The Jung Cult: Origins Of A Charismatic Movement

by Richard Noll

Winner of the 1994 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Psychology, Association of American Publishers

The classic path-breaking contextual history of the development of C.G. Jung's thought and Nietzschean religious movement.

The international sensation that was published in Portuguese (Brazil), Swedish, Danish, Japanese, Chinese and Italian translations.

" Richard Noll gives us the 'historical Jung': his goal is neither to idealize nor denigrate Jung but to recover the diverse cultural and intellectual contexts out of which Jung's ideas emerged and to highlight the complex personal, professional, and ideological functions of the early Jung movement. Exceptionally, almost universally, well-read in the field of post-Enlightenment German-languate culture and thought, Noll is ideally suited to this task. . . . it is impossible, henceforth to claim that Jung scholarship is in any way 'behind' Freud Studies." 
                  historian Mark S. Micale, Yale University

"Richard Noll's careful, well-researched and well-reasoned study of the cultural context of Jung's psychology presents the centrality of notions of race and power extrapolated from the reception of Nietzsche's thought at the turn of the century. . . A brilliant must-read for any scholar seriously interested in the history of psychoanalysis/"
                  historian Sander L. Gilman, Cornell University

   ". . . an important study . . . "     Frederick Crews, The New York Review of Books        

"This is by far the best book written on Jung to date . . . . Noll's presentation of the volkisch idelogy is excellent and deserves to be read by even those who have little or no interest in Jung's thinking."    Martin Kusch, British Journal for the History of Science

Genres: Psychology, History, Biography, Nonfiction, Cults, Psychoanalysis, Conspiracy Theories

387 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1994

About the author

Dr. Richard Dean Noll, Ph.D. (Clinical Psychology, New School for Social Research, 1992; B.A., Political Science, University of Arizona, 1979), is a clinical psychologist, historian of medicine, and Associate Professor of Psychology in the College of Sciences at DeSales University (Pennsylvania). Previously, he taught and conducted research at Harvard University for four years as a postdoctoral fellow and as Lecturer on the History of Science. During the 1995–1996 academic year, he was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a resident fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some biographies struggle to shake off the taint of hagiography. This is the other kind.

Noll's study of Jung isn't really all that interested in psychology – or indeed in biography – but rather in the history of ideas, broadly speaking. So what we see here is not the usual story of Jung's break with Freud and innovations in therapy, but rather a fascinating portrait of the Germanic intellectual context out of which his ideas arose, a context which has been glossed over or even obscured by his followers.

Noll talks about uncovering the ‘historical Jung’ behind all the myth-making, a project which he compares explicitly to uncovering the historical Jesus. ‘History,’ Noll says drily, ‘is not the bread of the faithful’, and even Jung's own pseudo-memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is dismissed here as a ‘product of discipleship’, to be picked apart wherever possible.

I am a big fan of this approach, which makes for a wonderfully spiky and wide-ranging narrative; I also think it is undeniably convincing in explaining aspects of Jung's thought which otherwise seem rather bizarre for a man who tried to present himself as a scientific physician. Noll shows how Jung's ideas come out of a rich context of German vitalism, Lebensphilosophie, and what he calls ‘völkisch utopianism’, meaning a kind of folksy, half-mystical nationalism.

One reason this has proved so controversial – and Richard Noll is a dirty word among orthodox Jungians at this point – is that this context is the same intellectual heritage that was drawn on by the Nazi party, and indeed Noll takes a grim pleasure in highlighting ‘the similarity between Jungian psychology and National Socialism’.

Sometimes, it must be said, this can feel rather forced. It certainly starts to seem a bit strange when even minor comments in the text turn out, upon checking the footnotes, to be founded on citations from books with titles like The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, or The Occult Roots of Nazism. This obsession may be more Noll's than Jung's; but the connections are there all the same.

And it's valuable to see them because those ideas – precisely because of their association with Nazism – have been rejected and downplayed, especially when it comes to individual biography. But here we see reflected in Jung all those concepts of sun-worship, matriarchy, sexual freedom and self-deification that are also seen in, for example, the contemporaneous counterculture of Ascona. Noll sees Jungianism ultimately as something that

extolled the irrational and the intuitive […] a transcendental Weltanschauung that was closer to a religion than to twentieth-century science.

This is more or less my impression too, from my very limited reading of Jung. But Noll's contribution is not just to assert this, but to put it in a full historical and cultural context, so that it simply can't be ignored. Deirdre Bair, whose big biography of Jung is scrupulously fair to its subject (sometimes to the point of tedium), cites Noll a lot, and she says somewhere in her bibliography that although he is often overly critical, his research is just too good to be dismissed.

