Carl Jung and anti-Semitism: The Wounded Healer

Wounded Healer

A review of Claire Dunne’s Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul (New York: Parabola, 2000)

and Jane Cabot Reid’s Jung, My Mother and I. The Analytic Diaries of Catherine Rush Cabot (Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag, 2001).

Reviewed by Rob Couteau

The nineteenth century hosted significant progress in rationalism and scientific research, yet by mid- to late century there was a resurgence of things of a more occult or spiritual nature, such as Eastern religion, parapsychology, and Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy. In his seminars held in the 1920s and ‘30s, Carl Jung (discoverer of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the synchronicity principle) explained that in order for such nonrational phenomena to be taken more seriously, it was necessary to establish a scientific manner of dealing with them. This could lead to institutional structures that would legitimize the study of the soul, or psyche.

One of the leading psychologists of the time, Jung was ideally suited for such a task, in part because he believed that, besides the sexual instinct, there was a religious instinct: that psychic energy was, in essence, spiritual; that we are driven by this instinct to become whole and to strive for meaning. He called this mythopoetic quest the individuation process: one rooted in universal psychic patterns, yet unique in its expression.

Although he preferred to be remembered as a scientist rather than a Madame Blavatsky-type of figure, Jung’s work was largely promoted by the New Age movements of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. While academia continued to resist Jungian-oriented research, his ideas were transforming fields as diverse as humanistic psychology, anthropology, comparative religion, literature, painting, and art criticism.

By the late 80s and early 90s, his work gained a wider audience through the Bill Moyers interviews with Joseph Campbell (later published as The Power of Myth; 1988) and with the publication of best sellers such as Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990) and Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves (1992). In each of these examples, the spiritual aspect of his work comes to the fore, while the scientific aspect recedes to the background. Given this peculiar turn of events, a study of Jung that focuses on the spiritual dimension of the man is especially suitable. This is also the case since too many of the previous biographies have either been an “official” Jungian homage that neglects to explore his darker side or a critical attack from authors who, at the outset, equate “spiritual” with “nonsense.”

Claire Dunne’s Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul approaches his life in an innovative manner. She notes each developmental stage with a minimal amount of her own narrative, weaving it into longer passages from Jung’s writing: primarily, his letters and autobiography. These comprise Jung’s most intimate expressions.

Although more of a primer of Jungian thought than an actual biography (the narrative is so minimal that it simply links selections taken from Jung’s writings), Wounded Healer represents a valuable collection of Jung’s spiritual reflections. In addition, it’s a physically beautiful book, containing colorful reproductions of cultural artifacts; works of fine art; photographs of Jung’s family, friends, and colleagues; and examples of his watercolors and sculptures.

Dunne includes a succinct treatment of two enduring “taboo” subjects: the accusation that Jung was an anti-Semite and a pro-Nazi sympathizer (in the 1930s, during the rise of National Socialism, Jung published an essay on the so-called differences between Jewish and Aryan psychology. More on this later); and an homage to Jung’s former patient, colleague, and lover, Toni Wolfe:

Jung’s brilliance was exemplified by his discovery of the universal psychic factors that are contained within all people (i.e., the archetypes). But the need to understand what is “generally true” about cognition and behavior led him to make other generalizations of a cruder, less insightful nature. He believed that, between the personal and the collective unconscious, other dimensions of psyche were determined by a national, cultural and racial past: that cultural factors were not only imprinted on us from the environment but that they were also, in part, inherent. While the notion of a universal unconscious remains Jung’s most enduring contribution, behind this spiritually uplifting idea we find lurking a rather shadowy dimension that includes crass expressions of racial bigotry and bias.

