So then, so now?
Avi Goren-Bar
Ruth Netzer (2024) Carl Gustav Jung, The Collective Unconscious and German Mythology in the Shadow of Nazism. Carmel Publishing. In the Interpretation and Culture series, 352 pages
The reader of Ruth Netzer’s books dealing with Jungian psychology cannot help but be impressed by her wonderful didactic style, which is consistently based on the presence of information, on extensive excerpts and references, on conceptual clarity and the richness of concepts that she reviews while extensively interweaving associations, which give the texts a personal flavor of her Israeli, Jewish and intellectual personality. In her current book, Netzer continues her writing culture, This time, however, she adds two dramatic qualities to her book, thus making it an important theoretical document in the field of analytical psychology. On one level, Netzer comes out in Jung’s defense and fights to clear his name of being an anti-Semite and a supporter of the Nazi regime, while discussing the issue in the context of the period of its occurrence. At the time, I eagerly read the book by Supreme Court Justice Hadassah Ben-Itto, published in 1998 under the title: “100 Years of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (Dvir Publishing). Netzer, who is not a lawyer, manages a professional line of defense, quibbles, presents documents and is presented as evidence, and raises an orderly and convincing thesis pointing to Jung’s innocence. It does not refrain from accusing writers of standing in their fields of error and distortions of information that are common inadvertently and maliciously. In this sense, the book reflects a courageous, eloquent and sophisticated professional writer.
And on another level, which deserves to be called “enough of the sage in allusion” and which I would like to emphasize in this review, Netzer reveals the roots of the development of fascist culture. In this sense, the book is very topical, and also touches on the roots of socio-political phenomena that afflict our country and even many other countries around the world.Beyond Machiavelli’s psychopathic ideas in his book The Prince (Shalem, 2003), beyond a summary of the reasons for the development of trauma in Gina Ross‘s book From the Whirlwind of Trauma to Healing: The Impact of the Whirlwind of Trauma on Groups and Peoples (Amazia, 2016, p. 174) and even beyond the symptoms of fascism as explained by Umberto Eco (1995) in his book Ur-Fascism” or “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Black Shirt”, Netzer adds in this book a perspective that explains the phenomenon of fascism through the concept of the collective unconscious coined by Jung. It focuses on the collective unconscious and builds a prism through which the individual and collective human psyche is reflected in situations in which the psyche is inevitably sucked into the negative side of the collective unconscious. It is a psychological phenomenon in which the individual and the collective who follow a charismatic leader inevitably take part in the creation of a fascist culture.
What Umberto Eco asserts and is reinforced in David Ohana’s article “The Age of Democratic Tyranny” (Haaretz Supplement, December 6, 2024), is given in Netzer’s book a deep psychological explanation of phenomena such as the cult of tradition, anti-intellectualism, marking opposition to the regime as treason, exploitation of social distress, militarism and sacrifice to the state, eternal war, treating peace-loving people as traitors, abolishing modernity, xenophobia, oppression of the individual for the sake of the collective, oppression of sexual minorities, Elitism, contempt for the weak, and degeneration of thinking are all characteristic of the fascist regime.
In her book, it is found that Jung, in his analysis of the collective unconscious, refers again and again to the characteristics of fascism. Through the ideas that he tried to instill throughout his years of activity before, during, and after the two world wars, Netzer stands and teaches us a chapter in the archetypal foundation of the human psyche in everything related to the relationship between the individual, society, ruler, and regime. Due to the unique significance of the year 2024, which told the story of the legal revolution in our country and in which we were in pain by the consequences of the disasters of October 7, 2023, and the difficult war that followed, Netzer’s book will become even more relevant. Throughout my reading of the book, I was accompanied by Sebastian Heffner’s Diary of a German1914-1933 (Hargol, 2002) and Jonathan Little’s Benevolent Notes (Zmora Bitan, 2008). Both of these diaries correspond with Ruth Netzer’s historical approach and her insistence on seeing Jung as a person, a Swiss citizen deeply rooted in the roots of Austro-Hungarian culture, one who combines citizenship and psychology in his daily life. He is forced to struggle and spread his ideas about the collective unconscious while the Nazi scene devours his intellectual cards and slaps his theoretical attempts to combine reality and theory under impossible conditions. How unfortunate it was to instill the core of his theory in the days when reality revealed such a diabolical and terrible aspect of such a vague and relatively young concept that Jung sought to instill in the consciousness of the psychotherapist community and the public. It occurred to me that in 1939 Freud died in London and Jung, in the very same London, was still forced to insist on assimilating “his” collective unconscious into the audience. He writes: “Because of the Jew’s millennia-old culture and deeper awareness, it is less dangerous for a Jew to add negative content to his unconscious. In contrast to the Jewish unconscious, the Aryan unconscious contains forces that still need to be born.” Jung distinguishes between [Freud’s] Jewish psychology and his own, which in his opinion is more suitable for the Aryan unconscious. He thought that Freud’s teachings, based on the Jewish unconscious, were suitable for Jews, while his own teachings were suitable for the Aryans.