This is for sure one of the most revealing and entertaining books on Jung, as well as one of the most cynical. It's also just a brilliant history of a particular strand of thinking – from Goethe to Nietzsche to Haeckel to Madame Blavatsky – too often overlooked by cultural historians. When Jung bought into it, Noll says, ‘he left the scientific world and academia, never really to return’ – which may be fatal for his reputation as a scientist, but to anyone with a neutral interest it's riveting.

[Matthew W · Rating 2 out of 5]

Truly a work of your typical modern day nihilistic and soulless intellectual. Author Richard Noll goes for all the typically low blows of modern day academia labeling Jung an anti-Semite, closet-Nazi, racist, blah blah blah.... If you want to read a serious discrediting of a psychoanalytic pseudo-Scientist, read evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald's "Culture of Critique," which details Freud's hidden goal with psychoanalysis of subverting Germanic tradition (especially in regard to gender). It should not be a surprise as to why Jung broke with his former "master" Freud...

Maybe Richard Noll would have had an easier time detailing Freud's anti-Teuton agenda. Of course, that would be "anti-semitic."

Maybe Noll should stick to writing on shamanism and cultural anthropology. After all, even if Franz Boas was an anti-German liberal fraud that has been proven to have falsified his "Scientific" evidence during his "research," that does not matter since Boas was an anti-racist and he invented the myth that race is a social construct. A biological and ancestral "social construct" that Carl Jung devoted his life to.

[Isidore · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's remarkable that this very measured, very careful attempt to restore Jung to his proper place in the history of early twentieth-century mysticism has aroused so much hostility. Far from being particularly provocative, the book is, if anything, rather undramatic. However, Noll does a good job of explaining Ariosophy and Jung's connection with it, and the information about his and his disciples' anti-scientific, cultish behaviour is useful and revealing. A refreshing change from the all-too-often uncritical acceptance of the ideas of Jung and his followers (such as Joseph Campbell) which one encounters these days.

[Mir]

Jung did most of his work in Switzerland, which I learned from this book was (is?) a hotbed of occult, spiritualism, and off-the-wall ideas. He was charismatic and controlling, gaining a pervasive and influential following. The 'collective unconscious' can be broken free from, but only through a substantive process of psychoanalysis to find the individual self.

Noll saus that Jung rejected both science and religion completely, although by Noll's own description Jung sounds sort of neo-pagan. He was interested in Mithraism, Zoroastrianim, Greek and Norse myths, runes, ancient secret occult practices, etc.

Archetypes and symbols are innate to humans. These must be understood to be controlled.

[Jose Luis Belmonte · Rating 5 out of 5]

No wonder Princeton presented this book for a the Pulitzer in 1995, even though it did not get it. Very well researched and quite well written, I would have missed the real Jung unless I had read this book. In order to understand Jung between 1902 and 1920, the very formative years when he came up with and ans started developing the theory of complexes which later evolved into the archetypes, the theory of the psychological types, the theory of the collective unconscious and concepts like synchronicity, individuation, active imagination, among others, it takes not only a psychologist or a psychiatrist but a deep scholar interest in philosophy, mysticism, religion, myth, astrology, alchemy and the new age movements at the end of XIX century and beginning of the 20th in German speaking countries, France, England and the US, along with understanding of the classics, specially hermetism, gnosticism, early christian pagan mysticism and neoplatonism, mostly, and I might have left other important disciplines Jung delved into.
This is the first five I give to a book in goodreads. The book could be better ordered, but the work is impressive. Highly recommendable if you really want to know who Jung really was.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

In one chapter Richard Noll states that C.G. Jung admired and was influenced by the work of Richard Wagner. He completes the chapter with a statement to the effect of, "Do you know who else liked Wagner? Adolf Hitler". Noll's dislike of Jung and his work is quite evident.

Another section of the book goes to task trying to debunk the idea of the collective unconscious. While Noll has a valid point that various patients whose dreams or delusions had been interpreted as evidence could be a result of exposure to mythology, his tendency to assume everyone Jung or his colleagues analyzed was well-versed in Theosophical publications is unlikely.

Noll also seems to have the opinion that any religiosity not connected to an orthodox authority is suspect. If people flocked to Jung for spiritual rebirth why is that any less valid or dangerous than a church for redemption?

