Carl vs. Karl: Jung and Marx, Two Icons for Our Age

By James P. Driscoll

By drawing on Jung’s and Marx’s opposing ideas, James Driscoll’s Carl versus Karl: Jung and Marx, Two Icons for our Age develops fresh perspectives on urgent contemporary problems. Jung and Marx as thinkers, Driscoll contends, carry the projections of archetypal complexes that go back to the Biblical hostile brothers, Abel and Cain, and whose enduring tensions shape our postmodern era. 

Marxism, because it elevates the group over the individual, is made to order for bureaucrats and bureaucracy’s patron archetype Leviathan. Jungian individuation offers a corrective rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic’s affirmation of the ultimate value of free individuals. Although Marxism’s promise of justice gives it demagogic appeal, the party betrays that promise through opportunism and a primitive ethic of retribution. Marxism’s supplanting the Judeo-Christian ethic with bureaucracy’s “only following orders” Eichmann Code, Driscoll maintains, has created the moral paralysis of our time.  As Jung and writers like Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Elias Canetti have warned us, the influence of our ever expanding bureaucracies is a grave threat to the survival of civilized humanity.

Among the primary issues Driscoll addresses are: the nature of justice and of the soul, individuation and freedom, and mankind’s responsibilities within the planetary ecology. Religion, ethics, economics, science, class divisions, immigration, financial fraud, abortion, and affirmative action are all illumined by his analysis of the powerful archetypes moving behind Jung and Marx.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781680536973

Book preview

Introduction

Archetypes & Icons

The philosophers have only interpreted

the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Karl Marx

We cannot change anything until we accept it.

Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

Carl Jung

Four iconic thinkers reign over the dark, tumultuous era initiated by the First World War and the rise of totalitarian ideologies backed by autarchic bureaucracies: These are Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, and Carl Jung. By iconic I mean culturally influential, charismatic, and highly recognizable. The term can also mean revered; yet of the four only Einstein is generally revered. Hitler, Stalin and Mao are iconic political figures, but more loathed than revered. Many would agree that Marx, Nietzsche, Einstein, and Jung are the most influential thinkers of our era. Others might hand the number four slot to Freud rather than Jung. I would counter that Jung went beyond Freud, even as Copernicus went beyond Tycho Brahe, to probe the unconscious more deeply and explore it more broadly. As a result, his long term influence will surpass Freud’s.

Archetypal, seminal, and paradigmatic are also rough synonyms for iconic. Seminal and paradigmatic apply to all four figures. However, archetypal applies more to Marx and Jung than to Nietzsche, Freud, or Einstein. Archetypal refers to a particular numinous energy, and cultural impact, arising from activation of specific archetypes or archetypal complexes associated with an iconic figure. Einstein’s ideas sparked the quantum revolution in physics that superseded Newton’s mechanistic worldview. He and Darwin are the most influential scientists since Newton. By contrast, Marx and Jung, almost like religious icons, have come to symbolize the archetypal energies powering their key ideas.

Those energies generate crucial values and behavior patterns that profoundly, if through indirection, impact modern lives. Indeed, people turning, consciously and unconsciously, to Marx and Jung for values and meaning have made them icons for two opposing archetypal complexes that shape the central dialectic of intellectual history in our era. As such they signify powers beyond each man’s intent or the direct influence of their key ideas, as great as that may be. A primary objective herein will be to explore the character of Marx’s and Jung’s associated archetypal complexes and the nature of their energies, impact, and dialectical interactions.

