chapter will also cover his handling of the Germans’ desire to exclude Jews from membership, along with the question of whether Jung’s analytical psychology ultimately lessened German responsibility for atrocities. These questions are posed in the context of Jung’s overall theory, which stresses that, at the deepest levels of the psyche, human beings share the same collective unconscious and the same goal of individuation, a goal that stands against racial and ethnic tribalism.