[Jesper Lindholm]

Yeah so I just looked into the profiles of people who rated this book. Low ratings came from people who have rated hundreds, if not thousands of books here. Avid readers. Five stars come from people with less than 20 read books and they clearly have an agenda.
That says it all. I don't need to read this book after reading some of the reviews here.

[R · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was first considering writing a big essay here on some of the unusual occult happenings that occurred in the late 19th, early 20th century. How ideas like precursor civilizations and even Darwin's research let loose a frenzy of intellectual activity, academic reform, spiritualism, lodge building, etc. that defined the early 20th, most of which was then was promptly forgotten by us due to not one, but two highly destructive wars. It's very hard to understand for example how the same culture that produced the Bauhaus and one of the first modern clinics to take the study of transgender people seriously, also produced a kind of anti-government bent on destroying anything that disagreed with their vision of a perfect authoritarian utopia.

But, to be honest, nah. It's a lot to explain. Read this well researched book only if you really wanted to know, in precise forgotten detail, how this guy fits in with those times. How the same ideas of shared languages and celebrating one's culture could produce all of the following: orgiastic back to nature cults, sun worship, visions of national utopia, utopias of identity, alcoholics anonymous - all this whacky stuff, and yet, could also produce an insane pseudo-mystical political party that would become a fascist regime willing to experiment on its own population.

The truth is, the mystery of how so many good ideas led to so many bad ones, and how scholarly and scientific people came to rub shoulders with such dangerous weirdos, was a topic that had been written about and discussed a great deal by the time I came around as a young college age person. Already, the tomes devoted to the spectacular failure of human hopes, the crashing descent of several visions of a new 'scientific religion' into utter madness, and the collision of scholarship (for example, the best euro Sanskrit scholars of the time were German) with the poorly spent bloat of colonial wealth, that ultimately turned a national unification movement into the cannibalism of their neighbors as their experiments spun out. It was a disturbing two-faced coin with a shiny optimism on one side, and ruthless, forced change upon the world on the other.

So I think no, I don't want to explain all that I found in several generation's worth of commentary for me to dig around as a curious teen. What captured my interest about Jung was the abundance of cheap reading material on a variety of unusual topics like dreams and esp, with cool illustrations of things I already liked, and the premise that it was about having a scientific discussion of how the mind works. And maybe there's a huge advantage to being a self-taught reader, as there was no framing no culture around how I ran into the stuff, just the books themselves, in some used shop where it was really quiet.

The author makes a case that Jung was one product of a cultish explosion, and ultimately created his own version of what so many others were also creating around him. The author, though not being explicit about their angle, apparently has a disgruntled Catholic vibe to them, but I am no expert. Just in terms of what they object to - he felt Jungians were out to dismantle Christianity, or that they were sun worshippers or gleeful heretics. It's a march through time and a spaghetti bowl of various groups trying to revive their culture through optimism, sometimes with a little yoga. And it was all so popular, so successful, that a more political cult, the Nazis, just ran with it, not only seeking to replace traditional religious difference with a new state religion, but to erase democratic government and replace that too. To be fair to the author, he doesn't go too far. He isn't urgent to convict but meticulous about the larger picture, and ultimately does not find it to be the case that Jung was a Nazi. I'm glad that he does survive and that his books reached me because his theories of the mind are good and useful, they make sense to me, even if his science and history resources were not remotely what it is today. People were convinced, as much as by the dinosaurs showing that evolution was true, as by new archeology which seemed to show the 'great mystery of where civilization began' was soon to be solved. Of course, now we know we haven't even been talking for very long as a species, for example. All this is to say, look how much what we are preoccupied with has changed in a hundred years, even in intellectual circles. It's impossible to say we have not changed, or become something new, and we are clearly in mid-flight through a series of changes. Now that we have both the optimism and the cautionary tale, what will we choose?

Many of his favorite topics were the same big historical mysteries found in the Classics - What were people like way back? What were my people like way back? Is there some memory of them, in me? Topics like Alchemy, the Gnostics, and the Mithraism were all 'mystery' subjects in his time - their scholarship was well known to be largely speculative, so they've long fascinated the curious. He correctly intuited that a cultural unification movement had taken place in antiquity, setting the stage for things, and it made his era feel like a next phase in a kind of epic historical development. He wanted to be a part of that, it shows in much of his work, and then he saw it made a turn the other way instead, and perhaps like many in his generation, came to a shocking conclusion that the coldness of colonialism was going to impact his life in the 'cradle of advancement' meaning there was no dividing line between these worlds. The enthusiasm over mental fitness crashes hard into the immense, animalistic scale of difficulty found in human dissatisfaction.

