CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

INTRODUCTION
the religio-political situation in Germany led to a break between Hauer
and Jung and his circle. 102 Concerning Hauer’s conduct during this period,
Mircea Eliade recalled: “I heard from Scholem that Hauer was still
a very good man because during the Nazi persecution, he adopted two
or three Jewish children, or a Jewish girl. He said Hauer was one of the
very few scholars in Germany sympathetic with the Nazi regime which
Scholem said, ‘I don’t have anything against.’” 103
Hauer carried on his half of his dialogue with Jung on the comparison
between yoga and psychotherapy in his subsequent publications. In Der
Yoga: Ein Indischer Weg zum Selbst 104 (Yoga: an Indian way to the self) he
commenced by posing questions that have subsequently increased in
pertinence with the advent of the new age movement and the popularity
of alternative religions:
This problem, whether and to what extent this Eastern “way to salvation”
is also of value for Western people, remains in a state of flux,
and has engaged me very seriously. Was it not a mistake or even a
danger when for one’s own “way of salvation” men of the West struggled
with yoga? Why did these men not adhere to scientific research,
philosophical reflections in the Western manner, life and
deed, as the only ways to “salvation”? Did the West itself not also
have in its mysticism a way to the inner, that was of better use to it
than yoga? Why were the developing depth psychology and psychotherapy
not enough for it? Did we actually need a new impulse from
the East? These problems stem from the lectures and study seminars
in C. G. Jung’s “Psychological Club.” 105
In his view Jung’s analytical psychology had become a method and hence
had succumbed to the dangers of the psychotechnical externalization
that had been a danger for yoga. 106 In Der Yoga he devoted a chapter to
a critique of Jung’s work. He wrote: “I myself stand critically opposed to
the hypothesis of native and inherited ‘Archetypes.’ To say above all that
the historico-religious empirical basis for the thesis of the ‘archetypes’ is
extremely weak.” 107 He had also come to a negative judgment on Jung’s
102 In his diary entry for 8 March Hauer wrote: “I am too ‘German’ for these people.”
Cited in Dierks, Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, 1881–1962, 297; my translation.
103 Mircea Eliade interview, Jung Oral History Archive, 11.
104 Hauer, Der Yoga: Ein Indischer Weg zum Selbst (Leipzig, 1958).
105 Ibid., 5; my translation. There has been a great deal of literature comparing yoga and
psychotherapy. For two early studies, see Geraldine Coster, Yoga and Western Psychology: A
Comparison (London, 1934); and Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West (New York,
1961).
106 Cited in Dierks, Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, 1881–1962, 298.
107 Hauer, Der Yoga, 419; my translation.
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