Critical Notice

ODAJNYK, V. W. Jung and politics: the political and social ideas of C. G. Jung. Foreword by M-L. von Franz. New York,  New York Publishing Press 1976. Pp.  xv + 199.

It is a noteworthy event when a specialist in a discipline occupying an important place in Jung's writings takes the trouble, with empathy and understanding, both to give a fair-minded, systematic and non-proprietory account of Jung's contribution and to recognise its value. Volodomyr Odajnyk, for five years a lecturer in political theory at Columbia University, has, in a distinguished way, made sense of the two issues implicit in the dual title of the book. ‘Politics’ is a practical activity. ‘Political and social ideas’ transcends this and goes deeper. Statesmen (not politicians) combine the two. The truth about Jung, if we are to accept M-L. von Franz's account of it in her Foreword, is that ‘when engaged overtly in politics (he) seldom succeeded’. His ambivalence towards Nazism in its early days has never pleased the practical politicians, even though, for most of them, proneness to error remains an occupational hazard. Odajnyk does indeed marshal the evidence that Jung was acting in good faith (perhaps he was over-influenced by the model of the patient-analyst interaction) when at first he reserved judgment about the Nazis until he saw the way things were going. After that he was never in doubt. For all that, Odajnyk's final verdict is that what he calls Jung's ‘politically unadapted shadow side’ led him into serious errors politically (p. 108). This is spelt out and commented upon at length in his chapter entitled ‘The German case’, but it does not really shed light on the origins of that shadow. Ruth Hoffman is inclined to agree with the theory that Jung's early blindness, to both the psychotic aspects of Nazism and the psychopathic elements in Hitler's nature, was the result of an encapsulation of his early childhood psychosis. Thus, even if the same archetype, on its restless dynamic side, may be