Douglas Mercer
January 26 2025
That Carl Jung was a man of the right is certain; he believed in summary execution for all criminals, he detested parliamentary democracy, he believed in the aristocratic ideal, he believed that superior men were above morality, and that a new race and religion could emanate from enlightened Supermen. But the critics nowadays like to “tar and feather” him as a “nazi” but this is a bridge too far. When it comes to National Socialism the depth psychologist was out of his depth, the analytic psychologist promulgated a poor analysis. It is true that he was fascinated by Hitler but much of his participation in the movement amounted to little more than score settling against his arch enemy Freud, and the clearing out of Jews from Psychiatric Groups in the German speaking lands so his picked men could take them over; that is he was a rank opportunist. And when it comes to his statements about Hitler and National Socialism he shows himself to be a dabbler, a March Violet, a poetaster and a dilettante, a maven or magpie not a true fighter. For him Hitler was a “medicine man” as if our Leader was jumping up and down trying to make it rain in New Mexico, or stir some albino bones in a cannibal’s pot in the Subsahara to ward off the night ghosts. One would say it was beneath a great man to allege such things, but facts are stubborn things.
Essentially Jung takes Heine’s line on the Germans, that the Wotan lovers from the dark Northern Forests are natural berserkers, whose berserker nature was only subdued temporarily by the totem or talisman of the Cross, that when those Saxons were butchered on the field all gules the German spirit went underground and went inward. There were some eruptions here and there naturally as befits a Faust drenched people; but for the most part they were good little Kantians observing a categorical imperative, and rule followers, and precise and meticulous people who might dream of sand castles in the air like poets and a thinkers but they kept their homes clean and in piety went to Sunday school and worshipped Christ on his cross and feared the old man devil above all.
But lo and behold what a change was wrought when the first hints went round from David Strauss that the New Testament was just another text that could be hermeneutically unscrambled, could be parsed just like the Iliad, though the Iliad was always only poetry—that is that the whole thing was nothing but a scam! How now brown cow? What then? After all no one wants to be conned. And soon the greats were whispering that the Jews were the fomenters of decomposition and that they were the negation of being and they were absolute zero. And even sooner someone stood up and traced the genealogy of right and wrong and had the balls to say that in truth there was no good and there was no evil, that there was only truth; and that what was more anything that came from love was well beyond good and evil or, better, had nothing to do with it. This was the kind of “conundrum” which worried to no end beret wearing hooligans lazily whiling away the days in scattershot thought while they looked into the Seine in 1950 and claimed all art was dogshit; one would think by now we would be well beyond such puerile musings. But no indeed; everyone still thinks as an article of faith that when good and evil go all the devils are loose and all hell breaks loose. But those prototypes have been rescinded, being of no use to us now.
And then (back at the German Ranch) sooner than you could reach for your revolver they decided to put on a play in Germany (so runs the hackneyed narrative). Lawrence said the same thing in 1923 with his dark forebodings about the spiral heights of those Gothic Buildings which made him dizzy with vertigo, it was much too rich for his supposedly strong blood. And of course the traitor Mann hoed the same row in Doctor Faustus with his demonic music and his composer who made the fatal pact with (guess who!) the devil. One would say that this is a species of high-minded drivel but there is nothing high minded about it. Jung fell into an identical trap bleating about the chthonic but what they forgot is to get their predicate straight. What looks like evil only looks like evil because the world is evil; and the future belongs to the man willing to get his hands dirty because there is so much dirt in the world. This mind disease can of course be cured by an aerial or long view.
Hitler fascinated Jung, as well he might have; he fascinated more than a few for most the most understandable of reasons: he was fascinating. But Hitler was not dark, or demonic, or a recrudescence of the irrational; he was a child and god of light, the first and last born of the light: he was an Enlightenment figure par excellence, he applied reason to the affairs of men. He wanted not to be a war time leader, he would have loved nothing more than to be a builder and a builder up of men. He wanted to create his vast projects and he wanted his people to thrive and prosper—forever. But sometimes reason sees that things are awry, and out of joint. Sometimes it sees snakes in the garden, and parasites eating him out of house and home like ravening hordes of insatiable locusts. In this case what is a reasonable man to do, facing the unreasonable? Get his hands dirty is the answer though by doing so running the risk that should he fail he will be portrayed as the very carrier of the disease by those who carry the disease. It’s the oldest one in the book: a simple twist of fate.
Jungs saw Hitler as a power, and that he admired; but he fretted that this was just hypnotic trance as if he had put sixty million people under his spell by wielding a pendant; but they were free to obey; he saw Hitler as an atavistic upsurge; as chthonic; he said that Hitler’s was the mirror of the German unconscious, that Wotan Odin spear in the depth of the soul which he reflected; only an armchair human could say something that stupid. Jung said that Hitler was an archaic break in the present; that in him we had the plethora of psychosocial conditions, the grandiosity, the megalomania, the narcissism, the borderline, the hysterical, the histrionic the bipolar, the psychotic itself; and of course the scene a fair of the dark pagan gods returning disgraced his prose; Wotan he said was the archetype which had disappeared for a thousand years; but in Hitler the dark star of Wotan was rising gain, like Wagnerian Brass rumbling down the corridors of a better forgotten memory. He said that Hitler had a messiah complex; and he possessed the furor Germanicus; that Hitler and the German nation were mentally ill.
But then to those who cannot hear the music of the spheres the ones dancing will invariably appear insane; and Hitler as the uncanny, the eerie, the uninvited guest of a nihilism run amok is the thinking of a toddler. You see all of these are but phrases phases or molds from the long dark past; they are prototypes we have inherited which have no bearing on the future. They are tired prototypes that must be rescinded. For Hitler was one of those who wandered down the unbeaten path, who took that fabled road less traveled by; he heard the beat of drum that was distant and far away; for the future is not like the past, and the past’s preconditions will become unconditioned when the freedom of the German Forest returns. Hitler kept his eyes on his star and that it did not burst in the night sky so all could see it was but the chance of time; but don’t think for a second that the drum is still not beating out its time in wonderful and regular rhythm, and you must know by now that you cannot stop what is on its way. For as we all know that ancient Aryan symbol we call the Swastika means nothing but Good Fortune. And when the fat lady sings she will rejoin what has been scattered by the day, taller than any man—as a good German lass must be when she gets around to singing her heart out.