The era was also full of a furious pursuit of scientific explanations for everything, from atoms to language to evolution to ghosts, but what does it mean to try to explain our follies? A bit different than taking the temperature of a room. Simple yet game changing discoveries like electricity, a hidden energy that could suddenly be harnessed by anyone with some copper wire and a hand crank, seemed poised to convince them all that a New Age, of a better understanding of hidden spiritual life, had also arrived. For them, it felt like scientific advancement, to make sweeping guesswork of the course of ancient history. And then with all that enthusiasm for empire and the divinely chosen species' grandeur, they started to blow entire cities up, and have more or less not ceased to try this. Erasing two generations in three from ordinary life building. I suppose in a way, science is the result of a very ancient human desire for more accurate prophecy. But you get a picture that a hundred years ago, it wasn't clear where it was all going, but felt overwhelming enough to mobilize intense new efforts in our societies, towards both beneficial and destructive poles.

It seems his constant attempt to lean into science spared Jung from doing anything spectacularly foolish (or perhaps those records are sealed) but his attraction to founding a new religion in his ancestral identity made him like a catamaran on edge, with one fin out of the water. But I can tell you he was very creative and inventive writer, not a polemicist, wanting to contribute original theory, not romances of the past. I do not remember finding anything anti-Semitic that I recall in my studies. This author confirms that, even so the whole intellectual world of the time flirted with different degrees of revisionism, so he could easily be placed at large commune like events with soon to be notorious theorists embraced by the party and praising problematic people. And also consider that after all, Jung sought a friend and teacher in Freud. While no mention at all is made of Reich, the other star pupil and his contemporary and fellow student, who devoted his early work to unpacking fascism, and led me into this whole rabbit hole as a teen reader, we can at least get a sense of where that little trio landed politically. What does set these figures apart from all the spiritual and philosophic climate of the day, was a conviction that people could be helped to have a healthier and more enjoyable life through study of their individual inner lives and stories, through psychology and the study of behavior and the body itself. It's arguably, along with people like Hesse and Kafka, some of the best material from those times and time seems to have proven them out. But it's also true that to really appreciate the work's roots, it should be considered the way its contemporary users viewed it. Their solutions and choices, the ones that lasted, come from a troubled time with a great deal of tangled ideas, and conspiracy theories seeming to infect the highest offices of government and education.

So, the book is a tidy history of the weird intersection of spiritualism, science, some of the first real scholarly introductions of east and west, and the birth of psychology right in the center of all of that, (all with some nude retreats and secret rituals thrown in for spice). It was highly enthusiastic until the Nazis and their kind made it weird, Christian esoterics (nationalists) from the dark side with an anti-immigration itch for to blame their financial woes, which of course really came from their rulers blowing the bank on acts of war. People like this somehow took the idea that science was going to make humanity shine, instead went with ideas like reeducation camps, you know, to hurry up the future. So many never made it back, or never made it back whole, from this 'purification for progress' thinking that still haunts the modern psyche with an iron grip. And so it became a scary thing to dream too stridently of cultural renewal for the West, because somehow, despite all the enthusiasm and sharing, it became the mean ones with their murder and weapons investments that dominated the argument. Nowadays we know better, internet chat rooms tend to be dominated by the most loud and abusive voices. People like Jung were trying to point out in the midst of the furor, that we have a biological tendency to follow symbols of things like 'pure reason' rather than directly trying to understand the thing itself. He became one of the voices of warning about the dangers of too much enthusiasm for transforming a society, and was especially concerned about disrupting the natural sense that life goes on, the world goes on, long after us. The long view was missing when progress or purification became too institutionalized. His work was mostly spent indicating that a good deal of human life was irrational, that emotional instability led to political instability, and a belief that to become purely anything, let alone that it could be enforced quickly on human lives, was far too unrealistic to implement in a humane way. In the aftermath, carrying with us into the present not many of them, just a few like him, we started to instead take more interest in the personal experience, and in places that escaped too much loss of autonomy, dropped like a hot rock the topic of national destiny.

