Carl Jung

Carl Jung wrote the book Personality Types, or more correctly "Psychologische Typen." The book was originally published in German. Which, I thought was a little weird because he was actually Swiss; in a little town called Kesswil. So, I figured the language would be either French or Italian. But, I guess I should never underestimate the influence of German expansion..

Anyway, Carl Jung wrote this book about personalities. It was basically an exercise in self discovery. See Jung felt from his early childhood that he was two different people. He even referred to himself as Personality number 1 and Personality number 2. He considered himself an out going, happy go lucky school boy. He also considered himself a stoic reserved many of dignity and reserve.

It was of interest to me that his dad was an impoverished and  very reserved pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church. On the other hand his mother was the daughter of a well to do Hebrew professor.

His mother was a firm believer in the spirit world and held steadfast in her belief that she was visited by spirits on a nightly basis. It is fair to say that her view of reality was somewhat askew. But, what the hey. Most of the time she was really good fun to be around. That is until bouts of depressed found her sequestered in her bedroom for time on end.

The following is an excerpt from the Daily Grail.

For much of his career Jung obscured his interest in the occult, in his later years his writings on Gnosticism, alchemy, the paranormal, spiritualism, and even flying saucers brought these otherwise marginal areas into the field of respectable research. Predictably, Jung’s occult inclinations led to criticisms of irrationalism. Like Ludwig Klages, Jung has been seen by many on the left as a dangerous exponent of völkisch ideas. The neo-Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, himself no stranger to Rosicrucianesque utopias, once described Jung as a “fascistically frothing psychoanalyst.” Other neo-Marxist philosophers, like Theodor Adorno, likewise branded Jung a fascist. The tag was perhaps first made seriously by the German-Jewish cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin, who, unlike Adorno, had some interest in occult ideas, specifically the cabala and graphology, a discipline he shared, ironically, with the “fascist” Klages. (Benjamin was also a close friend of the cabalist scholar Gershom Scholem, who, as mentioned, was an associate of Jung at the Eranos lectures.) Adorno, Bloch, and others saw Jung’s psychology as a simple celebration of the unconscious, a rejection of the rational, critical mind in the same vein as the work of the more straightforward irrationalist Klages, whose ideas about “soul” in opposition to “spirit,” they argue, helped prime the German psyche for Hitler. The fact that Jung, like many others, at first believed that the creative potential of Germany might find fruitful expression through Hitler couldn’t have helped. According to Jung’s psychology, the “shadow” side of the psyche, though associated with “evil,” can often be the source of “good,” of new life and transformation, and Jung reportedly spoke of the Nazis as “a chaotic precondition for the birth of a new world,” a nod to Nietzsche’s remark that “One must have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” This, in a way, exemplifies the dangers of “holy sinning,” and reminds us that even great men can be blinded by their ideas.