Carl Jung Was Racist.

Hierarchy of the races and the Collective Unconscious

“The fear of the "black man", which is felt by every child.”
— Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung 1989, p.29)

So it turns out Carl Jung was super racist. And we’re not talking about the 21st-century microaggressions kind of racism here; we’re talking about full-blown Victorian race science kind of racism. And it runs right to the heart of his theory.

Why I’m Writing This

Before we get into it though, I want to explain why I’m writing this article. I’ve been a lover of Jung’s work for over a decade now. He’s given meaning to dark times in my life and he has saved me from the excesses of my good times. And so this isn’t about cancelling Jung or holding him to the standard of 21st-century morals. It’s about truth.

The research for this article has been painful for me. I started it a year ago and it took a long time to process but after a year of reflection and rumination, I find I can’t get away from Depth Psychology. There is too much value here. However, the following reveals a lot of holes in Jung’s theory and a lot of work to be done. That is the spirit in which this article was made. It’s not about condemnation but about moving forward constructively.

In his foreword to Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness Jung describes himself as a pioneer. That is the way we should think of his work. The work of Depth Psychology wasn’t done once and for all by Jung any more than the work of Physics was finished by Aristotle. The map of the pioneer is useful but for accuracy, we must wait for the cartographers who follow in their wake.

The point of this article then isn’t to cancel Jung or to hold him to the standard of 21st-century morals. The point is to follow truth forward rather than becoming dogmatic and defensive.

With that out of the way, let’s get into it.

Jung: A Racist?

When I first started researching this topic I thought it would be like the accusations of antisemitism against Jung which turned out to be a pile of outdated cringe but somewhat complimentary to Jewish people. That would fit with quotes like this one:

“In the collective unconscious you are the same as a man of another race, you have the same archetypes, just as you have, like him, eyes, a heart, a liver, and so on. It does not matter that his skin is black.”

which is a very nice Jungian sentiment about how we all have this shared collective unconscious and so, despite our differences, all of humanity is, at its roots, one. But that quote continues with the following:

“It matters to a certain extent, sure enough – he probably has a whole historical layer less than you. The different strata of the mind correspond to the history of the races.”
— The Tavistock Lectures (Jung 1935, para.93)

So it matters a bit — what with the history of the races and all that… But as we know, context is important though and the context of this quote is Jung’s trips to Africa and his meeting with the Elgonyi tribe on the border of Uganda and Kenya in 1926. When I first read this statement I read it in the context of hunter-gatherers. And that makes me think of the cultural developmental systems of Hegel, Marx, Ken Wilber and the Metamodernists. It seems what Jung is talking about is hunter-gatherers being part of a culture that lacks a lot of the complexity of industrialised countries. That wouldn’t really be racist then would it? It’d be…whatever Marxists and Metamodernists are.

You can read quotes like this in the same context:

“Our civilised consciousness is very different from that of primitives, but deep down in our psyche there is a thick layer of primitive processes which, as I have said, are closely related to processes that can still be found on the surface of the primitive's daily life.”
— A Radio Talk in Munich (Jung 1930, para.1288)

And this from his autobiography a few decades later:

“When I contemplated for the first time the European spectacle from the Sahara, surrounded by a civilization which had more or less the same relationship to ours as Roman antiquity has to modern times, I became aware of how completely, even in America, I was still caught up and imprisoned in the cultural consciousness of the white man. The desire then grew in me to carry the historical comparisons still farther by descending to a still lower cultural level.”
— Memories Dreams Reflections (Jung 1989, p.247)

Even here we’re getting a little more dubious right? We’re not talking about industrialised cultures but about “the cultural consciousness of the white man”. But then when he talks about the Elgonyi as being of a “lower cultural level” it kind of seems like okay this is probably still a cultural hierarchy system; he’s just conflating industrialised nations with white people. It’s a sign of the times but maybe not completely racist.

But wait. It gets worse.

One African Race

Because who is Jung talking about when he’s talking about Africans? At first, I assumed it was all about this hunter-gatherer tribe but notice that in the previous quote he talks about his perspective from the Sahara desert. It’s worth noting that the border of Kenya and Uganda is a long way from the Sahara. In fact, the Elgonyi were further from the Sahara than Jung was in Switzerland.

It’s also worth mentioning at this point that Jung didn’t make just one excursion to Africa but two. The 1926 trip we’ve already talked about — the visit to the Elgonyi tribe in Kenya and Uganda.

