Jung on America: the Illusion of Freedom
Jung on the herd psychology and heroic ideal of the American psyche
We tend to think of America as the home of individualism. Jung couldn’t disagree more. In a 1931 article, he shares his insights into the American psyche and what we find is not America “the great land of freedom and individualism” but the opposite — something which Jung describes as “positively terrifying”.
But he doesn’t just expose the mirage of freedom at the heart of American psychology, he also shows us its positive virtues; he exposes the noble ideal at the heart of American culture; and as we’ll see he exposes his personal Shadow as well. Though it’s almost a century old Jung’s account is hauntingly reminiscent of American culture a century later.
It’s Complicated
Jung had a fascination with American culture. Unlike his fellow Europeans who saw Americans as a simple and straightforward people, Jung saw the opposite. He concludes the 1931 essay The Complications of American Psychology with the following:
“Facts are neither favourable nor unfavourable; they are merely interesting. And the most interesting of all is that this childlike, impetuous, “naive” America has probably the most complicated psychology of all nations.”
That quote captures the spirit of Jung’s analysis — teetering between admiration and condescension. In the article, Jung analyses a number of traits of the American psyche including their laughter, their language and even the way they move their hips. However, the most powerful and relevant observation he makes is about how surprisingly herd-like American culture is.
the most powerful and relevant observation he makes is about how surprisingly herd-like American culture is.
He talks about the “boundless publicity” of American life and the
“lack of distance between people, … the belief in popularity, the gossip columns of the newspapers, … the defenselessness of the individual against the onslaught of the press—all this is more than disgusting, it is positively terrifying.”
It may not fit with the classical patriotic portrait of America but you can see its truth by fast-forwarding to 21st-century influencer culture (and the reality TV reign of cringe that preceded it). Following on from the last quote, Jung takes us to the true contradiction at the heart of America — her dogma of individualism:
“You are immediately swallowed by a hot and all-engulfing wave of desirousness and emotional incontinence. You are simply reduced to a particle in the mass, with no other hope or expectation than the illusory goals of an eager and excited collectivity. You just swim for life, that's all. You feel free—that’s the queerest thing—yet the collective movement grips you faster than any old gnarled roots in European soil would have done.”
Jung is touching on something important that I think it’s worth unpacking a bit. You “feel free” he tells us (and ain’t that America to a tee!) but the collective movement grips you. America is like the stereotypical goth expressing their non-conformity by wearing all black and getting piercings and paling their skin. The supposed act of individual rebellion against the mob is itself a clichéd example of herd mentality.
Our brave new world of algorithmic feeds and its offspring influencer culture seduces us with this illusion of free choice and individual expression but creates an army of carbon copies as mass-produced as the goods they are promoting. Our exhausted attention leaves us with little tolerance for novelty —something movie-goers are all too familiar with. And thus we enter the desert of the real — the 21st-century monoculture of freedom.
The similarities between Jung’s account and our current moment continue:
“There is a peculiar lack of restraint about the emotions of an American collectivity. You see it in the eagerness and in the hustle of everyday life, in all sorts of enthusiasms, in orgiastic sectarian outbursts, in the violence of public admiration and opprobrium. The overwhelming influence of collective emotions spreads into everything. If it were possible, everything would be done collectively, because there seems to be an astonishingly feeble resistance to collective influences.”
Jung spotted hustle culture a century earlier, but, more than that, I feel like he’s bottled the spirit of the past decade. I can’t think of a better phrase to describe my repulsion to the circus around the 2024 election cycle than the phrase “orgiastic sectarian outbursts”. I’m sure many of you will disagree, but, not being enchanted by the Red Team or the Blue Team in American politics, I can’t help but find the apocalyptic dramatics around this (yet again) being the end of democracy and (yet again) the most important election in American history to be just a little bit overdramatic.
Between these “orgiastic sectarian outbursts” and his line about the “violence of public admiration and opprobrium” I feel like Jung could just as easily be talking about the underlying psychology behind the dramatics of the culture wars and 21st-century American politics.
Over the past decade, there has been a tendency to blame all this on social media algorithms (as I did above). But I believe the algorithms are amplifiers. Just what they are amplifying might not be universal human nature so much as the peculiar American psychology that Jung put his finger on a century ago. Amid a culture that, more than any other, fetishises individualism, Jung sees its contradiction: the “overwhelming influence of collective emotions”. As he puts it in the conclusion to this spiel about this American herd psychology:
“It has a decidedly flattening influence on people’s psychology.”
