The Inverted Nature of Carl Jung’s Anti-Soviet Ideology
By Adrian Chan-Wyles PhD
‘Human thought never reflects merely the object under scrutiny. It also reflects, along with that object, the being of the scrutinizing subject, his concrete social existence. Thought is a two-sided mirror, and both its sides can and should be clear and unobscured.’
VN Voloshinov (Soviet Linguist)
VN Voloshinov (Soviet Linguist)
Karl Marx, in numerous of his works, explains how the Judeo-Christian religion laid the ‘inverted’ foundation of the bourgeoisie mind-set. Simply stated, this idealism presupposes that ‘god’, ‘spirit’ or even ‘mind’ creates physical matter out of nothing, as an act of ‘will’. This ‘inversion’ of reality relegates the material universe to a subordinate position functioning under the tyranny of religious imagination. The bourgeois practice of modern science abandons or ‘suspends’ this inversion long enough to gain profit understanding into various aspect of material reality, but this outburst of ‘non-invertedness’ has its roots not in Christian dogma, but rather in the rediscovered logic of the ancient Greeks in renaissance Europe (with the Greek texts having been preserved from Christian destruction in the Islamic libraries of Byzantine). This is the class and psychological background to Carl Jung’s work on the human mind, which, after his break from Freud, he termed ‘Analytical Psychology’. Jung, typical of his bourgeois class, put more faith in his own religious imagination than in the concrete reality of the real world, and like his mentor Sigmund Freud, fooled himself into thinking that he had ‘discovered’ a ‘science’ of the mind. In reality, a close study of the work of Jung reveals that it is a pseudo-science created from a modern re-working of the secularised Judeo-Christian tradition. In short, Jung’s work demonstrates that he was hopelessly awash in a sea of religiosity, and had completely lost touch with physical reality. In fact, one of the earliest academic critiques developed by early Soviet academics is exemplified in the 1927 work entitled ‘Freudianism: A Marxist Critique’ by the Russian semiologist VN Voloshinov (1895-1936). This pivotal work was eventually translated into English and published in the West in 1976, and has had numerous re-prints, such is the import of its logical devastation of bourgeois psycho-centric views of the world. Briefly presented, Voloshinov states that Freud did not discover objective scientific facts about the functioning of the human mind, but rather mistook and misinterpreted certain and various aspects of his privileged and superficial bourgeois existence, as being universal scientific facts. Freud then encapsulated this pseudo-science into a body of work he termed ‘psychoanalysis’, and ensured the exterior bourgeois trappings of his life that had become to signify his ‘practice’, (such as a middle class home and study environment, together with a diagnostic coach and ample leisure time), were passed on as an unquestioned vehicle of psychoanalyse from one generation to the next. Voloshinov made the point that the sexual component aimed at all humanity by Freud to explain psychological functioning, actually arose from Freud focusing his attention upon a small population of middle class Jewish women, and reflected only their cultural programming and concerns. Freud ensured the survival of his ideology by recruiting only young, middle class students who lived in, or had access to, a similar life-style to his own. This is the background to Carl Jung’s apprenticeship with Sigmund Freud, and the thoroughly bourgeois foundation of Jung’s understanding of the human mind. Freudianism, despite its limitations, continues to function in the world today, because of a number of ‘scientific’ myths that Freud and his followers developed and perpetuated. An excellent exposure of this Freudian mythology can be read in Frank Sulloway’s 1979 book entitled ‘Freud: Biologist of the Mind’. Sulloway states (Page 5):
‘In my historical appraisal, Freud stands squarely within an intellectual lineage where his is, at once, principal scientific heir of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers in the nineteenth century and a major forerunner of the ethologists and sociobiologists of the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, Freud’s theories reveal otherwise hidden rationality, as well as certain limitations.'
Whereas Voloshinov exposes the ‘inverted’ ideology of Freud’s work (long before criticising Freud became popular in the capitalist world), Sulloway reveals its ‘mythical’ and ‘pseudo-scientific’ content. However, Richard Milner – in his 2008 book entitled ‘Darwin’s Universe’ (Page 185) – concisely deconstructs what Freud believed to be the scientific foundation of his theory of mind:
‘Freud’s conclusions about the origins of dysfunctional behaviours are therefore based on two antiquated theories in biology: recapitulation and Lamarckian inheritance. Most present-day Freudians, unfamiliar with the history of evolutionary theory, cannot appreciate how deeply Freud’s theories rest on these two major 19th-century scientific fads, which have long since been abandoned by biologists.'