A word about Nietzsche. He manifests the archetypal complex associated with semi-mad seers, one might call it the Casandra complex. Going mad himself, he became the herald of the collective intellectual and moral insanities of our era. Like John the Baptist, Nietzsche prepared the way. In his case, he prepared the world for a great many trends, including the breakdown of traditional morality and religion, and the ideational polarities activated around Karl Marx and Carl Jung.¹

Throughout this work, I will treat Marx’s and Jung’s primary ideas, along with their cultural and political influences, as being fonts of archetypal energy as much as they are concepts. Major figures in intellectual history can take on the stature and character of the archetypes that energize them, thus functioning within the culture in ways analogous to autonomous complexes within individuals. They may personify an archetype, archetypal complex, or archetypal shift for the culture just as an individual’s personal mother may personify the mother archetype for him or her. Some iconic examples carrying archetypes are Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammad, Copernicus, Shakespeare, Newton, and more recently Nietzsche, Einstein, Marx, and Jung. Like Hellenic deities, they embody collective influences and energies highly active in the culture. In this way they resemble demigods, lesser versions of, or splinters from, the major collective autonomous complexes behind civilizational godheads, such as Yahweh, the Christian Trinity, and Allah.

Indeed, the Communist Party attempts in Marxist ruled societies to usurp the place traditionally given to God, therein it learned from precedents set by the Church. The party’s totalitarian regulation of personal life, however, more resembles the Islamic God than the Christian God or even the Church. Jung did not displace God for his followers; nonetheless, by embodying the wiseman archetype Jung lighted a path for many to commune with the numinous, including some who do not realize they are wanderers in Jung’s realm.

What are the most important archetypal ideas/patterns attached to Marx and Jung? They can be viewed in terms of four polarities. First is the ancient one of the active versus the contemplative life. While both men were intellectuals who spent much of their time reading and writing books, the archetypal complexes and patterns most prominent in their lives fall clearly into the active versus contemplative categories. The second closely related pattern, is the emphasis on justice and revolution with Marx contrasted against the conscious individuation toward wholeness that distinguishes Jung.

These two patterns are reinforced by a third pattern with crucial political implications: the open conflict between Marx’s view of individuals as defined primarily by their group identities and Jung’s belief that excessive group identification distracts from the deeper purpose of every human life which is individuation, the full development or flowering of the self. Jung warned that for modern mass man the group becomes a devouring mother, and identification with the group leads to ego inflation and loss of soul. Although group membership for Marx entails ego subordination to the social group that constitutes the party, identification with the party begets inflation. For Jung individuation requires ego to accept guidance from the self which requires prioritizing goals of the self over approval from the social group. This aligns Jung with the Christian tradition’s stress on individual character and free will. In Jung sin finds its equivalent in ego inflation. Jung identified the self, as distinct from ego, with the Christ archetype and vis versa. Thus, individuation becomes a quest for salvation from the inauthenticity of ego’s conformity with the group, a point stressed by Jesus if not his churchly followers.

In the intellectual history of the West, six iconic champions of the value of the free individual are, Socrates, Jesus, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Carl Jung. The Western democratic political tradition, including Locke, Hume, Jefferson, and Lincoln, aligns with the Christian-Jungian stress on the free individual. Marx is more in line with authoritarian political thinkers like Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. However, Marx glorifies, to a degree unique among major political thinkers, ruthlessness and violence in the pursuit of political power.

A fourth pattern distinguishing Marx from Jung is sociology directed to activism versus psychology focused on introspection and the unconscious. Sociology centers on social interactions within society; Jungian psychology focuses on the interactions of conscious and unconscious within individuals. Freud and Jung are the most famous celebrity scientific explorers of the unconscious, though they were by no means the first modern thinkers to be keenly aware of it. Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, William James, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoevsky were signal figures of their times who recognized the pervasive influence of the unconscious on conscious life. Indeed, an emphasis on the unconscious characterizes the entire existentialist movement.

Marx, roughly their contemporary, was notably oblivious to the presence and power of the unconscious. Marx was not introspective; an explanation might be his domination, or at times possession, by what Jung calls the shadow, repressed unconscious forces at odds with ego, forces that Marx lacked the discipline and/or insight to integrate into consciousness. Jung saw Marx’s attraction to violent revolution against the social order as a shadow manifestation. Marx or a Marxist, might in turn dismiss Jung’s focus on the unconscious as escapism, a bourgeoisie diversion. Either way, the two men embody the respective viewpoints of sociology and psychology, which each has done much to shape.