This is where we arrive at the post war tale, and the arts and intellects turn to a whole new topic - optimism wasn't enough, those people blew up the world. Reinvention or revival were definitely not the perfect inoculation. So we started to invest more intensely in the inner life, the experience of the senses, the individual, and here is where our cultures remarkably started to share a vibe. Jung is a bridge between an era where the individual was like a sailboat resting on the top of an undersea mountain made of culture (which was even synonymous with the word race in old usage), but for more and more people like him, the sailboat was now a complete world to itself, capable of autonomy and self-creation. It could weigh anchor and sail far and become something different, and by doing so, become unique to itself. This wasn't entirely new or original, but it was the right direction. After the destruction, people stopped talking about blood, or who was the original race of Adam and Eve, or the other thousands of kooky ideas and conspiracies that people had then, about how humanity could be put back into the box of its original 'perfection'. We don't talk about original perfection anymore, and that is something to consider because it is very new.

The point is, this guy is right at ground zero of a time where is a lot of scary in this story of massive poetic hippie growth, the bohemian phenomenon, the last time something really awful was found hiding underneath some really wholesome sounding New Age stuff.

His theories of the Gnostics, Alchemy, Mithra, any number of concepts even mandalas, are really not perfectly reliable history today for the most part, and many of his historical conclusions have not borne out. That doesn't mean the ideas aren't interesting. or cohesive to finding a common psychological thread in individual cultural experiences, this remains vital and useful for many. Even today, we take a folk tale and like to retell it from the perspective of different characters, such as the Broadway play Wicked, or Jane Austen and Zombies, and this is the gist of what he was doing. He definitely gets revelatory in his language, and is pretty obsessed with ghosts, so yeah, I think it's fair to say that he must have had a cult of some sort around him, and despite his claims, not altogether a scientific purist. But what part of him was keeping to that, seems to have kept him out of political trouble, by respecting the cumulative effort of curious people with his intellectual trust.

A lot of that ghost talk has been walked back in the modern era by his professional disciples, shelved as 'visionary' material, and in certain cases even considered records of psychotic break which seems right to me. It's not too surprising considering the challenge to selfhood that this pioneering work entails. But I also think he was having genuine visionary experiences caused by diving into so much human expression and experiencing real phenomenon shaped by his studies. But then I think mystical literature and illuminated spiritual poetry is as psychotropic a substance as psilocybin! I think it's possible to induce waking dreams and visions simply by studying certain topics intensely, and that the reality of ideas becomes more concrete the more repetitions and social acceptance of it we encounter, as we have seen with bizarre community beliefs forming around patently unscientific ideas about the recent pandemic, like microchips small enough to fit in a vaccine.

Before Jung, philology held most of the sway over how the past was viewed - meaning similar sounding words, for example, were given as the main proof of relationships. Much of this is faulty.
At the heart of another old view, was a very common idea that all myths shared one source, and all peoples had a fragment of a single story, a secret template - this was the religious view for many, so it was very old, for example that most Europeans believed that the garden of Eden was in Palestine, and therefore was their ancestor home as it was for every single human being. It sounds so preposterous now, but not so long ago it was just taken for granted.

In Jung's own time and work, the new view became a biological one, which for him meant myths are archetypal, shared expressions of general structures within human consciousness. This allows us to obtain an essence of something from distant and ancient ideas, about our own inner lives, through the process of abstraction mainly. But this explains why Christians of his age were not so fazed by Darwin, but nowadays some of them are. It didn't used to be that different a theory, so technically an anti-evolution theory today, is mostly driven by new modern forms of racism. He was a student during a time when people were obsessed with finding evidence of human evolution underway, looking at our differences and then trying to identify the 'original human' so phrenology and racial typology were seen as sciences related to this search, which one of our faces is most like the first? hilarious their last guess was actually the correct one! This is discarded science that we now are incredibly embarrassed to admit ever happened! Fortunately, the theories are so wrong, so we don't have to talk about that cul-de-sac. Remember, during his early career, the hieroglyphs of Egypt and cuneiform were just beginning to be read and studied by a handful of experts, leaving these major silent partners to the West still largely mute and under-represented in the recall of the time.

The writer is annoyed at Jung for sun worship, probable orgies, and spending time with long haired hippies and environmentalists. But he's restrained about it, and almost charming for that. The author is annoyed that pagans still exist, especially with sun worship and its reliance on frequently bad history, but nicely so he doesn't browbeat us with correlated damnation, instead painting a good history of a bizarre chapter of humanities that has shaped a lot of today's worlds, like that of the New Age movements. Few of us I suspect realize how recent some of their cherished notions about the distant past actually are, while others, in the spirit of Jung's time, don't care for the academic process, still busy designing the 'next step in human evolution' (and selling books along the way).

Not a bad damnation from a disgruntled (Catholic?) who suspects any nature worship - however transparently invented and abstract - is always a slippery slope to fascism. While we know this is not true, alas, history showed us that for some, especially the violently inclined, it apparently can be.

