“GERMANY POSSESSED”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 October 1941, Page 2

“GERMANY POSSESSED”

PHENOMENA OF NAZISM. In reviewing Dr. H. G. Bayne’s new book, “Germany Possessed,” the “Listener” of London says:—Here we have one of the most ambitious attempts yet made to throw the light of modern psychology upon the phenomena of Nazism. Dr. Baynes is a prominent representative of the Jungian school, and in this book he develops at length a line of thought adumbrated by Jung himself some five j ears ago in a paper but little known in Britain. An endeavour is made to explain the fanaticism and expansive power of modern Germany in terms of the Collective Unconscious and of the reciprocal relationship between the Introvert and Extravert attitudes as expounded by Jung in his well-known wosk on “Psychological Types.” The generally premominant attitude of the Germans “before the Prussian element ran off with the German State” was, according to Dr. Baynes, one of introversion, characterised by docility, a capacity for hard work and an immense respect for intellectual achievement, “with small inclination, for spontaneous extraverted adventures.” But Germany never came to terms with her old, pagan, extravert, instinctual life, which was all the time smouldering beneath the surface, a fact which is symbolised by the various myths of the Barbarossa type, in which the hero representing the repressed unconscious urges is destined one day to come io life again in all his might. Hitlei* is just such a symbol; he sensed that the hour had come and, adopting Barbarossa’s role, became a Messiah, himself imbued with the immense sources of energy contained in the Collective Unconscious. He is, in fact, like the Germany he represents, “possesed” by the Unconscious, much as are the shamans and medicine men of more primitive peoples. It is admitted that Germany in her present attitude is also compensating for feelings of inferiority; but this fits into the general picture, inasmuch as the “inferiority complex” itself, in Jung’s view, is a consequence of the repression or lack of development of one side of the mind (in this case, the life of instinct and feeling, which is now in the present regime so exalted over intellect),