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-Caveat Lector-
"Integrating of the conscious and unconscious, he assured his patients,
would create the New Man--the Ubermensch..."
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February 23, 1998
http://www.albertareport.com/25arcopy/25a10cpy/2510ar05.htm
Alberta Report
Downfall of another 20th-century psycho-titan
Student notes help disclose Jung's confidential conviction he was Jesus
Christ
THE ARYAN CHRIST: The Secret Life of Carl Jung
By Richard Noll
Random House, New York
334 pages; hardcover; $35.95
Since the publication of his best-selling 1994 book The Jung Cult: Origins
of a Charismatic Movement, author Richard Noll has been persona very much
non grata with the many admirers of the late world-famous psychiatrist C.G.
Jung and his family. The Aryan Christ can only deepen their displeasure. A
clinical psychologist and a Harvard University lecturer on the history of
science, Mr. Noll here discloses, among much else, that Jung very seriously
believed himself to have been deified in a December 1913 vision, when he
suffered as Christ, was worshipped as Christ and was then transformed into
the Mithraic lion-headed god Aion.
Mr. Noll also describes Jung's peculiar family, ancestors of equally
peculiar private beliefs, and the disciples (predominantly female) who
flocked to his Zurich establishment, the Psychological Club. He claims that
Jung derived one of his most enduring insights, the personality traits he
labelled introversion and extraversion, from a colleague, Otto Gross. These
he quietly appropriated as his own after Gross died in a sanitarium. Finally
he calls into grave question the validity of the theory for which Jung is
most revered: the "collective unconscious," common to all mankind, the
source of the grand primordial concepts he dubbed "archetypes."
Jung recounted his "ineffable" and "dangerous" experience in guarded terms
at a 1925 seminar for which published notes are now available. The letters
and reminiscences of selected initiates and his own secret transformational
diary, a 600-page illuminated manuscript known as the "Red Book," not yet
released by his heirs, describe his personal descent into the Land of the
Dead and his Mithraic ordeal there. A great snake wound itself about him,
crushing him as he stood in crucifixion stance, and a blind girl named
Salome worshiped him as Christ. Then his face became that of a lion,
completing his deification as the god Aion--the creator and destroyer of the
Hellenistic mystery cults. Jung also believed, Mr. Noll maintains, that Aion
provided a direct link to the supposed ancient Aryan people, via India and
Iran. Thus the "Aryan Christ."
Strange as these preoccupations may seem, they actually derived from quite
typical intellectual interests of 19th-century Europe. Many people were
fascinated with attempts to scientifically prove the validity of the
paranormal, with "magnetic" medical treatment and mesmer-ism, with Dionysian
cults, ancient Aryan tribal gods and the original "Urreligion" in which
their ancestors had worshipped sun, sky and sacred groves, with the
primitive as against the civilized, and with the intuitive as against the
rational. Seeking confirmation of the existence of the human soul and its
survival after death was a particularly popular pursuit.
Besides this, Carl Gustav Jung, although born in Basel in 1875, was acutely
conscious of his Germanic heritage, long believing himself an avatar of his
paternal grandfather, Karl Gustav Jung. Many of his maternal relatives,
including his mother Emily, believed themselves to possess psychic gifts.
Indeed, his maternal grandfather, the Reverend Samuel Preiswerk, used to
have his children stand behind him when he preached, to drive away the
spirits; the whole Preiswerk family believed the dead were all around them.
Jung wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1902 on "The Psychology and
Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena," based on his seance experiences
with his teenaged cousin Helene Preiswick. Despite the sceptical title,
however, he had long immersed himself in the works of Goethe and other
Germans of the Romantic school, philosophers like Nietzsche and heterodox
theologians such as Emanuel Swedenborg. From his researches into Greek and
Roman mystery cults and Germanic mythology, he soon began to see
Christianity as a Semitic foreign growth, cruelly grafted onto native
European paganism. Ultimately Jung would assemble a heady brew that combined
all these ideas with Gnosticism, Theosophy, alchemy and astrology.
Most immediately potent, however, were the intensive experiments he began in
1913 with trance states based on spiritualist technique. These developed
into mediumistic psychotherapeutic techniques rather like today's
channeling. Integrating of the conscious and unconscious, he assured his
patients, would create the New Man--the Ubermensch.
By then Jung had also been persuaded by Gross that modern men are shackled
by social conventions (especially the repressive orthodoxies of
Christianity) which thwart their healthy, primitive instincts. He advocated
what he called "polygamy" both for himself and certain male patients. Of
course, when wives proved less than tolerant of polygamy, as in the case of
Medill McCormick of the Chicago Tribune McCormicks, divorce was likely to
ensue.
But Jung chiefly now concentrated upon the ideas that would most notably
capture the academic and artistic imagination of the 20th century: the
collective unconscious and its archetypes.
Through his new-old faith, Mr. Noll says, he aimed to transform the world
through psychoanalysis, persuading his followers that by achieving
self-deification in the Land of the Dead (by whatever name) they could save
humanity. And achieve it they did, accord-ing to the records of their
analyses, encountering in their dreams and visions myriad mythological
entities.
This established the collective unconscious as a reality, Jung contended.
Critic Noll persuasively disputes this claim, however. Cultured Europeans
were entirely familiar with classical mythology and Germanic Volk themes, he
argues, and American patients seem to have been subtly guided by their
Jungian analysts. Mythology was required reading for Jung's research
assistants. His own deification account, for that matter, featured nothing
unavailable in the work of scholars like Franz Cumont (Mithraism, 1896) and
K.H.E. De Jong (Survey of Hellenist Mystery Cults, 1909). Mr. Noll says Jung
actually fudged dates to try to prove his patients could have had no prior
knowledge of these figures, because if they did, the collective unconscious
may exist "only on the shelves of Jung's personal library."
How did Jung preserve any so-called scientific credibility despite his outre
beliefs, and how did they spread so far so fast? He used different masks,
Mr. Noll claims, for different occasions and invented "psychologized" names
to obfuscate his occult concepts. Thus the Land of the Dead became the
collective unconscious; its gods and demons became archetypes. To reassure
Christian patients, he long continued to use Christian as well as occult
symbolism. And in an analytic session, although he could occasionally be
quite explicit, he was careful to remain the charismatic leader.
Contributing to his success, some of his patients were influential academics
who helped arrange speaking engagements that solidified his world
reputation. And some were rich, like Edith Rockefeller McCormick, the
troubled daughter of John D. Rockefeller and wife of Harold McCormick of
International Harvester. Her husband, son and two daughters also underwent
Jungian analysis.
To support his criticisms, Noll copiously cites Jung's own speeches and
writing, both public and private, and those of Jung's immediate followers.
The case he makes should even cause doubt in the most devoted Jungian. It
should certainly demolish the popular notion that Jung promulgated
wonderfully idealistic but scientifically solid theories which are
humanistic but quite compatible with, among other things, Christianity. They
aren't.
-- Virginia Byfield
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