The Jung Cult : Origins of a Charismatic Movement

Richard Noll gives us the 'historical Jung': his goal is neither to idealize nor denigrate Jung but to recover the diverse cultural and intellectual contexts out of which Jung's ideas emerged and to highlight the complex personal, professional, and ideological functions of the early Jung movement. Exceptionally, almost universally, well-read in the field of post-Enlightenment German-languate culture and thought, Noll is ideally suited to this task. . . . it is impossible, henceforth to claim that Jung scholarship is in any way 'behind' Freud Studies (historian Mark S. Micale, Yale University)

Richard Noll's careful, well-researched and well-reasoned study of the cultural context of Jung's psychology presents the centrality of notions of race and power extrapolated from the reception of Nietzsche's thought at the turn of the century. . . A brilliant must-read for any scholar seriously interested in the history of psychoanalysis (historian Sander L. Gilman, Cornell University)

Disturbing and often illuminating . . . Anyone in search of the historical Jung must now pass, however critically, through The Jung Cult.... it deserves comparison with Frank Sulloway's Freud: Biologist of the Mind. Sulloway retrieved an important but almost entirely neglected dimension of Freud's thought. Noll has done the same thing for Jung. (John Kerr, London Review of Books)

Provocative and original....Noll is excellent at tracing the influence of what he calls "volkisch utopianism" on Jung's thought....Noll's touch as a sociologist is just as sure as when he is writing as an historian of ideas. His analysis of the present-day Jung cult is acute and in some respects devastating (Frank McLynn, Guardian)

. . . an important study . . . (Frederick Crews, The New York Review of Books)

From the Fontana Press paperback  edition (UK) of 1995:

"The Jung Cult makes a highly original, daring and important contribution to Jung scholarship. Noll has elevated the social and cultural history of this topic to a new and fascinating level of sophistication."
      Frank Sulloway, author of Freud: Biologist of the Mind

"Richard Noll has made a signal contribution to the study of the life, thought, and followers of Carl G. Jung, and through that to the study of depth psychology as a whole . . . all those who hold Carl G. Jung in high esteem also owe a debt of thanks to Richard Noll, even though he will be persona non grata with many of them."
     Peter Homans, University of Chicago, San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal

"Any historical work done on Jung's life or his theoretical development will have to address Noll's Body of data."
    George Hogenson, Psychoanalytic Books

This is undoubtedly the best book about Jung and his movement which has yet been written."
    Richard Webster, author of Why Freud Was Wrong

"Noll's scholarship contextualizes Jung in an era teeming with scientific and occult influences: it is a tremendous piece of work, from which there is no going back."
      Doris McIlwain, Metascience