I regret that I have not been able to blog as regularly as I would have liked for the past few weeks. I am delighted to see that since his return, my blog-league has been blogging up a storm and earning us links and accolades across the blogosphere. Bruce, I’m so glad you’re back.
I doubt that I will be able to return to regular blogging until the end of next week as I am currently engrossed in the latest Harry Potter while finishing up research for a paper on Carl Jung and Anti-Semitism (which I need to write by Monday).
While none of the Jews who worked with this great thinker and psychoanalyst found him to be anti-Semitic, some supporters of Sigmund Freud (who broke with Jung in 1913) have made much of Jung’s naivete vis ? vis the Nazis in the early 1930s, taken some of Jung’s comments out of context while relying on a mistranslated version of one of his articles to claim that he was a Nazi. When one studies the evidence, it is clear that while this great man did make a number of mistakes, including underestimating (as did many of his contemporaries) the Nazis’ capacity for evil, he did not collaborate with those vermin.
Nonetheless, that evidence is not enough for some of his intellectual adversaries, particularly some rather fanatic followers of Freud. In his essay, “Carl Gustav Jung: Defender of Freud and the Jews,” the noted child psychotherapist Ernest Harms wrote:
Of course, persons with hate-filled emotions may accept the presentation given here and yet may find the proof inadequate. However, the presentation here is made for sound and humanly adjusted minds and not for psychopathological personalities.*
That is, those with hate-filled emotions will never get beyond their prejudices and will never find the proof adequate. Even when all evidence proves their thesis to be wrong, they will continually seek new evidence to convince themselves of their doctrine.
In some ways, the attitude of Jung’s critics is not much different from that of some critics of the president and the Republican party. For some, the truth just doesn’t matter. No matter what research reveals, they will always hold true to the narrow beliefs. Their hate is so strong that nothing can convince them to change their minds.
-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com
*The essay appears in the anthology, Lingering Shadows: Jungians, Freudians, and Anti-Semitism, edited by Aryeh Maidenbaum and Stephen A. Martin.