"All these pathological features--complete lack of insight into one's own character...self-admiration and self-extenuation, denigration and terrorization of one's fellow men...projection of the shadow , lying, falsification of reality, determination to impress by means fair 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..."
Who is being described? Anybody we know?
These are the words of psychologist Carl Jung, in an essay first published in 1946. They refer to Adolph Hitler.
The usual political and economic explanations don't do the job. In trying to find a new and more satisfactory approach to even partially understand this strange current moment in America and elsewhere in the world, it occurred to me to go back to the essays that C.G. Jung wrote just before, during and after World War II, about the psychology of that period in Europe.
Living and working in Switzerland and seeing patients from bordering Germany, Jung was well placed to observe everything that happened, day by day, over those years, and how people reacted, in their behavior and their dreams (which they discussed in their psychoanalysis.) He was also well positioned to observe the rise of Hitler and to some extent of Mussolini in Italy. While Mussolini was the dictator unleashed by a monarchy, Hitler was the dictator who abolished a democracy. Hitler was elected.
These essays are not very well known. They are preserved in Volume 10 of the Bollingen Series of his collected works, entitled Civilization in Transition. Though Jung's activities in Switzerland led to controversy and charges of Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitism, his writings and his activities in support of Jews and opposed to Hitler are matters of record. In recent years, his contacts with American "intelligence"during the war were revealed. Future CIA director Allen Dulles said his contributions were invaluable, especially his insights into Hitler. During the war, Jung's name was placed on the Gestapo's enemies list.
The basis for Jung's psychology is the relationship of the conscious to the unconscious. The unconscious is vast, powerful in our lives and by its nature unknown. But consciously we can observe some manifestations in behavior, and some of the mechanisms the unconscious typically employs to obscure its role and convince us it's all our conscious idea, such as denial, projection (usually projecting one's own faults onto others) and displacement. The more negative contents of the unconscious Jung also refers to as "the shadow."
The most important fact about the unconscious is that it is "unconscious," but the conscious mind can readily convince itself of reasons for doing what the unconscious motivates it to do. Only with conscious introspection can we begin to understand and control behavior rising from the unconscious, to bring ourselves more into balance. This is a very simplified description.
There are those who are severely out of balance, and times that Jung and Jungians would describe as one-sided. These can be dangerous times. Jung believed that much of the 20th century was and would continue to be one of those times, at least in Europe.
This 1946 essay entitled (in English) "After the Catastrophe" continues on the subject of Hitler, whose particular brand of hysteria is "characterized by a peculiar talent for believing one's own lies. For a short spell, such people usually meet with astounding success, and for that reason are socially dangerous. Nothing has such a convincing effect as a lie one invents and believes oneself, or an evil deed or intention whose righteousness one regards as self-evident."
Before continuing, let's pause for a moment at that term "hysteria." As a word, it has an unfortunate history. It comes from the Greek word for uterus, and for much of its long history it was chiefly used for what was believed to be a innate female disorder. More broadly it was also used to denote the expression of ungovernable and often violent emotion in any individual, or even in groups.
It was also a psychological category well into the twentieth century but has since been rejected, not only because various psychological and medical ailments were given more specific names (all the better to match them with drugs to treat them) but perhaps more importantly, because of the rejection of that initial premise--that this is something women are more predisposed to exhibit.
Yet the word is generally understood and very evocative. Most people probably still know what it means to say someone was hysterical. It isn't a bland and technical term that is understood only dimly.
Of course it is often misused as a pejorative, and as a projection. But without its gender associations and prejudice, and without its meaning limited to fits or episodes but to a condition, and seen as the basis for not only a personal diagnosis but applied to groups, even an entire nation, the term is powerful. At least for me, hystertic and hysteria explain a lot about these times.
Jung continues by addressing the question of why Germans didn't see through Hitler's act when much of the rest of the world found his "theatrical, obviously hysterical gestures" ridiculous. "When I saw him with my own eyes, he suggested a psychic scarecrow...rather than a human being. It is also difficult to understand how his ranting speeches...could have made such an impression....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."
"He behaved in public like a man living in his own biography, in this case as the sombre, daemonic "man of iron" of popular fiction, the ideal of an infantile public..."
So why was this hysteric so successful? "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."
There are always hysterics in public life. Sometimes media (and now social media) amplifies their hysteria because it's extreme, titillating, attention-getting. But much of the time, hysterics are not particularly successful at even getting close to power. When they do, it is because they have an audience of those who to one degree or another are themselves possessed by hysteria.
Only something this extreme can begin to explain how a man who can barely complete a sentence, who is under indictment for more than forty felonies, who denies basic facts that are matters of public record, who denied a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans, who defies all political norms, etc. is by some accounts the favorite to regain power in November. Or perhaps a little later.
At the moment, the United States is not united in thrall of the hysterics. If the polls and the pundits are correct, it seems almost evenly divided. There is hysteria on both sides, and that is worth exploring. But the obvious danger is that the hysterics who have largely taken over the Republican Party will return to power to finish the job of destroying democracy, while unleashing even greater catastrophes.
For now, let's return to Jung's description of individual and social hysteria:
"This is a pathological, demoralized and mentally abnormal condition: one side of us does things which the other (so-called decent) side prefers to ignore. This side is in a perpetual state of defence against real and supposed accusations. "
"As a rule there is amazing ignorance of the shadow; the hysteric is aware only of his good motives, and when the bad ones can no longer be denied he becomes the unscrupulous Superman...who fancies he is ennobled by the magnitude of his aim."
"Ignorance of one's other side creates inner insecurity...This sense of insecurity is the source of the hysteric's prestige psychology, of his need to make an impression, to flaunt his merits and insist on them, of his insatiable thirst for recognition, admiration, adulation, and longing to be loved. It is the cause of that loud-mouthed arrogance...insolence and tactlessness..."
None of this contradicts the possible presence of contributing political and economic motives, of conscious manipulation etc. Nor does it mean that feelings of insecurity aren't based in economic, political and social realities. But our discourse on this strange and portentous time that insists that only political and economic motives are real, still can't explain what's going on. Psychology underlies everything else, and cannot be ignored.
Because there is clearly something going on--and more likely, several somethings--that is being day by day ignored. I look at the Internet front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and other such serious news media and besides some factual reporting on wars and specific events, I see mostly evidence of hysteria and decadence, which is the hysteria of the rich and apparently secure. Most of what is truly important is missing, and I don't mean psychological diagnosis. I mean the likely factors underlying this hysteria. More on that another time.
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