Another recently published document sheds light on such matters. Jane Cabot Reid’s narrative of her mother’s extended analysis with him, Jung, my mother, and I, contains the most comprehensive (and most damaging) record of such shortcomings. For example, when speaking to her mother, Katy Cabot, about a neurotic Jewish patient, Jung remarks:

Therefore, just a few years after defending his published views on a so-called Jewish psychology, Jung was continuing to voice such racist ideas privately, to his clients and therapists-in-training. The same year that he made the statement above (1941), however, he was also referring to Hitler as “sinister” and “infected by the Unconscious.” According to Jung, the “Germans were in league with the devil, and had a lust for power which is satanic.” While Jung was certainly no Nazi (this document offers conclusive proof of that, as do other remarks he made in private seminars given in the 1930s, e.g., see his recently reissued lectures on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra), he expressed many of the same prejudices that the Nazis (and many of the Europeans of that time) believed in. Besides being a product of the racist times, Jung formulated his prejudices into psychological theories, attempting to institutionalize and to promote them, implicitly and explicitly, in his publications, seminars, and training programs.

Although many of his actions were clearly pro-Semite (e.g., he personally assisted in the resettlement of many Jewish refuges who were escaping from the Holocaust),* too many of his ideas about ethnicity and race were clouded by such typical biases of the times. “In America,” he says, “there is a bit of everything: Negroes, Italians, etc. and a large contingent of Irish, not a distinguished tribe, but a wild tribe of Irishmen, with manners that are by no means English.” Elsewhere, he calls the Irish “utterly irresponsible!” He explains one must have a psychological defense against becoming too impressed by other nationalities–a kind of justifiable prejudice–otherwise, one “goes under” and loses one’s national identity and character. (He also used this expression in a racial context in many of his private seminars, when referring to his trip to Africa.) On Swiss Catholics versus Protestants, he remarks: “the Protestant [community] … has nicer people, is more orderly, whereas the Catholic one is more primitive and less orderly. In a Protestant country, people have better relations with one another. The ‘Church’ in Catholic countries takes the place of the ‘relation to people.’” About 200 pages after this passage, which was a verbatim account taken in shorthand by Katy Cabot during her analytical session with Jung, narrator Jane Reid (Katy’s daughter, who was given the analytical records by her mother shortly before she died) adds (in a narrative commentary): “Katy returned frequently to the subject of Catholicism with Jung…. It was only from Jung that she could obtain an unbiased opinion.” (My emphasis.) Evidently, daughter Jane, who is a contemporary Jungian analyst, also seems at ease with such bizarre notions. (This is an unsympathetic narrative on the daughter’s side, who was more identified with her grandparent’s puritanical severity and who resented her mother’s unconventional, “flapper” lifestyle.)

Katy Cabot began her analysis with Jung in 1929 (her analysis concluded in 1958). The daughter of a Naval lieutenant who was assigned to international ports, she was often left in the care of boarding schools or convents in Europe. After spending many of her formative years there, when she returns at age nineteen to Boston to live with her parents (1913), she experiences a severe culture shock. This seems to be the event that sets the stage for the psychic conflicts that follow.

While the adult Katy feels she had more freedom than the average child, it’s obvious that her family exerted much control over her early life. They envisioned only one possible role for her: marriage to a “suitable” husband. She does find one who is suitable, as far as social standing is concerned, but in terms of being a suitable soul mate he falls short. After they marry, she feels isolated and bored, living in the backwoods of a cultural void named Charleston, West Virginia. When her daughter Jane contracts TB, Katy takes her to Italy to recuperate. Once Jane is better, Katy refuses to budge from Europe. After her husband’s premature death, she no longer needs to pretend that she’ll eventually return to America.

Her parent’s decision to encourage an extreme extraverted form of socializing (in order to find that suitable man) leads her to develop a taste for what Jung calls “superficiality” and “nonsense.” Though overly identified with her “social creature,” the need to develop inner values presses upon her. Finally, the unconscious reacts by “forcing her under” with a depression. (Jung was ahead of his time in realizing that depression served a positive function, forcing one to reexamine life in order to live in greater accord with the authentic self.) This leads her to Zurich and to Jung: possibly, the only spiritual center available to her at that time. In a classic example of the transference (in which we project unrealized aspects of the self upon the analyst), her analysis is centered on her perception of him as a religious figure. He becomes her touchstone to deeper psychic levels, which she cannot attain on her own.

