What comes across in accounts of Jung’s involvement with the Nazis is that, like anyone else, the great man was capable of damaging mistakes and misjudgments, a charge made against Jung by one of his closest collaborators, the Jewish psychoanalyst Jolande Jacobi. Jung’s misjudgments included commenting on the differences between the German and Jewish psyches at a time when such remarks, no matter how “objective” or “scientific,” would be used for odious purposes by the Nazi racial hacks. Pronouncements on the “old” Jewish psyche and the “youthful” German one were bound to be misread in the dark days of the 1930s, notwithstanding that Jung made these comments in the context of others about the “western” and “eastern” psyches, and wasn’t singling the Jews out for criticism. Likewise, Jung’s remark that the Jews seem “never to have created a cultural form of their own,” but require a “host nation,” would have been read in 1934 (when it was made) in one way only, that the Jew was a parasite, feeding off its Aryan host, no matter that Jewish philosophers like Otto Weininger and Ludwig Wittgenstein made similar remarks (and clearly, that they said it doesn’t make it true).
A lengthy excerpt from SA pal Gary Lachman’s excellent new book, Politics and the Occult, over at the Daily Grail.