This interview with the founder of analytical psychology was published in the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche on May 11, 1945, four days after the surrender of the German army in Reims. Its title is "Will Souls Find Peace?" - is still relevant.
Don't you think that the end of the war will cause tremendous changes in the soul of Europeans, especially Germans, who now seem to be awakening from a long and terrible sleep?
Carl Gustav Jung:
Yes of course. As for the Germans, we are faced with a mental problem, the importance of which is difficult to imagine, but its outline can be discerned from the example of the patients whom I treat. One thing is clear to the psychologist, namely, that he must not follow the widespread sentimental division of Nazis and opponents of the regime.
I have two patients who are openly anti-Nazis undergoing treatment, and yet their dreams show that behind all their decency, a sharply expressed Nazi psychology with all its violence and cruelty is still alive. When a Swiss journalist asked Field Marshal von Küchler [Georg von Küchler (1881-1967) led the invasion of Western Poland in September 1939.
He was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment as a war criminal by the Nuremberg Tribunal] about the atrocities of the Germans in Poland, he indignantly exclaimed: "Sorry, this is not the Wehrmacht, this is a party!" - an excellent example of how the division into decent and dishonest Germans is extremely naive.
All of them, consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively, are involved in horrors; they knew nothing of what was happening, and at the same time they knew.
The question of collective guilt, which is so difficult and will continue to be difficult for politicians, is an undeniable fact for the psychologist, and one of the most important tasks of treatment is to get the Germans to admit their guilt. Already now, many of them are turning to me with a request to be treated by me.
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If the requests come from those "decent Germans" who are not averse to dumping the blame on a couple of people from the Gestapo, I think the case is hopeless. I have no choice but to offer them questionnaires with unambiguous questions like: "What do you think of Buchenwald?" Only when the patient understands and admits his guilt can individual treatment be applied.
But how was it possible for the Germans, the entire nation, to end up in this hopeless mental situation? Could this have happened to any other nation?
K. G. Yu.:
Let me make a small digression here and outline my theory regarding the general psychological past leading up to the National Socialist War. Let's take a small example from my practice as a starting point.
Once a woman came to me and burst into violent accusations against her husband: he is a living devil, he tortures and persecutes her, and so on and so forth. In fact, this man turned out to be a completely respectable citizen, innocent of any demonic designs. Where did this woman get her crazy idea from?
It’s just that the devil lives in her own soul, whom she projects outside, transferring her own desires and fury to her husband. I explained all this to her, and she agreed, like a repentant lamb. Everything seemed to be in order. Nevertheless, this is precisely what worried me, because I do not know where the devil, who had previously united with the image of the husband, disappeared.
Exactly the same thing, but on a large scale, happened in the history of Europe. For the primitive man, the world is full of demons and mysterious powers that he fears; for him, all of nature is animated by these forces, which in fact are nothing more than his own inner forces, projected into the external world. Christianity and modern science have de-demonized nature, which means that Europeans consistently absorb demonic forces from the world into themselves, constantly loading their unconscious with them.
In man himself, these demonic forces rebel against the seeming spiritual lack of freedom of Christianity. Demons break into baroque art: the spines bend, the satyr's hooves are revealed.
A person gradually turns into an uroboros, destroying himself, into an image that has been a symbol of a person possessed by a demon since ancient times. The first complete example of this type is Napoleon.
The Germans show a particular weakness in the face of these demons due to their incredible suggestibility. This is revealed in their love of obedience, in their weak-willed obedience to orders, which are just another form of suggestion. This corresponds to the general mental inferiority of the Germans, a consequence of their uncertain position between East and West.
They are the only ones in the West who, with the general exodus from the eastern womb of nations, remained the longest with their mother. In the end they left, but arrived too late, while the mujik did not try to free himself at all.
Therefore, the Germans are deeply tormented by an inferiority complex, which they try to compensate for with megalomania: "Am deutschen Wesen soil die Welt genesen" [Approximate translation: "The German spirit will save the world." This is a Nazi slogan borrowed from the poem "Recognition of Germany" by Emanuel Geibel (1815-1884).
The lines from Geibel have been known since they were quoted by Wilhelm II in his speech in Münster in 1907] - although they do not feel very comfortable in their own skin! This is a typically youthful psychology, which manifests itself not only in the extreme spread of homosexuality, but also in the absence of the image of the anima in German literature (the great exception is Goethe).
This is also found in German sentimentality and "Gemiitlichkeit" [Comfort, pleasantness], which in reality are nothing more than hard-heartedness, insensitivity and heartlessness. All accusations of soullessness and bestiality with which German propaganda attacked the Russians refer to the Germans themselves; Goebbels' speeches are nothing more than German psychology projected onto the enemy.