Jung suffered a heart attack in 1944 and had what is in now referred to as an out-of-the-body experience. Hoping to ameliorate her affliction, he shares what was revealed:

In a fitting counterpoint to the bad blood that exists between Katy and her daughter, Jung explains his unique notion of “kinship libido.” That is, the need to “establish the original family relation on a spiritual level.”

As marriage moved from couplings within the tribe to those with neighboring tribes and, finally, to those with strangers, the need to reestablish an intimate “spiritual clan” is intensified. “We [moderns] have a neurosis because the endogamous libido is not satisfied.” Therefore, “the analyst becomes the maternal Uncle [Katy calls Jung “Uncle”], and instinctively the spiritual clan is established on a spiritual level. The patient and analyst are also the carriers of civilization because [through the transference] they establish the big family of primitives in which all are relatives.” “The Self is a collective idea, which the Hindus call ‘conglomerate soul’ … built out of many souls as it were […] We are related to each other through the Self …”

Jung encouraged his patients to sever unhealthy family ties and to seek a rapport with those who have experienced a relationship to the higher Self. He envisioned a community of those who were unrestricted by social expectations and that was governed by values that were truly Self-reflective.

An invaluable record of his work (and the lengthiest record so far of an analysis with Jung), the dairy chronicles such efforts to create a psychological “family.” The self-appointed patriarch of this peculiar clan is portrayed as a genius who often stumbled because of his shortsightedness; an intellectual and scholar who also thrived as a gardener, gourmet, and sensualist; and the promoter of a transpersonal consciousness who was ever the egoistic celebrity. The diary also captures the gemütlich Jung: at ease before a crackling fire, kindling a pipe of tobacco, and warming to an intimate exchange of thought and feeling.

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* “Jung’s unpublished correspondence from 1934 onward contains many copies of official Atteste, notarized statements submitted to the Fremdenpolizei, the Swiss government agency responsible for admitting foreigners to the country. In many, Jung guaranteed that if for any reason these persons were unable to support themselves, he would assume all financial responsibility. These Atteste were signed on behalf of persons who range from those totally unknown today to those well known in the Jungian community, among them the French theorist Roland Cahan, and Jung’s old friend Jolande Jacobi. Jung treated many Jewish patients without charge once they managed to get into Switzerland, among them Aniela Jaffé, who later became his secretary and collaborator on his autobiography.

Letters abound similar to the one he wrote to Heinrich Zimmer on the eve of his immigration to the United States, telling him of persons he had contacted on Zimmer’s behalf. And he wrote many more to persons in England and the United States, often ordering them to ‘help this Jew’ (his emphasis).” Deirdre Bair, Jung. A Biography, pp. 459-460.

According to Bair, when Allen Dulles entered Switzerland in November 1942 he was secretly working as the “advance man” for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Switzerland. (Dulles would later be placed in charge of the CIA.) “For some time, Jung became Dulles’s ‘sort of senior advisor on a weekly, if not almost daily, basis.’” The following year, “Jung became ‘Agent 488’ in Dulles’s reports to OSS offices in Washington and London, and 488’s dispatches were considered fact and figured prominently in the agency’s operational policies.” Dulles said that Jung “[understood] the characteristics of the sinister leaders of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. His judgment on these leaders and on their likely reactions to passing events was of real help to me in gauging the political situation. His deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for was clearly evidenced in these conversations.” In fact, Jung had constructed the first in-depth psychological profiles of political enemies, such as Hitler. “By 1945 […] Jung’s views on how best to get [German] civilians to accept defeat were being read by the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Jung’s analysis of Nazi propaganda was that it tried ‘to hollow out a moral hole with the hope of eventual collapse.’” Ibid., pp. 492-494.


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