The Roots of National Socialism and Germany's Reckoning with its Past

Jung's 1946 Essay "After the Catastrophe"

Carl Jung, one of the most prominent psychologists of the twentieth century, writes from the point of view of a Swiss intellectual and clinician, trying to understand the dark "shadow self" that possessed Hitler and his fellow Nazi officials to devise the so-called "final solution."

"The phenomenon we have witnessed in Germany was nothing less than the first outbreak of epidemic insanity, an irruption of the unconscious into what seemed to be a tolerably well-ordered world. A whole nation, as well as countless millions belonging to other nations, were swept into the blood-drenched madness of a war of extermination. No one knew what was happening to him, least of all the Germans, who allowed themselves to be driven to the slaughterhouse by their leading psychopaths like hypnotized sheep" (212). 

". . . their Christianity forgotten, they sold their souls to technology, exchanged morality for cynicism, and dedicated their highest aspirations to the forces of destruction. . . . Just think for a moment what anti-Semitism means for the German: he is trying to use others as a scapegoat for his own greatest fault! This symptom alone should have told him that he had got on to a hopelessly wrong track" (212-213).

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