Netzer tries to explain in her book that Jung erred in not considering that his readers and listeners would interpret the teachings he interpreted in his articles and lectures in a distorted way. Moreover, she argues that he was caught between a rock and a hard place, and that it was not in his favor to dig into him by the Nazi propaganda apparatuses, who sought to rely on a respected personality like him in order to validate their position regarding fascist values, cultural roots, and ideas. She also mentions twice that he worked for the U.S. Intelligence Service and provided materials and information about the Nazis.
At a certain point in reading the book, I wrote to myself: “These days, and considering what our country has been going through in the past two years, the question arises whether a psychotherapist can, should, or is able to grasp the consciousness of an individual patient while sitting in his office, when the collective unconscious, i.e., the collective psyche, hovers over all of us? How does breaking values such as morality, democracy, human value, integrity, transparency, equality of burden permeate the individual psyche? Netzer indeed notes that “it is worth emphasizing Jung’s explicit reference to the fact that his friends trapped in the archetype are those with whom it is impossible to talk, whose logic is nullified. Jung himself is watching them from the sidelines and is unable to get them to change their minds.” (Netzer, 110).
The book revolves around two main themes: the psychology of the unconscious of the crowd and the psychology of the charisma of the leader. Naturally, the two are intertwined. Jung writes: “Mythical archetypal contents, especially those concerning the core of the Self—redemption, self-fulfillment, divinity—have an over-nomination that can easily distract from commitment to human relations” (Netzer, 79). In doing so, he implies that when we deal with mythical archetypal contents, there is little chance of a fair dialogue. And the picture becomes even more complicated. Jung: “The bull is the animal instinct that Christianity has repressed, and it breaks when faith in Christ breaks through. He bursts wild and destroys himself because he has been repressed, and he has no human hand to guide him. … By repressing the animal, Christianity becomes wilder and more dangerous… This is the wild animal that has been repressed and destroys itself and leads to international suicide. If each person had a more correct connection to the animal aspects of himself (i.e., to nature and instincts), he would have a more valuable attitude to life.” (Netzer, 94) (I recommend that the Israeli reader replaces the word “Christianity” in the original text with “Judaism” in order to understand the analogy for today.) These words resonate with me when I think about the direction of the development of extreme Judaism in our country. Jung elaborates: “When the collective unconscious gathers into large social groups, the result is madness, a mental epidemic that can lead to revolution or war or something like that. […] You are no longer the same person, you are not just part of the movement – you are the movement” (Netzer, 107). According to him, fascism also has a religious nature, and therefore the fascination with it is enormous.” (1950). And he continues: “You can’t resist it, it catches you under the belt and not in your mind. Your mind is worth nothing, your sympathetic system has been captured, that’s the fascinating-charming force.” (Netzer,110)
Jung understands the concept that he believed so much, the collective unconscious, as having a mystical-historical character, and this fact is very important for the relevance of the book to the present day in contemporary Israel: “What the unconscious really contains are the great collective events of the time. In the collective unconscious of the individual, history prepares itself, and when the archetypes are activated in a number of people and come to the surface, we are in the midst of history – as we are now” (Netzer, 183).
The deeper we understand the concept of the collective unconscious as described in Netzer’s book, the more we witness the intensity of its influence on us. And if so, what is happening in the depths of the post-traumatic Israeli psyche in the wake of the October 7th? Jung says: “We need a worldview to discover the meaning of the movement of change. Otherwise, we may easily be unconsciously swept away by the flow of events because the mass movement has the power to take over the individual by means of suggestion, such as hypnosis. It is important to be in a state of awareness, and joining the movement must come from a conscious choice and not from coercion whose meanings are unconscious” (Netzer, 96).
