This is definitely unpleaseant at least. Very sad, sort of bad… But this is a thing that must be told here in at least in one post. In resume, Jung was racist and did believe on the “superiority” of the white European race. I am not kidding. Here are Jung quotes from an article that resumed that (just to clarify, these are all quotes from Carl Jung, most coming from his books):
“Powell says, ‘The confusion of confusions is that universal habit of savagery – the confusion of the objective with the subjective. ‘Spencer and Gillan observe: ‘What a savage experiences during a dream is just as real to him as what he sees when he is awake.’ What I myself have seen of the psychology of the Negro completely endorses these findings”
“There is a much better hypothesis to explain the peculiarities of the American temperament. It is the fact that the states are pervaded by the Negro, that most striking and suggestive figure. Some states are particularly black, a fact that may astonish the naive European, who thinks of America as a white nation.
It is not wholly white, if you please, but piebald. It cannot be helped, it just is so.
What is more contagious than to live side by side with a rather primitive people? Go to Africa and see what happens. When it is so obvious that you stumble over it, you call it going black. But when it is not so obvious it is explained as ‘the sun’… It is much easier for us Europeans to be a trifle immoral, or at least a bit, because we do not have to maintain the moral standard against the heavy downward pull of primitive life. The inferior man has a tremendous pull because he fascinates the inferior layers of our psyche, which has liv-ed through untold ages of similar conditions … He reminds us not so much of our conscious as our unconscious mind – not only of childhood but of prehistory, which would take us back not more than about twelve hundred years so far as the Germanic races are concern-ed“
“At the beginning of our era, three-fifths of the population of Italy consisted of slaves human chattels without rights… The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became in-wardly a slave. Living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected with their psychology. No one can shield himself from this unconscious influence. Even today, the European, however highly developed, cannot live with impunity among the Negroes of Africa; their psychology goes into him unnoticed and unconsciously he becomes a Negro. There is no fighting against it. In Africa there is a well-known technical expression for this: ‘going black’. 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 in-ferior’.
There are facts to support this view”
“Lecturer described a number of impressions he had gained on two journeys in north America. The psychological peculiarities of the Americans exhibit features that would be accessible to psychoanalysis, since they point to intense sexual repression. 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. Hence strongly developed defensive measures are necessary, which manifest themselves in the particular aspects of American culture”
“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 col-oured.
Apparently he can assimilate the primitive influence with lit-tle risk to himself. What would happen if there were a considerable increase in the coloured population is another matter”
“We often discover with Americans that they are tremendously un-conscious of themselves. Sometimes they suddenly grow aware of themselves, and then you get these interesting stories of decent young girls eloping with Chinamen or with Negroes, because in the American that primitive layer, which with us is a bit difficult, with them is decidedly disagreeable, as it is much lower down”
“Another thing that struck me was the great influence of the Negro, a psychological influence naturally, not due to the mixture of blood. The emotional way the American expresses himself, especially the way he laughs, can best be studied in the illustrated supplements of the papers; the inimitable Teddy Roosevelt laugh is found in its primordial form in the American Negro. The peculiar walk with loose joints, or the swinging of the hips so frequently observed in Americans, also comes from the Negro.
American music draws its main inspiration from the Negro, and so does the dance … The vivacity of the average American which shows itself … in his extraordinary love of talking – the ceaseless gabble of American papers is an eloquent example of this – is scarcely to be derived from his Germanic forefathers, but is far more like the chattering of a Negro village. The almost total lack of privacy and the all devouring mass sociability remind one of primitive life in open huts, where there is complete identity with all members of the tribe … This infec-tion by the primitive life can, of course, be observed just as well in other countries, though not to the same degree and not in this form. In Africa, for example, the white man is a diminishing minority and must therefore protect himself from the Negro by observing the most rigorous social forms, otherwise he risks ‘going black’. If he succumbs to the primitive influence he is lost. But in America the Negro, just because he is in a minority, is not a degenerative influence, but rather one which, peculiar though it is, cannot be termed un-favourable – unless one happens to have a Jazz phobia”
“The Negro by his mere presence is a source of temperamental and mimetic infection … I am quite convinced that some American peculiarities can be traced directly to the coloured man, while others result from a compensatory defence against his laxity. But they re-main externals leaving the inner quick of the American character un-touched”
Details are on this article:
As a blog note, “as Freud’s sort of open doors and captivations into psychology are not tossed aside because he was a strange individual, it is not necessary to destroy all of the personality psychology idea. Jung merely opened a door of thought. This thought can be debated and built upon. Certainly, even intellectuals can be wrong and you can still find valuable aspects of the theory AND acknowledge Jung was in fact a racist piece of garbage.” (Red Memories, from Typology Central)
So, yeah, I might continue (specially because there are posts to be posted that were written before this finding – I discovered that yesterday) and have all the proper sections with proper explanations, but, I would say that maayyybbbeee my favorite typing system will migrate to the Big 5. This is really frustrating…
Typology Triad 