The Heroic Ideal
But it’s not all negative. Jung also has an awful lot of positive things to say about American culture. In particular, he talks about the core ideal of America.
In Jung’s mind, “every great country has its collective attitude”. Once again he is dismissive of his fellow Europeans who reduce the American collective attitude to money — the “gold god” — but, he writes:
“America is not as simple as that. Of course, there is any amount of ordinary materialism in America as everywhere else, but also a most admirable idealism which hardly finds its equal anywhere else.”
This admirable idealism is the true core of the American spirit for Jung and the name he puts on it is the “Heroic Ideal”:
“Your most idealistic effort is concerned with bringing out the best in every man, and when you find a good man you naturally support him and push him on, until at last he is liable to collapse from sheer exertion, success, and triumph.”
This greatness he says is cultivated in every family. It’s cultivated in American schools where:
“every child is trained to be brave, courageous, efficient, and a "good sport," a hero in short”
It’s in its workplaces where:
“the whole system anxiously tries to get the best man into the best place”
And of course it’s in the movies which:
“abound with heroes of every description”
After talking about the popular adoration of great people in America no matter their field of greatness he concludes this picture of the American ideal as follows:
“America is perhaps the only country where "greatness" is unrestricted, because it expresses the most fundamental hopes, desires, ambitions, and convictions of the nation.”
It’s a fitting description of America that isn’t as contradictory of his other point as it might seem. Rather, it fits neatly within it. We begin to see an America obsessed with popularity and gossip is also obsessed with greatness. This Heroic Ideal isn’t the opposite of the American herd psychology but its apotheosis.
This Heroic Ideal isn’t the opposite of the American herd psychology but its apotheosis
The Source of American Psychology
Contemplating the source of this distinctive American psychology, Jung writes:
“I know the mother-nations of North America pretty well, but I would be completely at a loss to explain, if I relied solely on the theory of heredity, how the Americans descended from them acquired their striking peculiarities.”
Instead of being a European culture, Jung finds the roots of American psychology in three places: the American landscape itself, the Native Americans and African Americans. He starts by citing a paper by the father of American anthropology Franz Boas whose students included Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir and Margaret Mead. He references Boas’s study of American skulls in which the anthropologist claimed that they were becoming more and more like Native American skulls as the generations passed. Reflecting on this, Jung notes:
“Man can be assimilated by a country. There is an aura and a quality in the air and in the soil of a country, which slowly permeate and assimilate him to the type of the aboriginal inhabitant, even to the point of slightly remodelling his physical features.”
But this external similarity is as Jung puts it
“feeble in comparison with the less visible but all the more intense influence on the mind.”
He sees the influence of the Native Americans in the American Heroic Ideal and in her sports saying that:
“this is where the real historical spirit of the Red Man enters the game. Look at your sports! They are the toughest, the most reckless, and the most efficient in the world”
He even sees it in the American tendency to make skyscrapers:
“Have you ever compared the skyline of New York or any great American city with that of a pueblo like Taos? And did you see how the houses pile up to towers towards the centre? Without conscious imitation the American unconsciously fills out the spectral outline of the Red Man’s mind and temperament.”
This all sounds like some innocent folksy stereotyping like talking about the luck of the Irish or the politeness of Canadians. But it begins to get very very cringy. However weird it is when he’s talking about Native Americans, it takes a sharp left turn into racist uncle territory when he talks about black people. In fact this is one of the essays that gets cited again and again when talking about Jung’s racism. The original title of the article when it was published in the American magazine The Forum was not The Complications of American Psychology but Your Negroid and Indian Behaviour.
When he calls the Native Americans primitive, the charitable interpretation is that he’s talking about their level of civilisation. This isn’t race science this is more like when Hegelians or Marxists talk about the dialectical stages of cultural evolution. But when he talks about African Americans that defence goes out the window. Especially when he writes things like the following, in reference to black Americans:
“What is more contagious than to live side by side with a rather primitive people? Go to Africa and see what happens. When it is so obvious that you stumble over it, you call it “going black.””
Suffice to say, it gets a bit weird. If you’re living in the near future and would like a deep dive into Jung’s racism in this article and the rest of his works you can check out this article:
or maybe you’d like to know why Jung hated philosophers in which case you should check out this article:
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