symptoms of a secret psychic attitude unknown even to the individual himself and transmitted by no historian; perhaps the founders of religions give us the most information in this regard. The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant.
(Jung, 1933: 148)
Although prima facia it might seem that the events of history are almost inconsequential to him, reading this book reveals that Jung’s focus on the inner world is in fact a response to the one-sided consciousness that, according to him, is at the heart of western violence. “Our contemporary consciousness is oriented one-sidedly” he explains, “it is as if we believed that only Europe existed” (137). In an extroverted society “we are accustomed to constantly directing our attention outward and only rarely do we turn to look inward” (57). Western thinking has adhered to conscious history emphasising objective and external facts but has failed to incorporate knowledge of the unconscious. “when consciousness grows too strong in proportion to the degree in which the background is walled off…An inflation of the subject occurs” (87). people lose “all knowledge pertaining to these matters” (79). They become “defensive in their attitude towards the background” (87) until the bridge of understanding is forcefully sealed and “anything different is just seen as bad” (137).
While reading the book, I heard a story about Jung that touches precisely on this question.2 ((I would like to thank Rabi Mordechai Zeller for telling me this story. The original version appears in “The Dream, The Vision of the Night” by his grandfather, Max Zeller. )) Apparently, Jung was giving a lecture in Berlin, in 1937, on the same night that Hitler was meeting with Mussolini. As he was speaking, a tidal wave of the cheering mass grew stronger outside the lecture room until it was impossible for him to continue talking. His voice drowned out for many minutes, he was standing in silence, waiting patiently until the mayhem subsided and then asked his audience to return to the voices of the inner world saying: “I’m afraid we had to let world’s history pass by” (Zeller, 1975: 128).
Jung’s focus on the inner world is in fact his political reply to the mayhem of history, precisely because the forces of history are projections of what is impossible to bear. Although western thinking is one-sidedly extrovert, the emergence of “modern