The Jung Cult : Origins of a Charismatic Movement (1994)

Noll was raised in a Jesuit prep school. Jung's ideas have always run afoul of traditional religious views so it should be no surprise that someone like Noll wrote this hit piece on Jung. Noll even goes so far as to constantly insinuate that Jung was an anti-Semite with an "essential German character" which considering Jung's close relationship with Jews in his career (Freud) and his warnings against Hitler is utterly laughable. Noll uses little more than insinuation, inference and speculation to "support" his opinions. It's clear that Noll finds Jung's ideas threatening to his own Christian exceptionalism and he exhibits gross obtuseness in his conceptions of Jung's theories . I'm surprised Noll has made any head way in psychology as a career but it just goes to show what a broad spectrum of opinions there are in the mental health profession. However, I must say any influential charismatic public figure like Jung can certainly inadvertently arouse a charismatic cult surrounding him so there's some merit there. But Noll could have just as easily wrote a book like this about Einstein. How many idolatry posters of Einstein do people see on school walls? Quite a lot, but Einstein didn't offend Noll's fundamentalist worldview did he? Now we see that this book tells us far more about Noll than it does Jung or Jungians. This work constitutes a lot of factually unsupported accusatory moralizing from an author with nothing more than a fundamentalist chip on his shoulder. ( )

Not as bad or as crack-pot as the Jung factory would have one believe. ( )