Pill Pod 204 - Freud, Jung, and Hitler Walk into a Vienna...
Added 2025-04-17 14:00:13 +0000 UTCThis is a discussion inspired by a film but does not depend upon watching it, it is a film to be released called V13 c.f Vienna 1913 about Freud, Jung, and Hitler who were all in the same city at the same time.
This film is currently watchable or not depending on your geographic location https://vimeo.com/ondemand/v13
Comments
I agree that we should be nuanced about Jung, and that his support for national socialism should be put into context. However, it is important to remember that he was contemporaneously considered to be inappropriately bigoted even by his peers. Let's take a look: Farhad Dalal (1988). “Jung: a racist” in British Journal of Psychotherapy -- in this article, Dalal traces Jung's work and exposes his psychology's racist core (arguably 'fixed' by certain post-jungian traditions by the late 80s/90s). Jung's work has three overarching themes regarding blackness: 1) The modern black person is akin to the prehistoric human, 2) Modern black consciousness is equivalent to the white unconscious, 3) The psyches of modern black adults are comparable with those of white children. "These people live from their affects, are moved and have their being in emotion. Their consciousness takes care of their orientation in space and transmits impressions from the outside, and it is also stirred by inner impulses and affects. But it is not given to reflection; the ego has almost no autonomy. The situation is not so different from the European; but we are after all somewhat more complicated. At any rate, the European possesses a certain measure of will and directed intention" - Carl Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 270 (this work was published posthumously and iirc written after ww2) "An incident in the life of a bushman may illustrate what I mean. A bushman had a little son whom he loved with the tender monkey-love characteristic of primitives. Psychologically, this love is completely auto erotic – that is to say the subject loves himself in the object. The object serves as a sort of erotic mirror. One day the bushman came home in a rage; he had been fishing as usual and caught nothing. As usual the little fellow came to meet him, but his father seized hold of him and wrung his neck on the spot. Afterwards, of course, he mourned for the dead child with the same unthinking abandon that has brought about his death." - Carl Jung in Collected Works 5, p. 239 and Jung at his 'most radical': "[…] somewhere you are the same as the N**** or the Chinese or whoever you live with, you are all just human beings. In the collective unconscious you are the same as a man of another race, you have the same archetypes, just as you have, like him, eyes, a heart, a liver and so on. It does not matter that his skin is black. It matters to a certain extent, sure enough – he probably has a whole historic layer less than you. The different strata of the mind correspond to the history of the races" - CW 18, p. 46 "Dreams were the original guidance of man in the great darkness […] When a man is in the wilderness, the darkness brings the dreams […] that guide him. It has always been so. I have not been led by any kind of wisdom; I have been led by dreams, like any primitive. I am ashamed to say so, but I am as primitive as a n*****, because I do not know!" - CW 18, p. 286 "He [the black man] reminds us – of not so much our conscious as our unconscious mind – not only of childhood but of our prehistory, which would take us back not more than twelve hundred years so far as the Germanic races are concerned." - CW 10, p. 508. Just as a snippet - this thread runs throughout his work. This, however, shouldn't stop Jungians from retooling his frameworks away from his racism. Many post-jungians have reflected on this. IMO, one interesting move is the development of collective 'cultural/social/symbolic' unconscious and archetypes in the late 90s (see pietikainen/stevens/hogenson/solomon/mogenson debate) which would somewhat de-essentialise Jung's original notion and insert some amount of structuralism. However, Frantz Fanon got there much, much earlier - see how he retools Jung's collective unconscious in the FIFTIES (black skin white masks).
vigasz
2025-04-27 20:47:44 +0000 UTCYo hold up 31:00 this guy Diego talks about who thought it would be good to send neurodivergent kids to work farms... Is this guy RFK jrs inspiration for the "autism work farms."?? Lmao I can't say I know "plays" very well, but how prevelant are plays that depict philosophers, and of those, how many use the play format and more specifically embodied interactions of ideas and concepts as a means of teaching or instilling those ideas and concepts? Seems like an effective approach because of the affective method?
ageOfBumFires
2025-04-21 20:12:33 +0000 UTCI think Jung has gotten more flak than he deserves, just because Peterson is his fan. Jung's support for national socialism, taken from a few sentences out of context with everything he's written (and there are thick volumes of it) doesn't meet the criteria for honest criticism. It's good, Gentlemen, that you've nuanced Jung's alleged affair with Nazis. Because it's a bit like calling a guy who deals with the social conditions of prostitution a whoremonger.
P B
2025-04-21 10:24:49 +0000 UTCYeah, the primary schism between Freud and Jung was Oedipus, just as it was for Freud and Rank, and Freud and Adler. Diego is not wrong on some of the details, but those details matter in how they relate to the Oedipal theory, and Jung simply thought there was more to the psyche than psychosexual dynamics. I'm not a fan of either, but Freud's theories are only more interesting if you ignore that even his good ideas eventually weave back to Oedipus, which is what most theorists and philosophers who take Freud seriously tend to do.
Manny Furious
2025-04-18 19:58:41 +0000 UTCI am not a Jung expert, and I do not care for him. (though I find some of his network fascinating like Sabina Spielrein) **But** a recent development is 7 of Jung’s diaries / journals were published in 2020, called the Black Books for the outside cover of said journals were Black for five of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Books_(Jung) And pretty much we can now safe to say Jung had a really bad time in 1913 and 1914 for he always had visual mental imagery, but it got worse during that time. And people have tried their best to name the type of conditions we think Jung suffered such as this 2024 journal article (I am not a mental health expert) https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1358329/full Likewise their are other journals beside this one, the Red Book (2009) is dedicated to Dionysus by Jung (technically Liber Novus, Liber being one of the Roman versions of Dionysus with some differences due to Syncreticism / Different Culture.) And there are 3 main other post homnus Jung Publications. • Now I am perfectly okay with altered mental states and human diversity with the mind. Not okay with all the antisemitism and ideas of national inherent culture that stains your soul. Well after 1914 Jung takes up painting and travels a dozen different times to India, Africa, America, England, etc. Likewise he suffers two heart attacks in the 1940s. But yeah Jung style completely changes after age 38 / 1913 when he starts getting all these intense mental / visual images that put pressure on the mind with such forefront intensity.
Matthew Theisen
2025-04-18 17:25:25 +0000 UTCI think the main split between Freud and Jung was more about two things: Jung opposed addessing psyche dynamics on sexuality mostly and second was about the structure ego-id-superego versus persona-animus-anima-self. Also, I felt you dismissed 'colective unconsiousness' too easily as mambo-jumbo fairy tales. And finally, I'm not sure, if Jung claimed we are born with ready-made ego. Still, happy to listen to such stuff - I was missing for some time subjects on psychoanalysis' connections with critical theory. Current stories happening in the world give tonnes of material to apply these lenses. Thank you, gentlemen. Waiting for your next episodes and Pills to come back.
P B
2025-04-18 16:43:51 +0000 UTCThis was great. Would love to hear more on Freud
Henry Martyn
2025-04-17 19:51:16 +0000 UTC
