JUNG AND POLITICS

About the Book

"Jung never wrote a treatise that systematically defines the implications of his psychological theories for politics. His views on the subject are dispersed throughout his works, although a number of books and essays are closely concerned with politics, either explicitly or by implication and logical extension. Hence, this book represents a compilation of those of Jung's ideas that have political and/or social implications, gleaned from the voluminous writings on various subjects, a comparison of those ideas with Freud's, and a consideration of just what Jung's ideas imply for the social and political questions."

"Jung's anthropological studies, his concepts of the archetypes and the collective unconscious, did inevitably make him take stands in contemporary political conflicts and he developed a number of sociological and political ideas. Although Professor Odajnyk has not refrained from honestly giving his own views, he gives in his book a very valuable survey of Jung's attitude toward anthropological and political questions."

-Marie-Louise von Franz, from the Foreword

Contents: The Origin of Culture and Politics • Psychic Inflation • Mass Psyche and Mass Man • The Individual and the State • Politics and the Unconscious • The German Case • The End of Politics • The Future of Man • Jung and Freud • A word about Democracy

About the Author

V. Walter Odajnyk, Ph.D., is a former Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He is the author of Marxism and Existentialism (Anchor Books, 1965) and Gathering the Light: A Psychology of Meditation (Shambhala, 1993) and currently a core faculty member at the Pacifica Graduate Institute.