The immaturity of the personality manifested itself in a terrifying way in the spinelessness of the German General Staff, softness reminiscent of a mollusk in a shell.
Germany has always been a land of mental disasters: the Reformation, peasant and religious wars. Under National Socialism, the pressure of demons increased so much that human beings, falling under their rule, turned into somnambulistic superhumans, the first among whom was Hitler, who infected everyone else.
All Nazi leaders are literally obsessed, and it is certainly no coincidence that their propaganda minister was tagged as a demonized man - lameness. Ten percent of the German population today are hopeless psychopaths.
You are talking about the mental inferiority and demonic suggestibility of the Germans, but do you think this also applies to us, Swiss, Germans by origin?
K. G. Yu.:
We are protected from this suggestibility by our small numbers. If the population of Switzerland were eighty million, then the same could happen to us, since demons are mainly attracted by the masses. In a team, a person loses his roots, and then demons can take possession of him. Therefore, in practice, the Nazis were engaged only in the formation of huge masses and never - in the formation of personality.
And this is also why the faces of demonized people today are lifeless, frozen, empty. We Swiss are protected from these dangers by our federalism and our individualism. In our country, such a massive accumulation is impossible, as in Germany, and, perhaps, in such isolation is a method of treatment, thanks to which it would be possible to curb the demons.
But what can the treatment turn out to be if it is carried out with bombs and machine guns? Shouldn't military submission to a demonized nation only heighten feelings of inferiority and exacerbate disease?
K. G. Yu.:
Today Germans are like a drunken man who wakes up with a hangover in the morning. They don't know what they were doing and they don't want to know. There is only one sense of boundless unhappiness. They will make convulsive efforts to justify themselves in the face of the accusations and hatred of the world around them, but that will be the wrong path. Redemption, as I have pointed out, lies only in the full admission of guilt. "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!" [My fault, my great fault (lat.).]
In sincere repentance, they gain divine mercy. This is not only a religious but also a psychological truth. The American course of treatment, which is to lead the civilian population through concentration camps to show all the horrors perpetrated there, is therefore perfectly correct.
However, it is impossible to achieve the goal only by moral teaching, repentance must be born within the Germans themselves. It is possible that the catastrophe will reveal positive forces, that from this immersion in oneself, prophets will be reborn, as characteristic of these strange people as demons. Whoever has fallen so low has depth.
In all likelihood, the Catholic Church will reap a rich catch of souls as the Protestant Church is experiencing a schism today. There is news that general misfortune has awakened religious life in Germany; entire communities kneel in the evenings, begging the Lord to save them from the antichrist.
Then one can hope that the demons will be expelled and a new, better world will rise to ruins?
K. G. Yu.:
No, demons cannot be gotten rid of yet. This is a difficult task, the solution of which is in the distant future. Now that the angel of history has left the Germans, the demons will seek a new victim. And it won't be difficult. Every person who loses his shadow, every nation that believes in its infallibility will become a prey.
We feel love for the criminal and take a burning interest in him, because the devil makes us forget about the beam in his own eye when we notice a speck in our brother's eye, and this is a way to lead us. Germans will find themselves when they accept and admit their guilt, but others will fall prey to obsession if, in their aversion to German wine, they forget their own imperfections.
We must not forget that the Germans' fatal tendency towards collectivity is no less inherent in other victorious nations, so that they may also unexpectedly fall prey to demonic forces.
"Universal suggestibility" plays a huge role in America today, and how much the Russians are already fascinated by the demon of power, it is easy to see from recent events, which should somewhat moderate our peaceful glee. The British are the most reasonable in this respect: individualism relieves them of the attraction to slogans, and the Swiss share their amazement at the collective madness.
Then we should anxiously expect how the demons will manifest themselves in the future?
K. G. Yu.:
I have already said that salvation consists only in the peaceful work of educating the individual. This is not as hopeless as it might seem. The power of demons is enormous, and the most modern means of mass suggestion are the press, radio, cinema, etc. - at their service.
Nevertheless, Christianity was able to defend its positions in the face of an insurmountable enemy, and not through propaganda and mass conversion - this happened later and turned out to be not so significant - but through persuasion from person to person. And this is the path that we must also go if we want to curb the demons.
It's hard to envy your task to write about these creatures. I hope that you will be able to present my views in a way that people do not find them too strange. Unfortunately, it is my destiny that people, especially those who are possessed, think I am insane because I believe in demons. But it is their business to think so; I know demons exist. They will not diminish, this is as true as the fact that Buchenwald exists.
"Werden die Seelen Frieden finden?" Ein Interview mit Prof. CG Jung von PS In: Weltwoche, Zurich, 11.5.1945. The translation was published on the Gestaltherapy website.