Carl Jung on Identity

SIGMUND Freud was an insular Jew who moved in Jewish social and professional circles and identified as a Zionist. His differences with dissenting psychoanalytic protégé Carl Jung, furthermore, are inextricable from the racial and ethnic divide separating the two psychological innovators. “I am, as you know, cured of the last shred of my predilection for the Aryan cause […] We are and remain Jews,” Freud wrote to a mutual acquaintance in 1913 after Jung had dared to break with him over his sex-obsessed theoretical orthodoxy. “The others will only exploit us and will never understand or appreciate us.”1

Freud, who “made few friends who were not Jews”2, looked to Jung as an intellectual successor and figurehead to lead the psychoanalytic movement not because of his brilliance alone, but because, “and, perhaps most important of all, he was not Viennese and he was not a Jew,” explains Jungian analyst Anthony Stevens.

Freud, he goes on, “was acutely aware of the danger that anti-Semitism, associated with public disgust at his ideas on infantile sexuality, could result in the widespread rejection, or even suppression, of psychoanalysis, and he hoped that the adherence of a Swiss Christian of Jung’s stature could help rescue his movement from this fate.”3

Jung split with Freud after a few years of collaboration and friendship, the latter’s insistence on reducing human behavior to vestigial childhood sexuality and its lingering infantile traumata, and his dismissive resistance to Jung’s more expansive and positively oriented ideas of the collective unconscious and of personal growth through individuation of archetypal potentials having become too much for the younger man to tolerate.

Here, then, are Jew and gentile in capsule: the latter, both reverent and curious, inquisitively yearning after some deeper sense and understanding of his ancestral inheritance – and the former, controllingly insecure, quick to accuse, and discovering a murder being plotted under every rock. Jung – but of course! – has been accused by many of “anti-Semitism” for daring to suggest the existence of ethnically determined psychological differences between Europeans and Jews. “Admittedly I was incautious,” Jung wrote in 1934, “so incautious as to do the very thing most open to misunderstanding at the present moment: I have tabled the Jewish question.”5