Other subject areas provide further examples of Jung and Marx’s dialectical opposition in the realms of ideas and values. The most crucial one is religion. Jung is correctly seen as profoundly religious, if in a gnostic or spiritualist rather than a conventional Christian sense. Though he struggled to understand the archetypal dynamics of the Judeo-Christian deity and rejected orthodox theological formularies, he nonetheless believed in the essential constructive role of Christianity in Western culture and that the religious quest in general is intrinsic to humanity. Contrary to some superficial impressions, Jung was no stock saint, though he was an authentic sage as well as a potent healer who unselfishly devoted much of his life to his patients. Jung might be seen as the paramount modern seer and eccentric patron saint of the Way of Individuation.

Karl Marx, by contrast, is the icon for the Way of Action, even though he spent much of his life in the library. He rejected religion as a distraction from the key goal of life, to initiate social, political, and economic change and ultimately inaugurate his notion of universal justice, which meant absolute equity, within the classless society. For this he is commonly, if incorrectly, dismissed as an atheist. As we shall see, both men’s views on religion were complex. Although Marx’s complexity on many subjects is obscured by the kneejerk simplifications of his street activist followers. Marx was an insensitive, arrogant, and selfish man who frequently blamed and rarely credited other; however, unlike many 20th century Marxist dictators, he was not personally an evil monster.² Had he actually attained power that might have unleashed his darkest nature. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao all demonstrate.

Jung and Marx each struggled long and hard questing for their own truths. Jung’s more recent dates (1875-1961) often give his ideas and writings contemporaneous relevance over Marx’s more dated work (1818-1883), as does Jung’s much broader range of intellectual engagement. However, the comparative simplicity of Marx’s basic ideas, the intensity of his calls to action, and his passionate demands for justice have given his message and approach huge and enduring appeal to the disaffected, alienated modern masses. Marx attracts the choleric perpetual discontents, Jung the melancholic, questing, spiritual types.

On economics, Jung, through his marriage to a wealthy Swiss watch heiress, became a bona fide member of the capitalist elite. His clients were middle to upper class; he displayed slender interest in the economic basis of the psychological problems of proletarians or of the struggling lower middle class. In terms of personal and lifestyle approaches, Marx was not Jung’s opposite: he prized a middle class lifestyle that time and again proved a desperate struggle for him to maintain. In respect to the natural sciences the two men were closer to being opposites, with Jung displaying a lifelong fascination with parapsychological phenomena, while Marx remained a confirmed skeptic with strong positivist leanings.

Marx did not hesitate to advocate violent actions for the correct cause—as determined by Karl Marx of course. Jung, eschewing political disputes and all violence, was never an open activist though he did work privately against totalitarian movements like Nazism and Communism. Jung’s behind the scenes approach, relying on influence rather than action, was par for the course among the wealthy class into which he married. Marx’s philosophy promotes big government and bureaucracy, a factor that proved hugely significant in spreading his influence. More on this later. Jung, always wary of mass anything, moved in the opposite direction toward his introverted Swiss version of individualism. Marx’s outlook was that of a citizen of a large bureaucratic nation state, Bismarck’s Germany; while Jung reflected the character of his small, isolated Confoederatio Helvetica, and even some of the peculiarities of his Basal canton.

For Marx, education was the responsibility of the party and the state, as such it was a critical tool for implementing the proletarian revolution and enforcing Marxist groupthink. The education that most concerned Marx was propaganda for the revolution and the party. For Jung education was a highly individual matter that must be tailored to each person’s peculiar needs, talents, and cultural background. In fact, education is a key feature of the individuation process and furthering individuation must be a major objective for any good education. Jung abhorred propaganda, regardless of its source or purpose.