Here we come to the inseparable interface between the collective unconscious and the rise of a tyrannical leader. Jung holds that “every movement that grows organically with the leader, who embodies with his whole being the meaning and purpose of the mass movement, is an indication of the psyche of the people, and he bears its word… It is important for a person to look himself in the eye and see his shadow” (Netzer, 97). Jung says: “Be aware and do not follow the leader hypnotized, the awareness of the individual in this period is important, do not follow the [Nazi] movement as a herd… The only thing that can stop this is a significant number of individuals who will be aware of the reality that governs them. Therefore, they should be given as much as possible the opportunity to question and help as many as possible to be aware … There is a danger in being an unconscious person by being a prisoner of a mystical and emotional occurrence with the participation of the masses” (Netzer, 99). He adds: “The greatest liberating acts in the history of mankind and acts that advance humanity have come from those with the personality of a leader and never from the ignorant mob, who can be manipulated by demagogues… The cheers of the Italian nation are directed at the personality of the Duce, and other nations sing hymns that mourn the absence of a strong leader” (Netzer, 103). It is interesting that Jung attributes, a month before Kristallnacht, to the leader and the people as one organic organ: “In a primitive society there are two kinds of strong people – one is the chief, the chief of the tribe with physical strength (Netzer, 129), and the other is the pagan doctor, a man who is not strong in himself but by virtue of the people’s reaction to him: all his power comes from the power that the people project upon him.” (Netzer, 129)
When Jung explores the figure of the leader, he dwells on Wutan, the god figure from Germanic mythology, and delves into it. It should be emphasized that as a god Wutan is an archetype, and as such he represents opposing polar qualities. “The god Wotan, as he is portrayed in the German myth, is not only the god of rage and madness with the emotional and instinctive aspects of the unconscious, but he also has an intuitive side, inspires, knows the occult, understands the signs of the ancient runic script, and is able to interpret fate. Jung associates him with the god Mercurius” (Netzer, 127). Later, “Wutan has a combination of a trickster and aggressive heroic god, and he demands total loyalty” (Netzer, 196). This is where the analysis of the personality of the fascist leader begins. In a seminar on visions, Netzer relates, Jung said that in ancient Egypt, Pharaoh was Egypt, and Egypt was Pharaoh, and that the same psychology still exists. It is archetypal psychology that shows the extent to which the masses can project an idea of their individual self onto an ideal or a group leader (Netzer, 184). What particularly impressed me about Jung’s analyses, as discussed at length in the book, is the level of sophistication of the complex personality structure of this type of leadership, and the great similarity between this type of leadership profile and the governmental leadership in our country: “A hysterical man, aware of his goodness and in a state of astonishing ignorance about his shadow. And when evil can’t be denied, he becomes Superman. Denying the shadow increases a person’s insecurity, he does not know for sure who he is. He feels inferior, but he does not really want to know what he is inferior to, and so the sense of inferiority grows and the need to impress, the need for appreciation and admiration, and the longing to be loved” (Netzer, 144). As if that were not enough, Jung elaborates: “Technological and intellectual achievements cannot solve emotional inferiority, denied inferiority causes hysterical detachment, and hysterical people are pushed to torture others” (Netzer, 144). As for the woman next to the leader, Jung says, “He has nothing to do with the anima character [the femininity in the psyche that leads to the unconscious]. Therefore, he is controlled by the woman next to him. Instead of being creative, it becomes destructive.” The dictatorship touches the religion. Here we also get an explanation of the coalition between the Ultra-Orthodox and the government in Israel nowadays: Jung points to the connection between fascism and religion, saying: “Fascism is the Latin form of religion, and its religious nature explains why such a thing has enormous fascination” (Netzer, 199). Netzer adds that Erich Neumann (Jung’s Jewish disciple and successor, who immigrated to Israel from Germany in 1939 on Jung’s recommendation) writes: “In monotheistic religions, myths of redemption prevail. They are usually marked by God or His Messiah or an idea such as the end of days. When these myths are imposed on society and on peoples’ relations instead of being moderately realized in the soul of the individual within, their dark face is revealed. At the foundation of the redeeming character of any collective movement lies the liberation of the individual from the moral problem and the transfer of responsibility from the shoulder to shoulder of the collective.” (Netzer, 201).
Only once in her book does Netzer deviate from her neutral professional philosophical position and notes towards the end: “These words (of Jung’s) are still true today, and they bring us back to the necessity of the individual to look at himself in order to formulate an ethical position of personal and moral responsibility not only towards himself but also towards interpersonal and collective processes” (Netzer, 276).
And to conclude this review from a personal angle, I can only quote Netzer’s excerpt: “That same year, 1941, Jung reported that he felt his age, his heart, and for a few days he felt a black depression in response to the events of the war” (Netzer, 143).
Dr. Avi Goren-Bar is a PCC-ICF Jungian Coach, CTI-Co Active Coach, He developed the Jungian Coaching Method and is the CEO of the Jungian Coaching Magic LTD. With its Online International School. He owns a Ph. D in Clinical & Educational Psychology, is a member of the European Gestalt Association, a MBTI facilitator, and an Expressive Arts Certified Supervisor, member of the Israeli Association of Psychotherapy.
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