Jung, War, Politics and Nazi Germany: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

In the thirties, Jung was at the height of his powers and found himself swept up in the international politics of his day. As a consequence of Hitler’s rise, Jung found himself president of what was to become the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. This placed Jung and his ideas in the center of a whirlwind of theoretical and political controversy. These chaotic times led him to comment widely on political events and saw his most extensive attempt to explain political events in terms of his theories of the collective and his use of the archetype of Wotan to explain Nazi Germany.

The period of political interest and theoretical innovation saw him swept into one of the most bitter, complicated and contested controversies of his career. The controversy has tangled together many different aspects of Jung’s life and theories so that important aspects of both have become mythologized or inadequately explained. This book seeks to re-examine the period, to unravel some of the confusion by setting out the historical background of Jung’s ideas, and provide a fresh debate on Jung and his collective theory.