Neither Jung nor Marx had much to say on our contemporary issues of bias, the environment, population growth, and immigration. Nevertheless, their ideas have major implications for these matters. While Jung was deeply concerned about what he saw as the rise of mass man, Marx seems oblivious to the perils of sovereign mega-bureaucracies that have been portrayed and analyzed by George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Elias Canetti, Hannah Arendt and many others.³ Nonetheless, both Jung’s and Marx’s fundamental approaches carry important relevance and heuristic implications here. Jung’s individualistic perspective is inimical to the rise of totalitarian state power and bureaucracy. By contrast Marxism makes the party a pervasive, all powerful bureaucracy and Marxist group centered thinking creates favorable conditions for growth within all bureaucracies.

To encapsulate the respective influences of Marx and Jung and their archetypal character, one might observe: Jung and Marx represent two divergent tracks and sets of values for modern man: justice, power, violence, and revolution leading to totalitarian control versus truth, integrity, healing, and individuation leading to freedom and spiritual wholeness. Justice and truth are equally essential to achieving our full humanity. Although, as if to leave room for his dialectical opposite Marx, Jung downplayed justice. Of course Marx put strict limits on truth subordinating it to power for the proletariat. For 20th Century Marxists the cardinal rule became power for the party by whatever means possible, including means that inflict severe injustices.

While Marxists hold up justice as an ideal, it always remains subordinate to their ultimate goals, political and economic power. In their quest for power, Marxist states encourage the development of mass men, shallow, one dimensional citizens as obedient as sheep and programmed like insects in a colony. Yet so far they have never succeeded in extinguishing the irrepressible heterogeneity of human nature or the individual’s desire for personal freedom.

In summary, Jung and Marx offer opposing paths to modern man in search of meaning: for Jung meaning is found within the self, for Marx it comes from outside through identification with the group. The complementary but at times opposing archetypes of truth and justice, as well as the dialectic of the individual with the group, are essential to the psycho-dynamics of our post 1914 era, and indeed of modern humanity itself. An ultimate purpose of this work will be to deepen understanding of their contemporary dialectical interplay toward the Jungian end of creating a coincidentia oppositorum, Jung’s term for synthesis.

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How did I come to write this book? People write books for many reasons: to advance careers, make money, educate the public, tell their stories, solve problems, get revenge, inflate egos, awaken the world to some truth, etc. Writing a book requires disciplined concentration over extended periods of partial isolation; it is generally not done without strong motivation. For me a ruling motivation was my belief that Marx and the Marxists focus on and explore, mostly with poor results, our irrepressible human desire for justice. Because of temperament and vocational circumstances, Jung and the Jungians tend to downplay justice and stress self-knowledge. This makes Marx an intriguing and provocative opposite to Jung. It offers the possibility of a coincidentia oppositorum wherein Marx embodies Jung’s intellectual shadow, those things neglected by Jung and denied by the Jungians’ professional personae and at the same time Jung offers a needed corrective to Marxist excesses.

To put it in a longish soundbyte: Jung’s is a quest for personal consciousness bringing truth, healing, and wholeness, while Marx represents Jung’s shadow, the quest for justice through power, violence, and revenge. Jung appeals to those who seek truth, integrity, freedom, and wholeness, while Marx appeals, initially at least, to those who claim to seek justice and equity, even though that claim is too often a cover for their real motives of envy, anger, and resentment, and of gaining arbitrary power over others through whatever means possible.

Marxism’s greatest appeal is the promise of justice, while its downfall is its abject failure to deliver that promise. Marxists attain power by promising justice, then, following that universal flaw in human nature, ego inflation, they seek to make their power permanent which brings the massive injustices of totalitarianism. Marxism as a political position never attracted me, though I am always seeking to better understand the psychology behind its powerful appeal to others. I knew a big part of that appeal was Marxism’s exploitation of the enduring human need for justice, along with justice’s flip side of envy and the lure of revenge. For these dark ends, Marxism readily provides convenient rationales, techniques, and means to ambitious individuals seeking personal power above all else.

