Dr. Jung nearly arrested by the Nazis

It is not unlike the present state of things in Germany.

I don't want to talk politics, but I can tell you one very interesting psychological item:

when I was in Germany I was consulted by some leading Nazis who wanted to keep me there, one of them actually said he should arrest me so that I would be forced to remain.

But why? I said, "I am no politician, I am a psychologist, what have I to do with your enterprise?"

And he replied: "Exactly, you are a psychologist, you are outside of the whole thing, so you are the man who could tell us what we are doing."

You see they don't know.

I marveled at that fellow, I think that is fine, it could almost convince one that there is something in it.

To say: We don't know what we are doing, is remarkable; if they say they know, well, who knows?

Nobody knows.

That man did exactly what the creator has done.

The creator must be a very great person, I suppose, so he created animals with enormous necks and snouts and horns and teeth and claws, he tried every possible stunt under the sun, small animals, big animals, giants, the most horrible grotesque objects you could imagine, most terrible beasts.

Then once he really asked himself: "Now what is that?"

And then he came to consciousness in order to know what it all meant, and man had to invent some tale about it.

Man was just like myself, a perfectly innocent psychologist who knows nothing of the job of the creator but is able to say: "You have created this animal."

So man named every animal to the Lord, he introduced the whole of God's creation to the Creator, who did not know he had created horses and donkeys and monkeys and human beings till man named them to him: "This is a poplar tree which you have created, and this is a donkey, and this is a snake, and that is a camel."

And the Lord said: "Now that is wonderful! I did not know that I had made snakes."

It is like the bourgeois gentilhomme who was being educated and his teacher told him that he spoke prose and the poets spoke poesy.
beginning of consciousness; with a bit of consciousness you begin to name things and then they are objectified.

So man was necessary.

And what that fell ow in Germany wanted was that I should name things; you thereby have it in the hollow of your hand apparently.

In antiquity also it was considered very important to know the names of things; and it is a great part of our scientific education that students are told what things are called; then they think they know something, but they only know the names of things. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1342-1343