Jung and National Socialism.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: In the conclusion to his interesting article "The Psychopathology of Terrorism" (January-February 2005), Dr Galak includes a reference to Jung's "break-up" with Freud, and then suggests that such was the severity to which Jung was thereby "scarred" that this "gifted and talented physician" sought "shelter in the seductive simplicity of National Socialism".

Such a benign judgment misreads or is uninformed by the available evidence, both as to the extent of Jung's fellow-travelling with aspects of the Nazi worldview, and as to the charge that Jung was a charlatan. This evidence, some of it comparatively recent, is fairly set forth in the The Seduction of Reason, an illuminating and enthralling tour-de-force by Professor Richard Wolin (Princeton University Press).

Jung's adulatory reference to National Socialism quoted by Dr Galak was merely one of many contained in public statements by Jung from the time Hitler came to power until at least 1939, which on occasions also recorded his admiration for Italian fascism. These declarations of support for Hitler and his Nazi regime were usually made from the safety of Jung's native Switzerland, so there could not be the slightest suggestion that he was under any form of coercion in doing so. He also accepted positions in Nazi-operated medical schools, including the presidency of one such organisation.

Sometimes included in his public statements or writings were claims that the Aryan mind was superior in some respects to the Jewish mind, and this at a time when the Nazis' persecution of the Jews had well and truly commenced. Although, as Dr ...