But personal power usually is attained later in life. For the very young, inexperienced, and naïve, Marxism appeals to their urge for change with its deceptive promises of equity or social justice. Among contemporary American university students, its appeal may be no deeper than desire to belong to a group and go with the flow of their contemporaries. Deficient in traditional religious, family, and cultural ties and values, the lives of today’s youth often seem desperately empty. Their sense of meaninglessness engenders a powerful desire to belong to a group, any group, and be part of a movement. For them meaning becomes belonging. The need to belong has increased with the decline of family and church, along with the excessive isolation of social lives conducted indirectly by electronic communications.

I realized early, through painful experience, that Jung and especially Jungianism, for all their strengths in mapping and understanding the human psyche, have so far failed to adequately address the isolation and systematic social injustices in modern society, let alone heal the debilitating anger and despair they engender. Although Jung was profoundly troubled by the problem of evil, in his eyes it was mainly a religious matter centering on the justice of God toward man in allowing the existence of evil and injustice (assuming that God, like an ego, has a choice!) Outrage at widespread, and sometimes terrifying, modern evils, such as the two world wars and the rise of totalitarianism, moved Jung to reject the solutions of orthodox dogma, such as St. Augustine’s privatio boni doctrine, and the associated claim that God is the summum bonum.

Jung’s struggle with the problem of divine justice across the decades culminated in his breakthrough work, Answer to Job. Here the justice of God to man, more than that of man to man most concerned Jung. Moreover, Jung seldom focused on the social and economic roots of his patients’ troubles, and he spent most of his life in Switzerland, possibly the safest and most socially, economically, and politically stable advanced country that has ever existed. Compared to the US, Germany, Russia, China, or even England, Switzerland provides an inadequate laboratory for studying social chaos, gross human rights violations, and systematic injustices, not to mention gross political and economic dysfunctions.

Born during the onset of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in late April 1943, I grew up in the US in the turbulent 50s and 60s which were continuously shaped and shaken by the Civil Rights movement and America’s Cold War dramas, like the Cuban missile crisis and the hyper divisive Vietnam war. Already accustomed to the social injustices that shook up life on the campuses, a devastating personal injustice in the early 1970s cast a dark shadow over my life.

With my first Shakespeare course in college, I began to realize that teaching the Bard was how I wanted to define and spend my professional life. Despite publications and being at the top of my classes in that area, anti-gay bigotry barred me from realizing my cherished dream. Although no one in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison then was fully out of the closet, my advisor had discerned that I was gay. He was what we now would call a homophobe. Though largely closeted in his prejudices, he believed that no gay person should be allowed to teach. While such bigotry would never be tolerated in academia today, it was common then, though usually veiled. When I obtained my Ph.D. in 1972 a powerful professor could still readily sabotage the career chances of a gay student.

Thanks to the double whammy of a sharply constricting job market and being blackballed by my advisor, I found myself unemployable in my chosen profession yet burdened with heavy student debts. My professional dilemma threw me into personal crisis where I sought help from Jungian therapists. Jungian therapy did help with a range of problems, and it was intellectually fascinating in itself. Unfortunately, it proved nearly useless in dealing with the social and professional injustice that pushed my soul into despair and blighted my life with exclusion, penury, anger, and chaos. Notwithstanding, it gave me a crucial insight. I learned, more from Jung’s writings about the problem of evil than from my therapists, that the wisest way to approach evil is as a challenge to create a new, more conscious good. Out of that insight I eventually became a gay activist, and in the late 1980’s an AIDS activist. The reader can follow the story of my activist career in my memoire: How AIDS Activists Challenged America and Saved FDA from Itself.⁴

Though I became an activist, I remained Jungian in my approaches to most personal problems and in my perspective on human nature and the psyche. That put me at odds with the mainstream activists whose assumptions were routinely Marxist. I realized that Marxism did not and could not create the social changes it professed to seek because it valued power over truth and political domination over authentic change. Moreover, the Marxists were singularly lacking in the selfexamination essential to expanded consciousness. Enforcing conformity to a mind and soul repressing party line groupthink, their true motivations arose from the dark shadow of the corrupted society they claimed they were atempting to reform.

