137 - Arthur I. Miller [81]
Back in 1935 Jung was invited to attend the tercentenary celebrations at Harvard University, scheduled for August 31 to September 18 the following year, as an honored guest.
Behind the scenes, however, there had been a great deal of struggle over whom to invite from Germany—if anyone at all. By now Hitler was in power and professing rabidly racist policies. The situation was particularly complex in the case of Jung who, early on, had become interested in the rise of Nazi Germany from the standpoint of analytical psychology. “Would you have believed that a whole nation of highly intelligent and cultivated people could be seized by the fascinating power of the archetype?” he wrote, adding “the ‘blond beast’ is stirring in its sleep.” He saw this as the archetypal image of Wotan, the mythical warrior king, worshipped before Christianity arrived in central Europe, who had been awakened by the “Hitler movement [which] literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet…. Wotan the wanderer is on the move,” he declared, awestruck at witnessing what he saw as his psychology in action.
Jung also expressed ambivalence and downright fear at what he saw happening in Nazi Germany, but nevertheless for him it was an opportunity not to be missed. In 1933 Freud’s books had been among those burned in Berlin. Psychoanalysis, so long associated with the Jews, was now banned in Germany. Jung’s analytical psychology was the only one allowed in the German cultural scene. Jung wrote several tracts in praise of National Socialism (Nazism) and in condemnation of the Jews, making statements no doubt intended to curry favor with the authorities, such as “The ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish.” Condemning Freud’s psychology, he wrote sternly, “it has been a grave error in medical psychology up till now to apply Jewish categories—which are not even binding on all Jews—indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic Christendom.”
Jung cemented his control over psychoanalysis in Germany by becoming president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy as well as editor of its journal Zentralblatt für Psyschoanalyse. But he made sure that the organization’s rules were vague enough that they banned Jews only from the German section.
Rumors even reached the Harvard tercentenary selection committee that Jung was “The Mephistopheles in the Nazi drama”—that is, that he was the eminent grise behind the Nazis—and that he was amused at the Nazi’s treatment of “Freud’s brethren”—the Jews. After many acrimonious sessions the committee decided to invite Jung, placing academic unity over political concerns. It was a decision for which Harvard would later be criticized.
Pierre Janet from France and Jean Piaget from Switzerland were among other psychologists who were invited. Freud, then eighty years old, was not invited. The tercentenary committee decided he was too old to attend and would probably decline.
Einstein declined and Bohr decided not to attend. Heisenberg had also been invited and had accepted but was forced to withdraw. In fact, the German government had granted him permission to travel, but his military obligations and his need to reply to attacks on science in the press required him to stay in Germany. Pauli was not invited. Either the Harvard University scientists did not consider he had the required stature or perhaps they wanted to invite only physicists who were Nobel laureates.
The ceremonial sessions were attended by a distinguished audience of 17,000 who took their seats in Harvard’s inner sanctum, Harvard Yard, where the fledgling Continental Army had drilled in 1776 and George Washington had been headquartered. Most of the major figures of European academia were there. Sixty-seven thousand people formally registered to attend the proceedings.
The featured speaker was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was then running for his second term in office. Jung’s opinion of him made headlines in The New York