Value of C. G. Jung's Work For Historians

As an historian, I can speak only for myself, but, to my mind, Jung has added a new dimension to history by opening up, for historians, an entry through which they can explore the subconscious depths of the psyche. And he has, I believe, done more for history than that. The subconscious is a subterranean river from which the springs of all conscious activities draw their waters. The subconscious is therefore a unifying level of the psyche; and, when history digs down to this level, it is able to coalesce with other human studies which, at the conscious level, are apt to divide into so many separate “disciplines”, organized in water-tight compartments. The subconscious is thus the avenue to a comprehensive study of human nature and human affairs.

The first book of Dr. Jung's that I happened to read was Psychological Types; and, though it is now many years ago, my recollection of this thrilling experience is still as vivid as ever. I re-live the excitement that came over me as I felt a clarifying and unifying process going on in my mind at the first reading of this great and illuminating work. Here was a mind inspired by a boundless curiosity to assemble all kinds of data that, at first sight, might seem heterogeneous: classical myths; well-known or more recondite episodes of history and biography; passages from the literatures of more than one civilization; and records of Dr. Jung's own clinical cases. Yet this curiosity, while it was exuberant, was purposeful and perspicacious too. It was the mental driving-power of a mind that saw how to draw out of these apparently miscellancous “materials” a set of common general principles of human psychology.

One outstanding negative virtue of Dr. Jung's approach to the study of human nature delighted me then and delights me still. Dr. Jung has always refused to pick out a nostrum and run it to death. Freud sets himself to reduce everything in human activity and experience to terms of sex, Marx to reduce everything to terms of ec