My scholarly expertise is in Jung much more than in Marx where I am an outside observer. Frequently, I will employ Jungian terms, such as shadow, self, anima-animus, and persona, and sometimes using my own Jungian derived concepts, like collective autonomous complex. Jung developed an elaborate terminology that provides a guide and a general map to the human psyche. Readers wanting to explore that terminology further can refer to my book Jung’s Cartography of the Psyche.⁵ Herein, a prime objective will be to identify and analyze the different complexes of archetypes attached to Jung and to Marx. Toward that end, I devote chapters to the key topics of justice, religion, ethics, the soul, economics, science, class structure, and bureaucracy. Then I move on to apply some of the basic concepts of Jung and Marx to contemporary issues where I have personal experience.

Behemoth bureaucracies, autocratically imposing their brands of groupthink on education, healthcare, immigration, and the environment, threaten the survival of civilization. I will discuss how Marxist ploys and methods have aggravated these problems by calls for justice that are covert power grabs leading to proliferation of freedom stifling bureaucracy. I will also show where activism, even of the Marxian variety, is sometimes a necessary change agent. And I will offer the wiseperson archetype, as manifest particularly in the works of Shakespeare and Jung, as a corrective to the intellectual and moral hubris prevalent among Marx’s contemporary followers.

My overall objective is to understand the dialectic of the archetypes constellated around Jung and Marx, particularly of justice, revolution, and power versus wisdom, individuation, and wholeness. I will stress that those who follow each path seek to fill a valid need that the other path neglects to satisfy fully. Above all, I will ask and seek: What future synthesis can guide mankind through the warring opposites of our dark, harrowing age into a healthy coincidentia oppositorum?

This book employs two complementary approaches: Theory and Praxis. The theoretical section will focus on general issues, such as justice, religion, ethics, the nature of the soul, economics, science, class structure, and bureaucracy as manifesting the Leviathan archetype. These are key matters where Jung and Marx take differing and often opposing stances. My objective will be to illuminate the subjects themselves in light Jung’s and Marx’s divergent positions.

The Praxis section, an exercise in public philosophy, approaches, through the insights of Carl and Karl, specific contemporary problems. These include how bureaucracy has promoted and protected systematic violations of LGBT rights, how economic fraud exploits the middle class, the immigration and environmental controversies, and mankind’s perennial dilemma of being unable to either find justice or ignore injustice. It concludes with a discussion of humanity’s existential challenges in our Age of Bureaucracy.

Part I

Theory

Chapter 1

Carl Versus Karl: Justice & Injustice

Justice and injustice are problems rooted in the shadow archetype and closely related to our sense of identity or the ego’s self-image. Confronting them always involves, consciously or unconsciously, dealing with the shadow and identity. Every injustice is a threat to our social identity, that is our place in society, as well as our conscious identity, our self-image or self-esteem. Justice is necessary to maintain or restore identity, a point Shakespeare repeatedly makes in his midperiod plays including the four great tragedies and the high comedies of Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It, as well as later in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

Jung taught that battling our own shadow projected on external adversaries exacerbates our problems with justice and injustice. We can achieve reform and seek true justice, which re-establishes a stable sense of identity, only by bringing into consciousness the trouble making shadow.⁶ Continued possession by shadow, and its characteristic resentment, vindictiveness, and anger, which Marxists and other totalitarians aggravate and exploit, becomes darkness visible.

Like Jung, I believe that the Marxists’ idealistic posturing is self-serving. Many of them are hypocrites and in time become ruthless political opportunists. Nonetheless, I recognize Marx and Marxism as the preeminent shadow phenomenon of our era; we cannot simply dismiss it as wrongheaded and forget it. Marxism is, notwithstanding, an area of contemporary society’s collective psychology that Jung and the Jungians have been reluctant to reckon with, let alone confront. The shadow, as Jung maintained, is a reservoir of dynamic energy that, if not transformed into good, will become activated for ill. The shadow cannot be safely ignored. So far Jungians have tended to downplay or misunderstand the West’s and America’s looming Marxist shadow.