‘In my historical appraisal, Freud stands squarely within an intellectual lineage where his is, at once, principal scientific heir of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers in the nineteenth century and a major forerunner of the ethologists and sociobiologists of the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, Freud’s theories reveal otherwise hidden rationality, as well as certain limitations.'
Whereas Voloshinov exposes the ‘inverted’ ideology of Freud’s work (long before criticising Freud became popular in the capitalist world), Sulloway reveals its ‘mythical’ and ‘pseudo-scientific’ content. However, Richard Milner – in his 2008 book entitled ‘Darwin’s Universe’ (Page 185) – concisely deconstructs what Freud believed to be the scientific foundation of his theory of mind:
‘Freud’s conclusions about the origins of dysfunctional behaviours are therefore based on two antiquated theories in biology: recapitulation and Lamarckian inheritance. Most present-day Freudians, unfamiliar with the history of evolutionary theory, cannot appreciate how deeply Freud’s theories rest on these two major 19th-century scientific fads, which have long since been abandoned by biologists.'
This shaky edifice of inverted mind-set, mythology and pseudo-science, is exactly the very same foundations of Jungian Analytical Psychology. Whereas Freud at least tried to pretend that he was remaining anchored in material fact (regardless of how flawed this idea was), Jung, on the other hand, broke free of this contextual limitation and fully delved into the deep mire of mythology. In the realms of dream interpretation, however, Freud by comparison comes across as highly rational when he explains that dreams are the mind’s way of making sense of experiences had during the day. Jung developed his mythology to absurd lengths, imagining all kinds of ‘psychic’ structures which must exist, even though no one can ‘attest’ to their presence (rather like the premise of a faith-based, theistic religion). Despite this ethereal basis, perhaps even because of it, Jung is not without his occasional brilliant observation or ingenious revelation, but his essentially ‘religious’ approach to the functioning of the human mind ‘limited’ the philosophical and ideological approach that he was prepared to take. An example of this deliberate blinkering can be gleamed from the fact that the Soviet Union successfully launched the first man-made satellite into earth’s orbit on October 4th, 1957 (an act of technology superiority that shocked the world!), but writing in his 1958 book entitled ‘Flying Saucers’, Jung states the following (page 145) whilst discussing the theoretical psychological, sociological and cultural development of an ‘ideal’ group of children:
‘On the other hand there is something definitely suspect about these children: they are not separated individually but live in a permanent state of participation mystique, or unconscious identity, that precludes individual differentiation and development. Had they been spared an early extinction, they would have founded an entirely uniformed society, the deadly boredom of which would have been the very ideal of a Marxist state.’
As the Soviets were successfully sending various dogs into space strapped into rudimentary, rocket propelled capsules (bringing most back to earth safely), whilst preparing to send human cosmonauts into orbit, Jung has this to say about Communism in the same book (Page 37):
‘On closer inspection, however, things look very different: the exemption of the individual from a difficult and apparently insoluble task drives sexuality into an even more pernicious repression, where it is replaced by rationalism or by devastating cynicism, while the power instinct is driven towards some Socialistic ideal that has already turned half the world into the State prison of Communism.’
If this wasn’t disturbing enough, when discussing what Jung refers to as ‘special’ children who are ‘different’ because of their advanced intellectual abilities, his obvious (racist) contempt and disregard for other cultures is readily apparent (Page 144):
‘Their advanced intelligence is, moreover, coupled with a complete realisation of their potential power for world domination. The question of how to deal with this menace leads to different solutions. The Africans kill the children immediately. The Eskimos expose them to the cold. The Russians, after isolating the village, destroy it by bombardment. But in England the favourite teacher introduces some boxes, apparently containing laboratory equipment but actually containing dynamite, into the schoolroom and blows himself up with all the children.’
