ABSTRACT
In a letter to one of his first students, Karl Abraham, in 1908 Freud expressed his anxiety that psychoanalysis would remain a purely Jewish national affair (Gilman 1994a: 34). This was one of the reasons why he was so enamored with the Teutonic Carl Gustav Jung, whom he wanted to make his heir. However, Jung, long after his rupture with Freud, would argue that psychoanalysis was indeed a reflection of the specifically Jewish unconscious. Notoriously, in 1928, in a footnote to the Two Essays in Analytic Psychology, he wrote: “It is a quite unpardonable mistake to accept the conclusions of a Jewish psychology as generally valid” (quoted in Samuels 2009). And he made his view of the racial unconscious even clearer six years later when he wrote:
Freud did not understand the Germanic psyche any more than did his Germanic followers. Has the formidable phenomenon of National Socialism, on which the whole world gazes with astonishment, taught them better? Where was that unparalleled tension and energy while as yet no National Socialism existed? Deep in the Germanic psyche, in a pit that is anything but a garbage-bin of unrealizable infantile wishes and unresolved family resentments.