Marx himself is presented as a dark shadow figure by his critics; some have even labeled him an agent of Satan. The biographical justification for such severe censure is not inconsequential. Marx was self-indulgent, ungrateful, egoistic, callous, envious, and he often became violently angry with scant provocation. Habitually projecting his shadow on adversaries, he engaged in bitter, vindictive quarrels that dragged on for years. He hated the rich and privileged capitalists, his hatred an outgrowth of envy of their easy wealth and splendid lifestyles, for which he incited others to violence against them.

Karl Marx was almost never grateful, not even where he was profoundly indebted like with his selfless champion, benefactor, and collaborator, the long suffering Fredrick Engels who co-authored their most famous work, The Communist Manifesto and made essential contributions to other important writings. Marx probably would not have become the momentous historical figure he is without Engels steady devotion, scholarly labors, and repeated financial rescues.⁷ Yet Marx ignored or slighted Engels’ contributions to their shared causes and achievements. Nonetheless, Engels tolerated Marx’s excesses and encouraged Marx’s lofty estimation of his own work and potential place in history. Theirs was one of the most extraordinary and impactful partnerships in the history of Western thought.

Not one to truckle to the Golden Rule, Karl Marx embodied the dark, sadistic shadow of Christian virtues in his habitual disrespect, violent hatreds, and intolerance. Marx and Jung exhibit, in a societal context if not always in themselves, the dialectic of the conflicting quests for conscious wholeness and for justice that in our era often shape national and personal politics.

From a long life filled with activism and reflection thereon, I have learned the following: There is only one remedy for injustice that succeeds: find and implement justice itself. Everything else is a delusion that leaves open, festering wounds, and an angry shadow thirsting for revenge. Forgiveness alone never heals unless it is authentic, complete, and mutual—which is rare in human life. Only justice can fully restore respect and identity. Marx, for all his inflations, miss-directions, and limitations, may have understood this in his gut better than did Jung who remained focused on the injustices of God to man—to the neglect, it at times seems, of those of men to men. But Marx understanding was crippled by his angry shadow, his over-riding obsession with real and imagined injustices to himself. This flaw is shared by too many of his followers today, people whose true ruling passion is not social justice but personal revenge and advancement.

My life and career as an activist have reflected the struggle of the archetypal complexes associated with Jung and leading toward individuation against those associated with Marx’s unremitting quest for justice in society and for restoration of violated or lost identity. Marx knew well the need for identity and consciousness, though his grasp of what they entail was far more restrictive than Jung’s, particularly in its neglect of the unconscious and exclusion of man’s spiritual dimension. However, his Marxist successors, ever obsessed with power, seldom recognize the individual’s need for wholeness. Yet the self’s goal of wholeness and truth is a basic factor in human nature that ever must be reckoned with. Like the quests for justice, identity and freedom, the quests for wholeness and truth are hard wired in and not to be obliterated.

That justice and identity are fundamental, is a principle that holds no less at a primitive tribal level than in a modern state. Man is first and foremost a social animal. Individual men and women depend on and must adapt to and make compromises with society. Notwithstanding, to be at peace with oneself one must believe he/she is treated justly. To avoid alienation, we need to believe that we live in a society where justice is the norm and we ourselves are not outcasts. Indeed, facing injustice the shadow and what Jung calls the voice, or conscience, will always seek respect, no matter the cultural, religious, and philosophical rationales for acquiescing to societal injustices.

Introverted Jungians are often tempted to retreat into a quietism that evades the identity defining dramas of our lives and thereby can deny us the most important truths about ourselves. Shakespeare and many other great writers, e.g. Homer, Milton, Cervantes, George Eliot, Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Thomas Mann, all show that fully living out our primary dramas is essential to an authentic life. Indeed, I would contend, it is an essential part of individuation itself.

