To the Editor:

The view of Carl Jung as ''neither personally anti-Semitic nor politically astute,'' which Robert S. Boynton ascribes to Deirdre Bair, the author of ''Jung'' (Jan. 11), is a further contribution to a misleading attempt to minimize the importance of Jung's anti-Semitic racism and his contributions to the Third Reich's genocidal policies. I would refer both Bair and Boynton to a book by James E. Goggin and Eileen Brockman Goggin, ''Death of a 'Jewish Science': Psychoanalysis in the Third Reich,'' if they wish to have a more realistic appraisal of Jung's racism and his involvement with Nazi politics.

It is difficult to dismiss the Goggins' careful presentation of Jung's involvement with the Nazi movement; his views on Jewish mental and emotional life are at the very core of Nazi propaganda. He was a consultant to Matthias Göring, Hermann's psychotherapist cousin, and lectured extensively in Germany during the 1930's.

It is pathetic that Jung should be excused from responsibility for his virulent racism and his importance in the Nazi movement. Most important, it is likely that his ideas about psychoanalysis were instrumental in Hitler and Göring's desire to cleanse psychoanalysis of Freud's ideas -- especially the notion of the Oedipus complex, which apparently offended Hitler's sensibilities. To conclude that Martin Heidegger was more of a collaborator than Jung serves to divert attention from the serious nature of Jung's involvement with the Nazis' anti-Semitic propaganda. Whether he was a worse offender than Heidegger is hard to assess, but as one who wrote papers on the inferiority of the Jewish race, Jung deserves a special degree of condemnation, not the lame excuse granted him by both Bair and Boynton.

Henry J. Friedman, M.D.

Cambridge, Mass.