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5.0 out of 5 stars
An honest reply to an unfounded attack on C.G. Jung, October 18, 1998
This review is from: Cult Fictions: C. G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology (Paperback)
Sonu Shamdasani's book `Cult Fictions' is a welcome reprieve for serious scholars of C.G. Jung and the history of analytical psychology. This is especially true since the appearance in print of such caricatured views of Jung and Jungian ideas which only recently Richard Noll in his `Aryan Christ' (1997) and `The Jung Cult' (1994) has tried to popularize. Mr. Shamdasani's work is a short, scholarly work, honestly practicing a hermeneutics which one has learned to appreciate in his earlier works. It is a pity that Mr. Shamdasani has to set the record straight visavis such walk-on `historian of science' as Mr. Noll has demonstrably turned himself into. This seems a terrible waste of time, yet it needed to be done, for Mr. Noll's scholarship is ingenious, but simply wrong! Let me elaborate:
1) For a scholarly `historian of thought', and Noll insists on being a scholar, it is certainly odd that he omitts in his own work the one work of a prior scholar who was certainly one of the first to show Jung in a critical light. I refer to Paul J. Stern, C.G. Jung: The Haunted Prophet, George Braziller:New York, 1976. Such unkind and unscholarly practice may be due to Noll's own unchartered career in a science which must be new to him. For if one checks Noll's amazing 'scholarly' development and publishing record, he has morphed himself from an erstwhile clinical psychologist into an unpedigreed `historian of science'. During this process, unfortunately, he seems never to have heard of a science of hermeneutics nor the epistemological uncertainty. The result is not more `Verstehen' but mere caricature of historical figures and movements.
2) Let's look at some details: To show with what broad brush Noll paints: In his Aryan Christ, page 71, he says in reference to Otto Gross: "To Jung he (Otto Gross) was so much more, but neither Jung nor his followers have acknowledged his importance. As he (Jung) revised his published works over the course of his life, Jung carefully removed references to colleagues, who fell prey to scandal or suicide. Otto Gross was certainly one of them. Nevertheless, Jung's cataclysmic encounter with Gross is a critical episode in the secret history of his life." Now, isn't it strange that when taking in hand the General Index to Jungs Collected Works, looking up Gross, Otto, there are entries to Otto Gross and his works in Jung's Collected Works, volumes 2, 3, 4, 6, some two dozens page references in all. Yet, Noll would like his readers to believe that Jung banned Otto Gross from his scholarly works. It is simply not true. What smoke screens is Noll trying out here?
In the above reference, Noll mentions Jung's colleagues `who fell prey...to suicide'. Obviously, this remarks refers to J. Honegger, an early associate of Jung's, while at the Burghoelzli mental hospital in Zuerich. Now, it is true, that in the Collected Works, Jung took out the reference to Honegger when he rewrote his seminal work 'Symbols of Transformation' in 1950. Rewriting a book is any author's prerogative, and Jung has, in a lengthy foreword to the rewritten work, stated clearly why he felt he had to rewrite that work. On the other hand, the original German "Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido" was republished in 1991, (in its exact 1911/1912 text), and of course, there, the two references to Honegger are in place, just as they were in the original text. Again, here, it is clear that Noll is guilty of cryptomnesia, or plain lying, or whatever one wants to call his ingeniously devious method. The critical reader is taken aback noticing how Noll charges Jung with just the kind of obfuscation that Noll himself is practicing on nearly every page. There are several other dubious scholarly things Noll does, but let this suffice for the time being.
3) Coming back to Jung and Noll's interest in him, Noll has certainly moved from Paul back to Saul. Between 1992 and 1994, Noll had no problem publishing his informative and gushing adulations as well as his renegade und puerile views of Jung in mainstream Jungian journals, notably the Journal of Analytical Psychology (JAP) and SPRING (A Journal of Archetype and Culture). But at that time, Noll's methodical madness had not truly come into the open. Now, after two books by Noll on Jung it is patently clear: To anyone having even an inkling of the scholarship on Jung and Freud as well as the scholarship on literary and artistic developments in Germany, Austria and Switzerland at the turn of the century, Noll is practicing a method last known to have been practiced by Senator McCarthy during the anti-communist Witch Hunt in the USA. Noll's misuse of the term 'volkish' and 'aryan' in reference to Jung - geared specifically to an American audience - is blatantly racist in its own terms - but it will sell books.
Sonu Shamdasani outlines in a point-by-point account his particular answers to Noll as regards his imagined existance of 'cults' and 'secret lives', none of which ever existed when viewed in the clear light of reason while practicing a responsible 'history of science'. Sonu Shamdasani is to be congratulated for his excellent scholarship into Jung and the early years of analytical psycholgoy. We can only hope for others to continue.
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