Marxism’s subordination of individual to group and its demagogic focus on equity for groups over justice for individuals activates the masses to support Marxist seizures of power. It is, however, a path to life avoidance and loss of individual identity. Equity or justice for a group is a ruse, the only meaningful and truly satisfying justice is for the individuals that comprise the group. Contrary to current Marxist influenced popular belief, only individuals can suffer injustice just as only individuals can have achievements, adventures and happiness or experience disappointment, pain, and death. Avoidance of individual justice is avoidance of life, the same holds for avoidance of consciousness and truth.

Truth and justice are vital concerns for ego and shadow, ego needs truth and shadow needs justice. They sometimes seem in opposition, but by Jung’s principle of coincidentia oppositorum they must reconcile if a person is to attain either. Among major artists and thinkers, Shakespeare, as embodiment of Jung’s wiseperson archetype, may have understood this best. His four great tragedies show there can be no peace or lasting happiness without both justice and truth. The Tempest manifests in its wiseman Prospero the great lesson of King Lear: peace and happiness, for oneself and others, come only through truth and justice.

Jung understood that in the theological sphere truth requires justice and justice truth; he was, however, hesitant about advocating this for society and politics where he had learned how easily those who stir the pot can get burned. Marx stressed social justice and neglected individual justice, except in the case of justice for himself where he became an obstreperous martinet. He understood that social justice needs truth. Nonetheless, with the dictatorship of the proletariat both justice and truth bowed to power which in turn consumed each of them. Power is like fire, a useful tool when controlled, a destructive force if it breaks loose, which it readily does if we are not careful. Marx and Marxists are often too caught up in their fixation on power to recognize or understand its perils. Many end as political pyromaniacs.

An intentional injustice violates identity. As deliberate disrespect, its intensity and duration exceeds that of injuries incurred by mere accidents or negligence. If you stub your toe on a rock, you don’t blame the rock; if someone stomps on your foot that’s a different story. Intentional injustice is perceived, even by animals, as malicious disrespect. It creates a ‘put down’ where the perpetrator demonstrates his status is higher than that of his victim. Injustice makes the victim ashamed and vulnerable. It poses a moral challenge to re-assert one’s human dignity. Injustice alienates the victims spreading distrust, fear, and hatred that lasts as long as the injustice is remembered or until it is corrected. Injustice is a prime source of alienation. An injustice that becomes an obsession steals consciousness itself from the victim. That is why justice and respect are essential to a healthy, humane society, and the quest for justice is unavoidable for those seeking individuation.

Those who get away with inflicting injustice set themselves up as more powerful than their victims. By their unjust acts, they enthrone themselves as leaders from a master caste. The social credit system that the Chinese Communist Party is implementing through info technology will establish a modern caste system among party faithful and with leaders at the top. Caste systems are inherently unjust because by promoting group thinking they disregard and devalue the individual’s unique identity, freedom, and capacity for change and selftransformation. In the West group thinking has become pervasive among those in our equivalents of castes, the credentialed professions.

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Like other practicing psychotherapists, Jung had to deal with injustices within families and in the course of his patients’ lives, for example the traumas of childhood, maturation, marriage, parenting, work, old age, and death. But seldom does he address systematic social injustices. Although the World Wars and events in Germany and Europe in his lifetime horrified him, he remained safe in his Swiss redoubt, protected from want and deprivation by his fortress nation and his wife Emma’s wealth. Nonetheless, the historic social breakdowns from systematic injustices profoundly disturbed Jung, as is profusely evident in his Red Book.

By contrast, severe financial straits were an unending ordeal for Karl Marx. Their cause was frequently his characteristic inability to manage personal finance. Marx saw all human problems as rooted in economics because he saw all of his personal problems rooted there. Marx’s economic sufferings were aggravated by his intense desire to maintain a comfortable middle class lifestyle, even when his means proved woefully inadequate, which was often. Just as Jung’s secure material circumstances freed him from the traumas of economic distress allowing him to focus on the spiritual realm, so did Marx’s trying personal finances focus him on the material basis of everything, including all economic, political, and social injustices.

For Jung the great soul centering