To be honest, the middle third of the book where the writer questions a slew of theory, I just couldn't follow, not being fully educated in this, so I can't even assess that section.

While we can't do much about the social contexts we are born into, intention does matter - because it leads us to the individual. Somehow, all that madness of going back to some Past and Future Perfect, of nation and race and re-education theory, gave birth for survivors to a real determination to respect the individual instead. This empowerment of the individual to overcome context by following their own healthy development, is still fairly new and untried. A kind of fascinating phoenix from the flames that Jung would have appreciated is still being recognized - not a revival of the past, but something modified from out of our collective pasts, that can heal us and put an end to social sicknesses, like war and racism.

[Tommy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A partisan exposay of the questionable cultural milieu Jungs ideas developed in. I personally don't like Jung but can't help but feel this is a ridiculously one-sided Judeo-Christian smear job by looking at some of the questionable scholars cited e.g. Daniel Gasman. With the rise of the Peterson cult a truly impartial work is more necessary now than ever before. For a similar "scholarly" tone but from the opposite extreme perspective see "Freud and Jung: The social implications of psychological theory", Mankind Quarterly, Volume 33, Number 4, 1993.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know the true background of Jung's ideas on things like the collective unconsciousness, anima and more, without filtration of Jung's disciples who did, indeed, create a cult, start here.

If you want to know how Jung himself encouraged that cult, start here.

If you want to know how Jung covered his own historical tracks on things like his thought development or sexual relations with patients, start here.

==

I had read Noll's "The Aryan Christ" years ago. I had no idea there was a predecessor volume. (And, yes, that book's title is not totally metaphorical.)

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Examines the life and influences of Jung, and the enduring aspects of his reception in society.

[Bohdan Pechenyak · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic overview of how Carl Jung was a man of his times, being influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy, Wagnerist cult, German völkisch mysticism and occultism of the late 19th-early 20th century, theories of Müller, Bachofen, Haeckel, Keyserling, ultimately influencing both his work in psychology and the more intimate spiritual and individual development. Giving a solid cultural background, pointing out the many intellectual intersections, describing the chronological development of the charismatic Jung cult in late 1910s and into 1920s and 1930s, Richard Noll does a magnificent job in shedding light onto one of the most fascinating thinkers of the first half of the 20th centuries. Anyone interested in the genealogy of the ideas widely accepted in the present will find this book to be a treasure of knowledge.

[Mark Filiatreau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about the early days of Jung that puts his entire oeuvre into a fresh and nightmarish perspective.

[Anton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a good, well written book. Biased? No doubt. How biased? I'm not qualified to say. It's about stuff that happened, but put in a certain context. Jungian thought has gone on to expand in different directions in the same way that theory grows in all thought. The question, is there a God?, separates his thinking from much of what else has been said about psychology; no small thing, and continually swept under the rug. They all made mistakes. They kanoodled with the patients. With unpredictable and conflicting results. The allusions to the Nazis seems to me mostly due to the fact that the Nazis borrowed from the cultural content, both scholarly and folk, of the German speaking world at large, and came up with their own version of Aryan superiority, (it wasn't necessarily that of the Folk or the Scholars), corrupted inevitably by the great gap in our then knowledge of the Proto-Indo European language and culture. Am I on the right track?

[Valton Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement

Here is a book I wouldn’t have considered had I not been introduced to the theories of psychoanalysis and psychotherapists through my research. Richard Noll reveals a hard to believe world of mind sciences developed and promoted as answers to human issues. Wonderful as it initially seems it becomes abundantly clear that these theories are really occult philosophies. So how have these become mainstream ideas for training and health?

There are not many books that confront the Carl Jung narrative head, in this manner.

[Cal Davie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chilling. Jung still today can be of great intrigue to the young mind. Noll all but flattens his nonsense. This work is a great read for the modern day whilst charlatans like Jordan Peterson prance around. Much of his nonsense is very similar to and influenced by Jung. This is a great weapon to have in the armoury.

[Jordan B Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite an interesting read. I know that this work is controversial among Jung scholars, but at the very least, it provides some fascinating insights about the intellectual and spiritual mileau at the turn of the century, and of Jung's place within it.

[Jönathan]

Richard Noll does not like Jung much, but altogether an interesting attempt to place him in the context of the political and mystical climate of Germany in his time.

[A.J. Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important book. Anyone interested Jung and his enduring influence needs to read this book.