[Buddha-l] Buddhism and Psychology research

[Dan Lusthaus]

> Ot sure why you feel compelled to erect this particular straw man at this 
> point.

Primarily because it is not a straw man. The evidence of Jung's antisemitism 
prior to and during the war is not in question. The smokescreen emerges in 
the discussion of what he did -- what he was --  after the war. He never 
owned up to what he did during the war, spent the '40s blaming a "Jewish 
conspiracy" and the "Freudians in India" for trying to besmirch his good 
name, and made sure to keep embarrassing things, like his Zarathustra 
lectures out of the English-reading public eye (those materials only came 
out after his death -- try to buy a copy... Bollingen only makes the 
expurgated version available -- and guess what sort of stuff is 
expurgated?). Case closed.

There are a number of ways one can look at these sorts of things. Generally, 
it seems, if one "likes" a miscreant, one finds way to forgive, whitewash, 
or de-emphasize the negative. Find some socially redeeming value in the 
smut. The parallel with Shimano, et al. is that folks don't want to see 
their heroes tarnished. It's wearisome, upsetting, unsettling, and downright 
uncomfortable.

As for why this comes up now, someone has been repeatedly tried to smear 
Freud with the charge of cocaine addict. There is no comparison between 
being an antisemite for one's entire life (Jung couldn't even disguise it 
during his first meeting with Freud -- read Freud's diary of that meeting), 
and having a temporary experimental episode with cocaine (I'll bet a good 
percentage of the readers of this list have had a comparable period in their 
life). Just as Buddha spent 29 years in gross indulgence in pleasure, and 
then 6 years of ascetism to counteract that (6 months of intense 
self-abnegation), in order to arrive at a Middle Way by understanding how 
pleasure and pain operate in our lives, Freud's experiment -- for which he 
became quite enthusiastic -- helped him understood what he came to formulate 
as the pleasure principle.It was a phase he passed through, and left behind 
once he learned more about it. Unlike Jung's antisemitism, Freud moved on. 
(See? I've illustrate the principle mentioned in the previous paragraph. 
NIfty, huh?)

So what does one do with imperfect beings? The Nobel peace prize was 
established by A. Nobel who made his fortune developing and selling 
dynamite. Does that taint Nobel? You bet. Is it better that he spent some of 
that explosive money on something like a peace prize instead of further war 
machinery? You bet. It's Better. Not good. Certainly not best.

Are there "fatal" flaws, flaws so unredeemable that one cannot tip the 
scales back? I guess that will be in the eyes of the beholder. At the least 
one has to make an effort to fix the problem -- hiding and accusing 
conspirators of creating it is not a fix.

Was Freud a flawed man? No doubt. But he studied himself, and he and we 
learn from his observations. Jung never faced up to his antisemitism, his 
philandering, or the many other now well known flaws in his behavior. I 
guess if one is looking for a way to ignore antisemitism (or condone 
sleeping with one's patients), Jung can be one's model. Let's not forget 
that Brian Victoria has shown that the same pack of Shimamo backers in Japan 
were also deep antisemites. These are NOT unrelated matters, Tim.

Dan