But the other trip, in 1920, was to Tunisia and Algeria in North Africa. And that’s a bit weird because that means Jung is lumping his insights from these trips into the same category. He’s treating the Arabic culture of North Africa the same as a hunter-gatherer tribe in Kenya and Uganda. And that is very strange and it’s not just a minor conflation or slip of the tongue. Here’s what he has to say about the Arabic world of North Africa:

“The emotional nature of these unreflective people who are so much closer to life than we are exerts a strong suggestive influence upon those historical layers in ourselves which we have just overcome and left behind, or which we think we have overcome. It is like the paradise of childhood from which we imagine we have emerged, but which at the slightest provocation imposes fresh defeats upon us.”
— Memories Dreams Reflections (Jung 1989, p.244)

These are the people who, while the Germans were just emerging from tribal life, founded Islam and created the world’s largest empire to date but nope they are unreflective people much closer to life — they are like children living in that simpler childish paradise. They are characterised as unreflective people with the nice condescending silver lining that they are closer to life than we.

He goes on to place the Arab world at a layer of development beneath the European:

“... these seemingly alien and wholly different Arab surroundings awaken an archetypal memory of an only too well known prehistoric past which apparently we have forgotten.” — Memories Dreams Reflections (Jung 1989, p.274)

And finally a bit of a nostalgic reflection on Arabs as childlike and primitive:

“the sight of a child or a primitive will arouse certain longings in civilised adult persons” — Memories Dreams Reflections (Jung 1989, p.272)

Just to hammer this point home: when he’s using the word primitive here, he’s not referring to hunter-gatherers. He’s talking about North Africa in 1920. It’s bananas. So we’re running into two categories here: one European white people i.e. civilised people. This is the “we” that Jung keeps referring to. Then there is the them. This is pretty much everyone in Africa. This category of primitive then contains not just hunter-gatherers for Jung but also our Arabic North Africans and both are primitive and childlike.

Not good.

Nature > Nurture

This is where things start to get real ugly. Because what we’re talking about isn’t a cultural difference. What we’re seeing is instead a racial hierarchy with the Africans — whether they be Arabic or hunter-gatherers — trapped in a previous evolutionary phase that Europeans have transcended. It’s like Jung took Freud’s iceberg and overlayed on a world map and said here’s the conscious part and down here is the primitive ancient unconscious parts.

Lest we have any doubt he writes:

“The child is born with a definite brain, and the brain of an English child will not work like that of the Australian black fellow but in the way of the modern English person.”
— The Tavistock Lectures (Jung 1935, para.84)

Born with a definite brain: you know what that means? That means that if you take an Australian aboriginal child and raise them in Europe they will not be civilised what with their definite brains. Of course, there’s still a little wiggle room here. We can still be super charitable with this quote and say that he’s not really being racist. When he’s reflecting on his experiences in Africa and he talks about how he:

“could not help feeling superior, as I was reminded at every step of my European nature”
— Memories Dreams Reflections (Jung 1989, p.245)

we could say that European nature here means European culture. We could even argue the same when he talks about how Europeans in Africa “cannot live with impunity among the negroes of Africa” (Jung 1927, para.249) and are in danger of falling under the spell of the primitive or as Jung calls it “going black” and how this

“would constitute a relapse into barbarism.”
— Memories Dreams Reflections (Jung 1989, p.246)

We could give the same defence when he talks about the colonial prejudices like the following:

“It is no mere snobbery that the English should consider anyone born in the colonies, even though the best blood may run in his veins, ‘slightly inferior’. There are facts to support this view.”
— Woman in Europe (Jung 1927, para.249)

All of this could still be Jung talking about different cultures right? He could be saying that lower cultures have a way of enchanting us. There’s still plenty in that we could question but that’s not Jung’s point. But fortunately or well unfortunately really, we can separate this racial element from the cultural element by looking at Jung’s writings on African Americans. After all in that case we would be looking at a group of people living in a Western civilised nation so we can’t excuse Jung by saying he’s talking about cultural differences rather than racial differences. And this is where things get really cringey.

Jung on African Americans

Jung first visited America in 1909 with Freud for a psychoanalytic conference in Massachusetts. The following are the notes Otto Rank took on Jung’s lecture a year later in Nuremberg, Germany. He summarises the talk as follows:

“Lecturer described a number of impressions he had gained on two journeys in North America. […] The reasons for repression are to be sought in the specifically American complex, namely living together with the lower races, more particularly the negroes. Living together with the barbarous races has a suggestive effect on the laboriously subjugated instincts of the white race and drags it down.”
— Report on America (Jung 1909, para.1284)

That sounds an awful lot like a racial hierarchy. But that is Otto Rank’s account so maybe he gave it his own colouring. And besides Jung was younger. Maybe he grew out of it. And so let’s jump forward a couple of decades and see how his perspective matures. In 1927’s essay Mind and Earth he writes about the American love of talking which, he says:

“is scarcely to be derived from his Germanic forefathers, but is far more like the chattering of a Negro village.”
— Mind and Earth (Jung 1927, para.95)

Writing about the “famous American naivete” he says that it:

“invites comparison with the childlikeness of the Negro.”
— Mind and Earth (Jung 1927, para.95)

We get a fuller treatment in his 1930 article that we talked about in the last instalment on the American psyche. This article was published in the American magazine The Forum — an esteemed publication who could list four American presidents among its contributors. Today this article can be found under the title: The Complications of American Psychology but its original title was: Your Negroid and Indian Behaviour. In this article, Jung attributes a lot of the American psychological profile to the influence of African Americans.

