Gunning for Jung

Zealous Jungians despise Noll–for his books The Jung Cult and The Aryan Christ, not to mention his 1994 op-ed essay in the New York Times in which he conceded Jung “the genius and medical credentials to make his own cult mainstream and meaningful” but nevertheless linked Jung’s name to those of David Koresh and Jim Jones.

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Yet even within this tradition of critical condescension, Smith’s review of Deirdre Bair’s Jung: A Biography in the January 21 New York Times was extreme. It began: “Carl Gustav Jung was an insufferable egotist, cruel to his family, a womanizer, with bad table manners to boot. He was a founder of psychoanalysis, but today his teachings have little importance in the treatment of mental illness. His writings on flying saucers, astrology and parapsychology read like those of someone on the edges of sanity himself. He is remembered mostly for his psychological autobiography, ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections,’ and for terms he used: ‘New Age,’ ‘the Age of Aquarius,’ ‘archetypes,’ ‘anima’ and ‘animus.’”

And it’s not only the Times. Hogenson goes on, “There’s a way in which Jung is viewed by a subset of the intellectual world in terms that are so extraordinarily negative as to at some level defy understanding.”

But the larger reason, Bair surmises, is that psychoanalysis in general is under siege, and Freudians attack Jung to guard their own threatened turf. (Bubbleheaded catchphrases such as New Age and Age of Aquarius–which Bair traces to a letter Jung wrote in 1940–surely make him an irresistible target.)

I was surprised when Smith told me that her 1995 story on Richard Noll–a reason for her to review Bair’s book, despite what Bair thinks–had been discussed at the paper as a possible reason why she shouldn’t. “We try to take everything into careful consideration,” she said. But as for what she then wrote, “All I can tell you is that the review speaks for itself. That’s the way any reviewer would respond. A book review is not a news report.”

“Yes.