137 - Arthur I. Miller [86]
On Dulles’s suggestion, Jung embarked on a series of psychological profiles of Nazi leaders. “It is Jung’s belief that Hitler will take recourse to desperate measures up to the end, but he doesn’t exclude the possibility of suicide in a desperate moment,” Dulles wrote. It turned out to be an accurate prediction.
Dulles considered Jung’s profiles dependable and referred to him as Agent 488 in his despatches to the OSS offices in Washington. Jung may also have given him information obtained from patients.
Bancroft had also started analysis with Jung, to bolster her confidence in the spying game. As part of their sessions Jung advised her on how best to question someone based on psychological type, as well as how to apply analytical psychology to the speeches of the top Nazis.
There is a story about Bancroft’s unconventional way of communicating with an important German contact. Telephones could be tapped, so this method of communication was used only with the greatest care. Bancroft claimed that when she needed to speak to her contact she used telepathy, willing him to call her. Minutes later he phoned saying, “I just got your message to call.”
Dulles was incredulous. “I wish you’d stop this nonsense! I don’t want to go down in history as a footnote to a case of Jung’s!” he said. But Jung was interested in telepathy and asked her to keep records of how long she spent willing him to call and how long it took him to respond.
Whether true or not, that the story is told at all is evidence of Jung’s involvement with intelligence activities in Zürich.
SO DID JUNG have Nazi sympathies or not? The judgment of history is still out. It is difficult to weigh the anti-Semitic opinions he expressed, supporting the Nazi line, against his comments about the dark side of Nazism, though these were never as strongly put during the war. Was his ambivalence an attempt to play it safe? In fact, throughout his life he made anti-Semitic comments. In 1918 he declared that Jews were so overcivilized that they no longer possessed that essential dark Germanic quality—being a pure barbarian brimming with creative potential of the greatest complexity.
He wrote at some length of Freud’s psychoanalysis as a Jewish doctrine and described how its reduction of everything mental to material beginnings based on primitive sexual wishes as an oversimplification unsuitable for application to the complex German mentality. He had voiced similar opinions even earlier. In 1897, when he was a medical student at the University of Basel, he spoke to a Swiss student fraternity where he remarked, repeating the then-current prejudice against Jews, that they were materialists who robbed science and culture of their spiritual foundations.
Jung was a man of his times, typical of the Northern Swiss culture, a region that remained neutral yet was sympathetic to the Nazis. But as early as 1934 he realized that he may have overstepped the mark. “I have fallen afoul of contemporary history,” he wrote. Yet he persisted.
Many years later, in 1947, Jung invited Gershom Scholem, a well-known Israeli scholar of Jewish mysticism, to lecture at the annual Eranos Conference in Ascona, Switzerland. Aware of the rumors that Jung had sympathized with the Nazis, Scholem asked the highly respected Rabbi Leo Baeck for advice. Baeck had visited Zürich shortly after being released from the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, where he had been one of the camp’s spiritual leaders. At that time he had refused Jung’s invitation to visit him at home. Jung was insistent and came to Baeck’s hotel where they talked for two hours. Defending his stance, Jung spoke of the wartime conditions in which it had not been clear how long the Nazis would be in power, that things might get better, and that to survive it was best to play along with them. Then Jung said, “Well, I slipped up.” It was the closest he ever came to an admission