For a start, he gives us a comprehensive list of features of African Americans in his eyes:

“It would be difficult not to see that the coloured man, with his primitive motility, his expressive emotionality, his childlike directness, his sense of music and rhythm, his funny and picturesque language, has infected the American “behaviour.””
— The Complications of American Psychology (Jung 1930, para.965)

This theme of infection comes up throughout the article and is kind of the main theme. And this is the part where his racial prejudice becomes clearest and where we see that he doesn’t see African Americans as having a distinct cultural influence in a melting pot. This isn’t like cross-cultural exchange among equals but a dangerous interaction between a superior and an inferior group.

Before I read the following passage let’s remember that he’s talking about African Americans here. When he uses the word primitive there is no mention of the African tribes here. He’s just thinking of African Americans and he’s not thinking of them as equals. He writes:

“Racial infection is a most serious mental and moral problem where the primitive outnumbers the white man. America has this problem only in a relative degree, because the whites far outnumber the coloured. Apparently, he can assimilate the primitive influence with little risk to himself. What would happen if there were a considerable increase in the coloured population is another matter.”
— The Complications of American Psychology (Jung 1930, para.966)

That’s pretty painful. But now let’s have one last quote. It’s a long one but it’s worth getting in full because it really highlights how distinct the races are for Jung. We see all the colourings of the superior and inferior races and the danger of infection. It’s all here. He starts off talking about how it’s easier for Europeans since we don’t live side by side with Africans:

“The inferior man has a tremendous pull because he fascinates the inferior layers of our psyche which has lived through untold ages of similar conditions ... He reminds us—or not so much our conscious as our unconscious mind—not only of childhood but of our prehistory, which would take us back not more than about twelve hundred years so far as the Germanic races are concerned. The barbarian in us is still wonderfully strong and he yields easily to the lure of his youthful memories. Therefore he needs very definite defences. The Latin peoples being older don’t need to be so much on their guard, hence their approach to the coloured man is different.”
— The Complications of American Psychology (Jung 1930, para.962)

That quote kind of captures it all right? Black people to Jung’s mind, even in America are childlike and prehistoric. This throws any charitable interpretation of the quote about “The child is born with a definite brain” out the window. Jung’s map of the world includes a racial hierarchy. Not just a cultural hierarchy as we find in the Marxists and Metamodernists but a hierarchy that has become biology. When he writes that black people have a “whole historical layer less than you” it’s not just about cultural nurture; he’s talking about a biological layer less.

The Defences

Defence 1: Primitive isn’t a bad thing

Races are a very real thing for Jung. But maybe we’re misunderstanding him. There’s a couple of common defences that are made of Jung’s racism. The first is that when he uses terms like primitive it’s not a negative thing. If anything it’s “positive racism”. Okay so he says they’re childlike but he means that as a compliment. He respects and admires these people as having something we have lost. And this is true to an extent. But consider this story Jung tells:

“An incident in the life of a bushman may illustrate what I mean. A bushman had a little son whom he loved with the tender monkey-love characteristic of primitives. Psychologically, this love is completely auto-erotic – that is to say, the subject loves himself in the object. The object serves as a sort of erotic mirror. One day the bushman came home in a rage; he had been fishing and caught nothing. As usual the little fellow came to meet him, but his father seized hold of him and wrung his neck on the spot. Afterwards, of course, he mourned for the dead child with the same unthinking abandon that had brought about his death.”
— Psychological Types (Jung 1921, para.403)

There’s so much wrong with this passage it’s hard to know where to start. The most glaring thing — well, aside from the comparison with monkeys — is that he doesn’t see the bushman as having agency. There’s no moral condemnation for this murder any more than I would condemn my cat for killing a bird. It’s a shame but given their nature how could it be otherwise? This is clothed in psychological language which gives it a ring of legitimacy but it reveals what Jung thinks of primitives and it’s not a perspective of equals but different. He feels superior to Africans and it’s no wonder why: he is able to restrain himself from murdering his child when he has a bad day.

This is the primitive mindset for Jung. They don’t have the differentiated consciousness to separate themselves for their emotions. So it’s not exactly a ringing compliment.

