Carl Jung and Political Action

Satya Doyle Byock

March 08, 2020

In the words of Marie-Louise von Franz: “Jung foresaw great trouble in the coming years and he was deeply concerned, not about politics in the everyday sense of the word, but about the fate of mankind as a whole.”

Jung wasn’t traditionally political, but he never retreated apolitically. While regularly engaged in his military service in Switzerland, Jung also worked diligently as Agent 488 for American Intelligence during WWII. His impact there was, by all documented accounts, of tremendous significance to the American government’s psychological understanding of Hitler, and the success of Nazi thinking throughout Europe.

“Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war.”

— Allen W. Dulles, Chief of OSS

But Jung’s most political work was his fundamental understanding that true social transformation begins and ends inside each individual.

Liber Novus, The Red Book, is an account of Jung’s personal struggle to witness that the inexplicable violence that had suddenly overtaken Europe at the dawn of WWI began with each individual’s refusal to go to battle inside themselves, with their own opposites.

“Since men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they got mad, and one lays the blame on the other.””

— Jung, The Red Book

His essay The Undiscovered Self was an urgent plea for humanity to recognize the dangers of mass movements of thought, and to search instead for self-knowledge and relationships with others as the antidote.

“It would be an insufferable thought that we had to take personal responsibility for so much guiltiness. We therefore prefer to localize evil in individual criminals or groups or criminals, while washing our hands in innocence and ignoring the general proclivity to evil. This sanctimoniousness cannot be kept up in the long run, because the evil, as experience shows, lies in man.”

— Jung, The Undiscovered Self

He named our inherent lack of inner unity, and the resulting unconscious projections onto others as the cause, and the retraction of those projections as the cure.

“The crux of the matter is man’s own dualism, to which he knows no answer. The abyss has suddenly yawned open before him with the latest events in world history. . . Even today people are largely unconscious of the fact that every individual is a cell in the structure of various international organisms and is therefore causally implicated in their conflicts. . . .It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else.”

— Jung, The Undiscovered Self

The solution came through a meticulous attention to one’s own life, over the lives of others, and an emphasis on connection, relatedness, and common humanity over difference.

“ Nothing has a more divisive and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections. This necessary corrective demands self-criticism.”

— Jung, The Undiscovered Self

This understanding is the foundation of our work at The Salome Institute: True, lasting, and inclusive change does not unfold through divisiveness, nor righteousness.

But shrinking away from the current struggle and avoiding events in the outer world is not the answer either.

So, in these times, in addition to our seminars and salons, we invite you to join us for bi-monthly gatherings to discuss, share, write letters, take action, and engage with the national and global political crisis with courage, love, and as much humor as we can muster.

Implicit in our gatherings is a depth psychological understanding of anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-homophobic thought. All people are welcome.