Psychology Quote by Gary Valentine Lachman

““It is just because we live in an active and responsible time that we need more consciousness and self-reflection,” otherwise we will be “unconsciously swept along by events.” “Mass movements,” Jung told his Nazi interviewer, “have the peculiarity of overpowering the individual by mass suggestion and making him unconscious. The political or social movement gains nothing by this when it has swarms of hypnotized camp followers.” And when Weizsäcker remarked that “in Germany today psychology is suspect . . . precisely because it is concerned with the self-development of the so-called individual,” and asked how “when the collective forces of the whole community have taken the lead in moulding our way of life, are we to assess the efforts of psychology,” Jung replied that “the self-development of the individual is especially necessary in our time” and “only the self-development of the individual, which I consider to be the supreme goal of all psychological endeavour, can produce consciously responsible spokesmen and leaders.”45 Nazism, as is well known, had no use for individuals, and Jung’s emphasis on the importance of individuals and their self-development was an outright attack on Nazi ideology. Most critics of Jung, however, fail to point this out.””

— Gary Valentine Lachman