Jung, here, appears quite mad and unhinged, but ‘Flying Saucers’ is a strange book. Although appearing to be some hippie tome written by a crusty establishment figure, Flying Saucers, whilst offering various observations about lights in the sky, is in fact a product of the US-inspired Cold War, and is a veiled attack on the USSR. Jung is quick to educate his readers to the fact that whatever UFOs might or might not be, the Western ‘fear’ of the Soviet Union is rational and entirely premised upon the alleged behaviour of that regime. People ‘fear’ the UFO because it embodies all the bourgeois fears of the Communist System, but instead of Jung making this point, his inverted mind-set interprets reality the wrong way around. He blames the self-generated ‘fear’ in the collective mind of the bourgeois West, not on the capitalist individuals that generate the fear, but rather upon the ‘imagined’ ogre of the USSR and its Communist ideology. Jung completely misses the fact that all this hatred and misrepresentation occurs only within the mind of the Western bourgeoisie – in other words, only within his own mind. Nothing Jung has to say about the USSR or Communism, for that matter, has anything to do with the material reality that actually defined the USSR or Communism. Flying Saucers reveals Jung’s true bourgeois, capitalist agenda, and his willingness to substitute ‘myth’ for ‘reality’. In his 1954 book entitled ‘The Development of the Personality’ (CW 17 pars. 284-323), Jung states:
‘Though it seems at present as if the blind and destructive dominance of meaningless collective forces would thrust the ideal of personality into the background, yet this is only a passing revolt against the dead weight of history. Once the revolutionary, unhistorical, and therefore uneducated inclinations of the rising generations have had their fill of tearing down tradition, new heroes will be sought and found. Even the Bolsheviks, whose radicalism leaves nothing to be desired, have embalmed Lenin and made a saviour out of Karl Marx.’
Jung accuses his mind-made enemies (that exist only within his head), of having the very same limitations that he himself projects into them. When Jung fails to acknowledge the presence or validity of the working class, it is he who is acting ‘ahistorically’, and deliberately writing-out of history those he considers unworthy of life. This is not surprising, as Jung critiques the USSR and Communism in a shallow or surface manner that involves jingoistic and catchy propaganda statements designed to induce ‘fear’ and ‘confusion’ into the minds that are exposed. Jung never once demonstrates his knowledge of Marxism, or of the actual functioning of the various Communist countries. Furthermore, as he has been accused of supporting Nazi Germany, his ‘silence’ regarding the fact that it was the Soviet Union that took-on and crushed Hitler’s troops (at the terrible cost of 27-40 million Soviet casualties), is most telling. Instead, Jung prefers to compromise his objective academic standing and ‘insert’ into his work the required US anti-Soviet propaganda statement of the moment. Throughout his work, Jung relentlessly demonstrates his ‘inverted’ mind-set and resorting to basic religiosity. A theme that recurs is his habit of referring to Marxism (i.e. Scientific Socialism) as a ‘religion’, when in fact both Marx and Engels premised their entire theory upon the scientific ‘rejection’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition (because its idealism grew-out of pre-modern humanity’s early attempts to make sense of the world, and was redundant in a modern industrial age). Perhaps this misrepresentation goes hand in hand with Jung’s implicit rejection of ‘multiculturalism’ as a concept, because (Jung thought) it watered-down dominant (European) cultures, and created a people with no ‘roots’ in the land they occupy (although Jung remained absolutely ‘silent’ about Israel’s annexation of Palestine). Jung’s single work that presents these various myth as ‘objective’ truth is his 1957 book entitled ‘Man and His Future’ (CW 10). Although he remains silent about the Nazi German atrocities meted-out to the Soviet citizenry during WWII, Jung does spend much of the middle to late 1950’s willingly distorting the foundational principles of his earlier psychology in the service of the bourgeois class and the capitalist system. In this regard, Jung demonstrated more than a willingness to abandon academic impartiality and prostitute his understanding of Freud’s work in the service of US anti-Communist hysteria. Again, Jung remains silent about the racist treatments of Black Communist Paul Robeson in America, and, of course, about the execution of the US Communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but then he equally refused to acknowledge the McCarthy era of widespread persecution of leftists in general, in America. These witch-hunts were certainly conveyed with a mixture of religious fanaticism and racism, but, of course, as a bourgeois himself, Jung probably thought that despite continuous proof to the contrary (which he chose to ignore), the capitalist system his class founded and controlled, was the best possible system humanity could ever construct. When viewed in this light, Jung is compelled by the history of his class to pour scorn not only on the working class itself, but also any ideology that purported to ‘free’ and ‘uplift’ that class out of the mire of bourgeois exploitation. It can be said that Jung carried-out this anti-working class task impeccably. The scientific fragility of Sigmund Freud’s theory followed through into Jung’s system, augmented by an intense ‘attachment’ to inner psychological phenomena, and the subordination of the physical world to the imagination. Eurocentric racism – almost certainly present in Freud’s work – is given free rein in Jung’s work. Both men, of course, rejected the principle of working class rights, and were ambivalent toward the USSR (although Jung was at times openly hostile – as are many Jungian ‘clones’ today).
©opyright: Adrian Chan-Wyles (ShiDaDao) 2017.