Defence 2: man of his times

The other defence is that Jung was a man of his times. And there’s truth in that. This after all was when eugenics and race science were mainstream. Of course, the Second World War put an end to that whole discourse. The world moved on, but Jung by the time of his autobiography in 1961, hadn’t. And he wasn’t lacking in opportunities to change his mind before then.

When him and Freud went to America in 1909 they were at a conference and one of the speakers was the legendary father of American Anthropology Franz Boas. Jung was fond of Boas’s work and quotes him a number of times including in The Complications of American Psychology article where Boas talked about skulls changing shape to match indigenous peoples.

At that very conference, Boas gave a lecture where, as the editor of Jung’s Red Book, Sonu Shamdasani put it:

“Boas made it clear that there was no ‘justification for [racial] hierarchies’. He also spoke against the idea that European civilisation represented the peak towards which other races and cultures were developing
— Jung and the making of modern psychology (Shamdasani, 2003, pp.277–278)

But maybe Jung was hungry during that talk and thinking about his lunch so he missed Boas’s message. However, that wasn’t the only opportunity. There was a Jungian Paul Radin who lectured at the Jungian Institute and had correspondence with Jung asking him to write a preface to his book on the Trickster archetype. Well this Radin directly criticised Jung’s claims about black people in 1927 in no uncertain terms saying that:

“No greater distortion of the facts could possibly be imagined. And yet Dr Jung obtained this example from what purported to be a first-hand account … [It] illustrates the unconscious bias that lies at the bottom of our judgement of primitive mentality, the unconscious assumption of the lack of differentiation and integration to be found there”.
— Primitive Man as Philosopher (Radin 1927, p.39)

The first-hand account Radin is referring to here is the bushman killing his child story that we looked at earlier.

The point being that while Jung can be given the asterisk that he was a man of his times, we can’t put all the blame on the time he lived in. He had people in his life who questioned him and showed him his bias but he did not integrate their claims — even when the world moved on.

Implications

The point of looking at this is as I’ve said already not to cancel Jung or to hold him to the standard of 21st century of morals. The point is to show that Jung is not an omniscient sage who did the work once and for all but to hold his work to the standards of 21st-century science and encourage us to work and improve upon the starting point he gave us. We need to become not Jungians but Depth Psychologists. This was something Jung himself acknowledged as Barbara Hannah noted in her biography of him quote:

“He used to deplore the tendency of too many of his pupils to make dogma of such concepts, and once in exasperation remarked: ‘Thank God I am Jung, and not a Jungian!’”
— Jung: His Life and His Work (Hannah 1976, p.78)

This racist element isn’t the only part of Jung’s personal Shadow. If you’re interested in learning more you might want to check out the following:

Why Jung Hated Philosophers

Was Carl Jung Antisemitic?

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📚 References:

• Hannah, B. (1976). Jung: His Life and His Work. New York: Putnam

• Jung, C.G. (1909) Report on America. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 18. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Jung, C.G. (1921) Psychological Types. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 6. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Jung, C.G. (1927) Woman in Europe. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 10. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Jung, C.G. (1927a) Mind and Earth. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 10. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Jung, C.G. (1930) The Complications of American Psychology. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 10. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Jung, C.G. (1930) A Radio Talk in Munich. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 18. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Jung, C. G. (1935). The Tavistock lectures. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 18. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Jung, C. G. (1989). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books.

• Radin, P. (1927). Primitive Man as Philosopher. New York: D. Appleton and Company

• Shamdasani, S. (2003). Jung and the making of modern psychology: The dream of a science. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

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📚 Further Reading:

• Dalal F (1988) Jung: A Racist. British Journal of Psychotherapy 4(3): 263–279.

• Collins J (2009) ‘Shadow Selves’: Jung, Africa and the Psyche. Interventions 11(1). Routledge: 69–80.

• Brewster F (2013) Wheel of Fire: The African American Dreamer and Cultural Consciousness. Jung Journal 7(1): 70–87.

• Brewster F (2017) African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows. London: Routledge.

• Samuels A (2018) Jung and ‘Africans’: a critical and contemporary review of some of the issues. International Journal of Jungian Studies 10(2). Brill: 122–134.

• Samuels A (2019) Notes on the Open Letter on Jung and ‘Africans’ published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, November 2018. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 24(2): 217–229.

• Johnson, J. (2020) Being white, being Jungian: implications of Jung’s encounter with the ‘non-European’ other1. The Journal of analytical psychology 65(4). J Anal Psychol.

• Carter C (2021) Time for space at the table: an African American - Native American analyst-in-training’s first-hand reflections. A call for the IAAP to publicly denounce (but not erase) the White supremacist writings of C.G. Jung. The Journal of analytical psychology 66(1). J Anal Psychol.