Jung on Hitler and the Archetype of the Madman
The psychologist Carl Jung was a Swiss national, served in World War I, and kept a close eye on Germany when Hitler and the Third Reich were spawned. In 1936 Jung acknowledges in an article the growing German menace, comparing Hitler to the Norse God Wotan who represented irrationality and apocalyptic events. Wotan was the Nordic god of war and had long been a cult figure among Germanic people. Wotan was known as a great magician and could intervene magically in battle with his paralyzing power. This god was also a shapeshifter, taking on guises and other personas as he saw fit. Wotan was an actor in dark and dangerous theater.
Jung wrote in 1946 in his essay “After the Catastrophe” the archetypal forces behind the Wotan myth had wreaked havoc across the world. The prophecy has been fulfilled and Europe lay in ruins. He acknowledges that he had been prophetic, but admits that World War II damaged body and soul, making analysis so close to such horror, difficult. He seemed to struggle writing this essay.
Jung writes that long before 1933 there was burning in the air. And with the burning of the Reichstag there was no mistaking where the source and the evil presided. Jung notes that much of Europe was pleased to discover the source of the fire and little that followed could surprise, including mass killings. Later the saturation bombing of German cities was considered by many an act of God.
Jung is trying to get to the core of the Germany psyche. He refers to other German writers, including Goethe, Heine, and Nietzsche, who have been struck by the inferiority of the Germans and how this state manifests itself in dissociation of personality, ignoring one’s shadow, and looking for the darkness in others. He summarizes this condition:
“All these pathological features — complete lack of insight into one’s own character, auto-erotic self-admiration, denigration and terrorization of one’s fellow man (how contemptuously Hitler spoke of his own people!), projection of the shadow, lying, falsification of reality, determination to impress by fair means or foul, bluffing and double-crossing — all these were united in the man who was diagnosed clinically as an hysteric, and whom a strange fate chose to be the political, moral, and religious spokesman of Germany for twelve years. Is this pure chance?”
Jung suggests a more accurate diagnosis of Hitler’s condition “would be ‘pseudologia phantastica’ which is characterized by a peculiar talent for believing one’s own lies.” For a short time, such people can meet with remarkable success, and are therefore dangerous. Jung writes that Hitler’s theatrical, hysterical gestures struck most foreigners as ridiculous. He adds a personal observation:
“When I saw him with my own eyes, he suggested a psychic scarecrow (with a broomstick for an outstretched arm) rather than a human being. It is also difficult to understand how his ranting speeches, delivered in shrill, grating tones, could have made such an impression. But the German people would never have been taken in and carried away so completely if this figure had not been a reflected image of the collective German hysteria. It is not without serious misgiving that one ventures to pin the label of ‘psychopathic inferiority’ on to a whole nation and yet, heaven knows, it is the only explanation which could any way account for the effect this scarecrow had on the masses. A sorry lack of education, conceit that bordered on madness, a very mediocre intelligence combined with the hysteric’s cunning and the power fantasies of an adolescent, were written all over this demagogue’s face. His gesticulations were all put on, devised by a hysterical mind intent on only making an impression. He behaved in public like a man living in his own biography, in this case as the somber, demonic ‘man of iron’ of popular fiction, the ideal of an infantile public whose knowledge of the world is derived from the deified heroes of trashy films.
“These personal observations led me to conclude at the time (1937), when the final catastrophe came, it would be far greater and bloodier than I had previously supposed. For this theatrical and transparent impostor was not strutting about on a small stage but was riding the armored divisions of the Wehrmacht, with all the weight of the German heavy industry behind him.”
Jung concludes this thread with this somber assessment: Eighty million people crowded into the circus to witness its own destruction at the hands of a narcissist.
(Jung could not have known that Hitler apparently received psychological help when he was in the Landsberg prison in 1924. His doctor Alois Maria Ott revealed in 1990, at age ninety-eight, that Hitler displayed magical, mysterious thinking.)
Jung continues to probe and to wonder why no one intervened. He refers to Göring as a good fellow and a cheat; and Goebbels as a dangerous character. The psychologist joins these men with Hitler in an unholy trinity. All were united in pathology. Hitler was exalted to the skies. Some theologians saw him as the Savior, a precursor of the Second Coming.
The psychologist wonders why army commanders didn’t intervene when Hitler’s intentions were clear. He wonders why there is no evidence of any such action. He concludes that this lack of action can only be described as the outcome of a particular state of mind, a chronic disposition which, in an individual, we call hysteria. He suggests that this condition influences mind set, character and will. Jung concludes that this state produces great energy and tension as well as inner contradiction, such as conflict of conscience, disharmonies of character; in short, everything we see in Goethe’s Faust, who sinks to the level of charlatan and mass murderer. Faust, like Hitler, seems to have no real insight and suffers no remorse.
“After the Catastrophe” seems prescient, even though written right after World War II. For Jung, the devil stole a march on the Germans, dangling in front of them the bait of power, aggrandizement, and national arrogance. They were led to imitate their prophets and to take their words literally, without understanding them. Germans allowed themselves to be deluded by their disastrous fantasies.
Jung writes that we must open our eyes to the shadow that looms behind contemporary man. “We have no need to hold up the devil’s mask before the Germans.” Individuals as well as nations have individual and collective shadows that keep us from consciousness. Jung warns against science and technology as dangerous playthings in the hands of people not psychologically equipped to handle them.
Jung considered the Hitler era a period of epidemic insanity, an eruption of the unconscious into a well-ordered world. For him, the way to avoid such an outcome is self-knowledge, psychological awareness, public clamor, intervention from others in power, and the capacity to call out the false gods and religions.
For Jung, Hitler was a charlatan who lead his country into a disastrous war. His prototypes, in various forms, still strut on the world stage.
Jung’s warnings still stand, prescient as ever.
Note: Excerpts from “After the Catastrophe,” from C.G. Jung’s “Civilization in Transition,” in Volume 10 of the Collected Works)
