Warwick’s review of The Jung Cult : Origins of a Charismatic Movement > Likes and Comments

I agree that many leave out the bits of historical connections that people don't like but they provide a context that I think helps. I'm no Jungian expert or fan-girl but he did have some great stuff, especially being pretty much the first one out of the gate on a lot of it. HIs own personal life was downright messy but I don't know many in the field that don't have some stuff hidden away in the closet. I wonder what Jung would say about how his influence has impacted current therapeutic principles as well as present day culture?

I wonder if Noll is aware that Jung worked with US intelligence to defeat the Nazis, and that Allen Dulles of the OSS, and later the director of the CIA, said that the world would "never know the debt" we owe to Jung for their defeat.

Mesoscope wrote: "I wonder if Noll is aware that Jung worked with US intelligence to defeat the Nazis, and that Allen Dulles of the OSS, and later the director of the CIA, said that the world would "never know the d..."

Interesting. I wasn't aware of this. Perhaps it is mentioned in the book? Thanks for the info.

@Jasmine, yeah the context is very revealing I think. He certainly brought about many very influential developments, though I wonder if his influence has been more on New Age thinking and the world of therapy than on psychology as a science.

@Mesoscope, well of course he is. But the argument here is not at all that Jung had ‘prefascist’ ideas. Just that he was drawing on the same web of ideas about Aryanism and German philosophy that the National Socialists also did, which is why Jung's connections to it have been neglected (Noll argues).

Wow it really interesting I would love us to be friends for more inspiration let's chat okay send me a message

Well, then it seems like bad taste to me, to put it mildly, for an author to criticize someone whom he knows to have actively and instrumentally opposed the Nazi regime for "drawing on the same web of ideas".

What did Noll do to fight the Nazis that gives him the moral high ground? Draw from more ideologically-unobjectionable sources?

He doesn't assume the moral high ground, Mesoscope, and he's not criticising Jung for drawing on those ideas. He's just pointing out that that intellectual heritage existed, and Jung didn't develop his theories simply by studying Freud and Adler, but by building on a whole host of other pseudoscientific (as we'd now consider them) thinkers and writers. When he does criticise Jung – and for sure Noll is quite critical in places – it's really about the cultish aspects of his movement, and the ways he presented quasi-mystical ideas as hard science.

Warwick wrote: "He doesn't assume the moral high ground, Mesoscope, and he's not criticising Jung for drawing on those ideas. He's just pointing out that that intellectual heritage existed, and Jung didn't develop..."

Well, what you said in your review was: "indeed Noll takes a grim pleasure in highlighting ‘the similarity between Jungian psychology and National Socialism’", but I haven't read the book.

True, I think he does. He’s trying to have his cake and eat it I’d say, but whether or not he gets away with it will be up to you.

I know that it's exceedingly unpopular, but I think Carl Jung is one of the greats. I do not believe he is an irrationalist, I think he worked in a manner of psychological and cultural analysis which is rigorous, but according to standards that are unrecognizable to scientists of a different training, or who tend to a more pedantic stripe. We could ask, for example, if one agrees that crucial psychological information is found in Goethe's Faust - one's answer might be a strong clue for determining which side one is on.

By today's standards he's an easy target, and he does, no doubt, give rise to slavish imitators - that should embarrass anyone of good intellectual conscience. As Carl Jung once said, "Thank God I'm Jung, and not a Jungian."

"...one of the most revealing and entertaining books on Jung, as well as one of the most cynical.

Hand, meet glove.

Great review Warwick. I’ve definitely found a lot of Jung’s ideas to be downright bizarre, and it seems like Noll’s biography is the right place to go to make sense of some of his more outlandish assertions.

@Mesoscope, I definitely agree that he's one of the most interesting and probably one of the most influential thinkers of the century, but that doesn't mean he was entirely rational. I mean he clearly believed in communing with spirits, in predicting the future, in alchemy, so I think the charges of irrationality are fair game. The comparison with Goethe is instructive, I think – Jung wanted his writing to work on that mythic level, even though he was writing ‘science’ and not poetry.

@Justin, yes it's a very productive approach in Jung's case!

@Kevin, thanks man, a lot of Jung fans really hate him, but even if you don't agree with Noll I think this context is exactly what is missing from a lot of discussions of Jung.

Warwick wrote: "I mean he clearly believed in communing with spirits, in predicting the future, in alchemy, so I think the charges of irrationality are fair game."

We can simply agree to mildly disagree, of course, but here I would question your use of "believe", which implies that there is one kind of belief, as though Jung believed in spirits or alchemy in the same sense that he believed that the Detroit Tigers won the 1968 World Series. Jung emphasized again and again that he took the data of the conscious and unconscious minds as psychological facts, and was not interested in asserting them to be empirically true, which he characterized as metaphysical speculation, and held to be unsuitable for the psychologist.

I think it only takes a little epistemological sophistication, then, to understand how a "man of science" could be interested in occult "phenomena", especially a man as learned as Jung, and as deeply aware that the unconscious spontaneously produces its own experiences of supernatural and divine powers that precisely mirror myths and legends from around the world.

Again, feel free to move on if you're done with this conversation, but I thought that was worth saying.