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In this article, Andrew Samuels traces Jung's anti-Semitism conceptually rather than historically, and provides us with some shocking evidence of the degree to which Jung's dealings with the Nazis were shadowed by his own nationalist sentiments and convictions, which he psychologized in his theories of national characteristics: for example, he claimed ‘the Aryan unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish’ (quoted in the article).
Refusing to be drawn into a debate which either justifies or castigates Jung's activities, Samuels rather develops his theme: Nazi dogma was not simply a vehicle for racism, but a political theory of history which was rooted in the intense growth of nationalism, particularly in Germany. Jung's nationalistic tendency, along with his ‘pan-psychism’, led him to believe in a kind of innate national psychology, which was not in itself inherently racist. Linking the logic of nationalism as expressed in these terms, Samuels's analysis is that for Jung, the nationalist, the nationless Jews were psychologically threatening similarly to the way they were experienced as a threat to