Why Jungian psychology is anti-semitic: some definitions and observations

As with Wagner the Jungian appeal to myths is pre-modern, anti-scientific, and so irrational. It is the theoretical form of magic, and so is inevitably anti-semitic. By modernity I mean a complex of things including capitalism and its deterritorializations, distanciations, and exilic character; the self-determination that became central in Western philosophy and thought after the Protestant Reformation; science as a mode of inquiry that separated itself from religion, as the ancient Greek "modernity" or Enlightenment did by way of mathematics, philosophy, tragedy, and democracy; and the dominance of new aesthetic forms like the novel, which Lukàcs called the epic of disenchantment, centered around irony and an affirmation of social alienation and "the problematic individual"; finally, the idea of world becomes de-centered, no longer theologically monarchistic, nor anthropocentric, as in "humanism'; and generally the replacement of religion by art and a secular and often political philosophy. By anti-modern I mean the repudiation or willed ignorance of any or all of these things.

By myth I mean the use of stories as ethical exemplars to guide one's life in a new religion ("re-binding") based on the irrational elevation of these models to the status of a divinely authorized truth. By magic I mean the use of any technique, including uses of images and stories as exemplary ethical models, as a technique to increase one's happiness by succeeding and get what one wants; magic believes that it can control what happens by using techniques whose justification relies on their meaning, which is imaginary. By ethical I mean concerned with the good life either philosophically (the question of what it is generally) or practically (how can we or I live it). By rational I mean that truth claims and the methods of establishing them follow the norms specific to the practice of giving and asking for reasons, and so requiring statements and actions to be justified (even if "raw" existence and behavior obviously are not, except in a retroactive gesture that replaces the temporal causality of events with the logical one of reasons). By anti-semitism I mean antipathy or opposition, not necessarily to Jews as people or even their religion considered only as such, but to characteristically Jewish modes of thinking. By these I mean roughly those consistent with its forms of ethical monotheism. Which among other things excludes magic and myth. There are fictional stories in Jewish sacred history and literature but they do not function normally as myths in the sense they take on in other cultures, including the Indo-European ones, which are the main referent usually of mythagogues like Wagner, Jung, and their followers. Note that there is none of this of course in Freud, who believed that the irrationality of the mind has its own reasons that can be explored. But his thinking is scientific and not mythical. By mythagogy I mean a pedagogy based on stories that the pupil is expected to believe because they appeal to his desires and intuitions. It is a form of mystagogy, which classically is the initiation of a person into sacred mysteries. By sacred mystery I mean a story that has some magical efficacy when engaged in in the right way but that cannot really be explained. Mystery is different from enchantment, as in romanticist poetry, which poses a different but related problem, which in late modern Europe was that of modernity itself, thought of as disenchanted. There are all kinds of enchantments today, usually adhering to artworks. They are not beyond explanation, which is why there is a role for art criticism. (I am a critic).