‘There is No Such Thing as A Liberal Dictatorship’: Discovery and first publication of a letter on politics by C. G. Jung

For several years in the early 1980s, I used to co-lead a study tour for the University of California at Santa Cruz to the C. G. Jung Institute in Kusnacht. As part of this programme, participants would write a brief outline of their objectives and in some cases we would call them to seek clarification of various points.

In one such case I called a young man and was informed that he would be unable to come. As we talked he asked me if I would like a copy of an old letter of Jung's. He related how he had been hitchhiking through Kansas and dropped into a bar for a beer. He struck up a conversation with an older man in his late fifties and soon they were chatting about Jung. As it turns out, the older man had written Jung a letter in late 1938, saying that he was an American teenager who thought that one answer to the world's problems was for countries to be run by ‘liberal dictators’. What did he (Jung) think? A few months later Jung wrote back. The man in the bar still had a copy of the letter which he gave to the ‘hitch hiker’ who in turn sent me a copy.

I thought some readers might be interested in this piece of memorabilia which I think not only reflects Jung's humanity but also gives us a sense, yet again, of his ‘poetic wisdom’. For reasons of confidentiality I have purposely deleted names.

This is the letter Jung wrote: