C. G. Jung and the Jewish Foundations of Alchemy
Sanford L. Drob, Ph.D., holds doctorates in both philosophy and psychology and is a clinical and forensic psychologist in practice in New York City.
His recent publications include “Fragmentation in Contemporary Psychology: A Dialectical Solution”(Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Fall 2003); Symbols of the Kabbalah: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, and Kabbalistic Metaphors: Jewish Mystical Themes in Ancient and Modern Thought (both Jason Aronson, 2000).
He is currently completing books on Jung and the Kabbalah and on Jewish mysticism and postmodern thought.
In October 1935, over a year after Erich Neumann had emigrated from Germany to Palestine, Neumann wrote Jung about his fear that his absorption in Jungian psychology would place him in “danger of betrayal to [his] own Jewish foundations.”
Neumann further wrote of his realization that analytical psychology “stands on its own ground…Switzerland, Germany, the West, Christianity,” and that Jewish individuation must be based “on our own archetypal collective foundations which are different because we are Jews” (Neumann, M., 1991, p. 280).
Jung in his response wrote that analytical psychology “has its roots deep in Europe, in the Christian Middle Ages, and ultimately in Greek philosophy,” adding, “the connecting-link I was missing for so long has now been found, and it is alchemy”
(Jung, 1973, vol. 1, p. 206).
Neither Neumann nor Jung would allow that analytical psychology as it then stood was rooted in anything Jewish, a fact that was troubling to Neumann, who had thought of Jung as his spiritual teacher (Neumann, M., 1991, p. 279), but who chided Jung for “lacking knowledge and understanding of Judaism.”
Although later in his life Jung was more than happy to acknowledge Jewish, specifically Jewish-mystical, precursors to his own work (Jung, 1977, pp. 271-2), during the 1930s, at a time when he sought to distinguish analytical psychology from the “Jewish” psychologies of Freud and Adler, Jung was unlikely to acknowledge any Jewish sources of his own thinking.
There is a certain irony here, because what Jung failed to realize, or mention, at the time of his letter to Neumann (though he would later openly acknowledge it) was that alchemy, the “connecting-link” to analytical psychology, was itself imbued with Jewish mystical symbols and ideas.
Around the time of his letter to Neumann, Jung was speaking pejoratively about Freud and Adler’s “Jewish” psychologies, which on Jung’s view were inapplicable to the “Aryan” mind. In 1934 Jung wrote,
“It has been a grave error in medical psychology up till now to apply Jewish categories… indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic Christendom” (1970/1934, p. 165).
In that same year in a letter to Kranefeldt, Jung wrote,
“The Arian [sic] people can point out that with Freud and Adler specifically Jewish points of view were publicly preached, and, as can be proven likewise, points of view that have an essentially corrosive [zersetzend] character” (Maidenbaum & Martin, 1991, p. 377).1
Earlier Jung had argued that Freud and Adler reduce the psyche to the sexual and power drives and that while such reductions give a certain (compensatory) satisfaction to the Jew, “these specifically Jewish doctrines are totally unsatisfactory
to the Germanic mentality”(1964/1918, pp. 14-15).2
In this paper I argue that at a time when he was railing against “Jewish psychology,” Jung, by uncovering the psychological “gold” that lay buried in the pseudochemical formulations of the alchemists, was actually reconstituting the Jewish mystical themes that served as the spiritual foundation for alchemy.
This is one reason why when Jung turned directly to the Kabbalistic sources, he found an important precursor and support for his own thoughts (Jung, 1973, vol. 2, p. 157).
In making my argument I will appeal directly to Jung’s own writings but also to those of such scholars as Patai (1994) and Suler (1972), who have painstakingly demonstrated the Jewish-mystical sources of alchemical ideas.
I have argued elsewhere (Drob, 1999, 2000a) that prior to and even after World War II Jung suppressed the Jewishmystical roots of much of his thinking, claiming to have first discovered the very significant correspondence between his views and those of the Kabbalah in 1954 (Jung, 1973, vol. 2, p. 157).
In spite of a pretense to have been largely ignorant of Jewish mysticism prior to the 1950s, Jung had considerable familiarity with the Kabbalah prior to and during World War II, and this familiarity, particularly with Knorr von Rosenroth’s
3000-page Latin compilation of Kabbalistic texts, impacted significantly on his thinking at a time when he would have been embarrassed by any connection to Judaism.
Here I will extend my argument by demonstrating that in extracting the psychological core of alchemy, Jung was in effect reconstituting Jewish-mystical ideas that had earlier been assimilated by the alchemists themselves. ~Sanford Drob, Towards a Kabbalistic Psychology, Page 77-79
