The Volk and its Unconscious: Jung, Hauer and the ‘German Revolution’

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist C.G. Jung and the German Indologist and völkisch scholar J.W. Hauer, with whom Jung collaborated in the early 1930s. In the latter part of the decade, Jung became increasingly wary of the political implications of völkisch doctrines and Hauer's völkisch ambitions, which reached their apotheosis in the founding of the German Faith Movement. There are two main reasons for Jung's increasing reluctance to co-operate with Hauer. First, as his public image was that of a neutral Swiss, Jung did not want to associate too closely with an openly National-Socialist scholar, whose racial ideas he no longer shared and whose influence in Germany was negligible anyway. Second, Jung had become more widely known in the Anglo-American world during the 1930s, and he did not want to risk his growing reputation there by adhering too closely to openly völkisch doctrines. Yet, although the more explicit elements of völkisch ideology disappeared from his writings, in his infatuation with mythical archetypes, he retained some of the more invisible völkisch elements in his psychology.