| This dissertation explores the cultural and intellectual background of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung's 1936 essay, "Wotan." Challenging the widespread perception that this essay mainly represents Jung's depth-psychological diagnosis of National Socialism, the dissertation uses discourse analysis and historical research to show that "Wotan" portrays Jung's convictions about the racial essence of Germanism (Germanentum). He had begun formulating these ideas as early as 1912, drawing on a complex discourse about the "Germanic barbarian" that extended over 2,000 years and was first developed by Caesar and Tacitus as justification for Roman imperial attempts to colonize central Europe. 1,500 years later, German humanists transformed Tacitus's ambivalent portrait of the Germanic peoples into a discourse of self-validation. By Jung's era, this discourse had gone through several permutations. Germanists, philosophers, artists and founders of new religious movements in the larger German cultural domain incorporated the image of Rome as state-builder into the self-image of the Germans, while they projected onto the Jews the image of Rome as over-civilized and degenerate. They then incorporated the negative portrayal of the Germanic barbarian as lazy, undisciplined and overemotional into the image of the "dark-skinned savage" of modern European colonial discourse. Furthermore, they embraced Tacitus's positive description of the Germanic tribes as youthful, unspoiled and free as essential racial attributes of Germanism. Finally, scholars in multiple disciplines secularized and legitimized these ideologically laden motifs through scientific language, including that of anthropology, psychology, medicine, racial science, and the science of religion.;The dissertation explores how Jung fashioned his image of an inherited collective Germanic psyche by combining these various discursive threads with the spirituality of self-redemption (Selbsterlosung). This new form of religiosity, promulgated by a wide range of German-cultural artists, writers, and religious thinkers, was rooted in the Protestant belief of an inward calling by God, yet secularized under the impact of Nietzschean philosophy and combined with German volkisch ideology to become a source of self-definition and new spirituality in the broader German-cultural realm. The dissertation follows the permutations in Jung's image of "Wotan the Wanderer," from the god's first appearance in Jung's writings in 1912 through the posthumously published Memories, Dreams, Reflections , to demonstrate how Jung used Wotan to create a profile of a collective Germanic psyche that he believed was most capable of generating out of its depths the necessary spiritual solution to the malaise of modern society. The dissertation concludes with an examination of the employment of Jung's theory of inherited archetypes and a Germanic-Aryan collective unconscious within significant segments of the contemporary Germanic religious revival known as Heathenism or Asatru. |
