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The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. - book reviews
National Review, July 10, 1995 by James Gardner
INTELLECTUAL doctrines, no less than popular songs and women's hemlines, are subject to the whims of fashion. During the touchy-feely Seventies, few readers felt that Freud had anything to offer them. He was the god of their parents' generation, the psychiatric equivalent of Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett -- terminally unhip and passe.
Those were the days when Jung's message of the universal togetherness of all peoples at all times, as enunciated by such apostles as Joseph Campbell, seemed to offer endlessly luminous possibilities. By the 1980s, however, things had changed drastically. Rejecting such expansive, ``Californian'' humanism, intellectuals returned to Freud in droves. Not only did Freud's sexual pessimism chime with the spirit of the age of AIDS, but the endorsement of him by the most fashionable French thinkers, especially Lacan and Derrida, made him intellectually acceptable once again. Meanwhile Jung's reputation declined. Those who are intellectually a la page will have nothing to do with him now, for much the same reason that rock bands no longer sound like The Captain and Tennille. But yesterday's high-brow doctrines become today's midcult, and such New Age, Nineties phenomena as Thomas Moore's best-selling Care of the Soul are steeped in Seventies Jungianism. This of course is the kiss of death. For the more the midcult admires Jung, the less high-brows will have anything to do with him. Symptomatic of the assault on the Swiss analyst is this new book by Richard Noll, who goes so far as to assert that Jung saw himself literally as a god and created a religion around himself. ``For literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thou- sands, of individuals in our culture,'' Noll writes, ``Jung and his ideas are the basis of a personal religion that either supplants their participation in traditional organized Judaeo-Christian religion or accompanies it.'' Though Noll never says so explicitly, he pretty much places Jung in the company of the crystal-gazing, pyramid-power people in the Ashrams of the Northwest. In a sense Jung brought this upon himself. The son of a parson, he was decidedly more religious than Freud, who liked to refer to himself as a ``godless Jew.'' Jung's deep-rooted spiritualism manifested itself in a greater interest in astrology, alchemy, and the I Ching than men of science are supposed to express. Whereas for Freud religion was merely a projection of certain personal neuroses, for Jung it represented a universal striving for spiritual wholeness. Psychic life was not, as Freud believed, a ceaseless war of competing drives, but the self's quest for internal balance, which Jung called the Individuation Process. Nor did he see the individual as being at war with society, as Freud did, but as part of a human community that crossed national and religious boundaries as well as centuries. The common language of this community, what Jung called the archetypes of the collective unconscious, was a universal storehouse of shared motifs proceeding from the very structure of the mind itself. All of this, of course, is Seventies talk. This is the way ``we'' sounded two decades ago and may sound again, but to sound that way today is to lay oneself open to charges of cultism and worse, such as characterize Mr. Noll's book. And yet the substance of his extraordinary claim that Jungianism (or Jungism, as he likes to call it) is literally a religion amounts to nothing more than this: occasionally, in his self-analysis, Jung uses a technique he calls ``active imagination'' to explore the unconscious. He imagines a descent into a dreamworld of spirits and wisemen, a landscape filled with luminous archetypes. Rather than concealing this technique, Jung discussed it in his memoirs, and despite Noll's claims to the contrary, Jung understood full well that he engaged in an imaginative game. Noll's methodology, however, is a kind of entrenched literalism -- a quality that, as Jung himself might remark, is typical of the minds of children and primitive peoples -- whereby he supposes that everything Jung says, despite Jung's disclaimers, must be taken at face value. Once we remove this literalism, Noll's argument doesn't amount to much. In fact, most of the time, Noll never really asserts anything at all. Instead, he fudges and fudges and fudges. Here, for instance, are the openings of the first four sentences of chapter nine: ``During those long hours [with Gross], Jung must have learned . . . Included in this analysis was no doubt . . . Perhaps most important for our purposes, Jung probably heard . . . Jung also no doubt heard . . .'' What Mr. Noll is really saying in this entirely typical passage is that he has no direct evidence for what he is saying, but is merely assuming it. More often than not his exposition is not so much corrupt as simply confused. Commenting on the fact that in 1925 Jung delivered a series of lectures in English, Mr. Noll writes that ``the symbolism of this decision cannot be underestimated [he means, of course, overestimated], for it signals Jung's willingness to spread the gospel of his mysteria around the world.'' Now first of all, even if we accepted this kind of baseless ``symbolic'' reading, it should be said that English was not in 1925 the universal language it became, under American influence, a generation later. Second, even if we believe that Jung saw himself as a mystagogue, it is surely in the interest of mysteries that they be kept secret except to initiates, rather than that they be published for the inspection of all comers. Third, Noll asserts elsewhere that training in Jungian analysis can cost up to $100,000, a fact that he apparently wishes sinisterly to recall the way certain televangelists get rich off their congregations. And yet it is precisely because Jungian analysis is not a religion but a medical practice that training in it costs as much as, but not more than, Freudian training or medical school -- or law school for that matter. One could go on in this vein, but only at the risk of answering a fool with his folly. Which is not to say that the present book is useless. It seeks to place the Swiss physician in the context of Germanic and European culture in the late nineteenth century, an undertaking that, in more responsible hands, would certainly be worth while. For Jung, just as surely as Freud, was a child of his time, one upon whom a great many of the doctrines and attitudes of fin de siccle Europe exerted their influence. Without question the mind of Jung was wrought upon by a thousand disparate strains -- Nietzsche, German Protestant theology, Spengler, Wagner, Haeckel -- as Noll points out. But even here he goes too far, suggesting darksome links between Jung and fascism, mostly because certain elements of the thought of both derived from a common source (although it must be said that Jung's repudiation of Nazism before the end of the war was never as vigorous as it ought to have been). Such discerning of links and common origins is a favorite sport of contemporary intellectual life, which imagines that if any tie can be found, however adventitious, between a modern movement we despise and an older thinker whom an author somehow dislikes, then that thinker's reputation must have been dealt a lethal blow. Thus, the totalitarian regimes of Soviet Russia are laid at the feet of Kant and Rousseau, and Schopenhauer is responsible for the rise of Nazism. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Noll went so far as to link Jung to a Swiss messianic cult, the mass suicide of whose members made the headlines last November. The controversy that resulted from that article induced Princeton University Press, which published both this book and the complete works of Jung, to withdraw its support for a collection, to be edited by Noll, of Jung's religious writings which, Noll feels, will corroborate his belief in Jung's messianism. Surely Princeton should reconsider, though it would do well to entrust the project to someone other than the author of this book.
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