Saturday August 29, 2015
5:45 a.m. Dr. Jung, Bernie asks how the Nazis affected you personally and your psychiatric practice. I’m not sure what he’s getting at, but do you care to respond?
And you having your own agenda wonder why he does not ask directly, you not wishing to realize that different people have different inclinations, different talents, different
Lost it, but I get it.
Let each one find his own path. You are not required – no, nor empowered – to turn another onto your path. I do not ask you to become a psychiatrist.
Yes, I get it. All right.
It is one thing, and a very good thing, to encourage another to develop. It is another, and not a good thing, rather a useless thing, even a harmful thing, to expect him to choose what you choose, express what you express, develop as you have developed. This is not something you would do deliberately but it is, shall we say, the shadow side of good intentions. Showing someone a road map so that he may be aware of the roads leading outward is all to the good, but it is not a waste of time or opportunity if he freely chooses to stay home. What you really want to do – the thing everyone should really want to do, ideally – is help each person to become even more what he is.
All right, I stand corrected, and I know this isn’t meant only for me.
No, but primarily! Zeal is good, but restraint is good, as well.
Now to the question at hand, how did the Nazis affect me, how did they affect my practice.
You must understand, I spoke German, but I was Swiss. That is, I deeply understood the German psyche but I did not share the cause of the national psychosis (to put it that way) that caused the Nazi movement.
My goal in life was to understand, not to condemn. What kind of doctor condemns his patient for being ill? And, as a good European, I felt the situation deeply.
As you know, I was in England when the World War broke out in 1914, and I spent nearly a month trying to get home, through Holland and Germany in the chaos of that first month of war. The war itself came as a relief to me in one sense, in that it showed me that what I [had] feared was a personal psychosis was actually a prefiguring of the event. Europe was being submerged in a sea of blood. My country’s mountains were rising higher to protect one island of sanity. I was not crazy after all.
But what came as a personal relief came also as the most appalling tragedy. No one in your day can realize the shock that war gave to the system of anyone who was already shaped by the prewar era. I was nearly 40 when the war came. It came as a crashing destruction of everything I and others cherished in European civilization.
Reading German, speaking German, and being immersed in the great and profound culture of Germany, I could not be unaffected by their struggle. But being Swiss, and reading and speaking English and French, I was saved from being [either] a German partisan or a partisan of their enemies. I was Swiss. We were neutral in sensibilities as well as in politics. And I was a doctor, a healer by profession. I could see the war not as a battle between good and evil, but only as a tremendous catastrophe that had overtaken civilization. And so it proved. I think historians in your day – and more so in later days to come – would agree.
Seeing it from within and yet without, we Swiss could see easily enough the tremendous sense of injustice felt by the German people at being made to pretend that the war was entirely their fault when, in their innermost souls, they did not believe it was their fault at all.
Unexpressed truths breed hatred just as surely as does fear. Resentment, deprivation, chaos, indignation – all mingled with the carefully repressed knowledge of Germany’s complicity with the forces that had caused the war – all raged within the German psyche, and it began to emerge as some of the initial numbness of defeat wore off.
Now you may ask yourself what has this to do with Nazis, and I say everything. If you do not understand the psychology of the German people after the war, if you do not understand their desperate longing for a leader who would express their resentments, their sufferings, their grievances – you cannot understand how the Nazis came to be a power in the land. Faced with a choice between a fragile parliamentary democracy in which they had no faith, and a communist party of frightening strength, the Germans saw only the Social Democrats or the Nazis as their representatives, and it required greater faith in democracy to support the Social Democrats than the Nazis. Nevertheless it might have been that the Nazis would not have attained power, only no one in German government seemed to understand that they would not play by the rules, but only by a fig leaf covering force. The Reichstag fire, the rule of emergency, the Prussian government under Goering, the arming of the Nazi party members as “unpaid volunteers” alongside the police, then then their swift replacement of police – the whole story is well known. The Germans did not vote in the Nazis in any free election, nor did Hindenburg realize the use that ruthless men could make of what was intended to be severely limited authority. It was, as has been said, revolution from the top.
As a neighbor of Germany, as a European citizen, as an educated man, I could not fail to be aware of these events. As one who had lived through the changes from 1914, I could not fail to be aware of the misfortunes and sufferings of the German people. And, finally, as a neutral Swiss unaffected personally by the German people’s dislocation, I could see clearly the things that they themselves could not see, or could not see dispassionately.
And, most of all, as a doctor of souls – a psyche doctor, a psychiatrist – I could understand the deeper currents flowing beneath surface events.
You, Frank, are aware that I had a patient who was so near psychosis that I did not dare to treat him, a patient who later became a Nazi. This did not surprise me. Being brittle and endangered within, he naturally gravitated toward a force that would provide him with a façade of certainty and strength rooted in fanatical adherence to absolute standards. In this he merely reflected millions of his countrymen.
I am aware of the suspicion that I had Nazi sympathies, and this suspicion is correct to the extent of saying that I deeply understood why people were Nazis, and what the Nazis represented to millions of people. If you cannot see the idealism that was channeled into the Nazi movement, you will never understand how millions supported it. Saying that those millions were evil is merely saying you choose to condemn rather than to understand.
But to understand is not to condone. When one sees why a patient is led to become an ax murderer, the natural result is not to say, “oh yes, I see. Well, that’s all right then,” but to say first we must remove the ax and then we must either treat the patient or execute or imprison him. And since one cannot execute or imprison a whole people, what is left but to disarm them and then understand them and try to help them understand themselves?
So, I never hated the Nazis any more than I hated the Communists, who did an equal amount of evil in the world. But neither was I blind to the terrible fall from civilization that both movements attested to. [Transcribing this, I get that “fall from civilization” may have been a mistranslation. “Fall from consciousness” is closer to his meaning, I think.] Within individuals, to become a committed Nazi or a committed Communist was far more likely to represent psychosis than sanity. I understood why, and I deeply sympathized, as I would with any of my patients. But sympathy with the plight of someone in the grip of paranoia does not therefore lead one to join in the same terrible situation.
I’m not sure this is what Bernie wanted or expected, but I find it valuable, and I thank you.
The answers to his questions are implicit, at any rate. I did not have any Nazi patients! [Said with the impression of an ironic smile.] I was on the list, you know. The Nazis had a list of those they intended to seize immediately if they invaded Switzerland, and I was one. Our government ordered me, should invasion come, to escape southward immediately. Neither the government nor I had any illusions as to what fate I would meet in such case. One thing the Nazis were very good at was knowing their enemies. What doctor of the psyche could fail to be opposed to a regime that treated the individual as an insignificant cog in the machine of state?
That came out pretty fluently, and it has been a little more than an hour. Thanks, as ever.
We will talk again.
That would be very pleasing to me.