Ivan Tyrrell asks Richard Noll, author of "The Jung Cult" to unravel the lies Carl G. Jung told to aggrandise his charismatic psychoanalytic movement. First published in 1997, this is an abridged version of the original interview.

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Tyrrell: I was astonished at some of the facts you reveal about Jung — how much he was involved in the occult for example. Cults form very easily around any group of people who meet regularly, unless steps are taken to stop it happening, but I was surprised to learn that he deliberately manufactured a cult around himself. What are the main characteristics that you see in the Jung cult?

Noll: Well, I use that term to describe the social organisation that Jung gathered around him after his break with Freud. He was living in Küsnacht, Zurich, Switzerland. Essentially, at first, he gathered primarily German-speaking Swiss around him, and a few Germans, then people from Britain and the United States. His biggest catch was the daughter of John D Rockefeller who, in 1916, poured more than a million dollars into his enterprises.

It all began with a deification experience in late 1913 while he was inducing visionary states in himself. During 1913 and 1914 Jung withdrew from his former bourgeois life-style and lived out a wild, intense mad fantasy life during which he believed he was initiated. He descended into a cave and had all sorts of strange dreams and fantasies, which he described in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in the chapter "Confrontation with the Unconscious". But that book has in it only the watered-down version of what happened. What's missing is the culmination of the whole series of visions which you can read in The Jung Cult. That's when Jung, standing with his arms outstretched like the crucified Christ, a big snake wrapped around his body, suddenly turns into a god. He develops a lion head, becoming the lion-headed god of the ancient Mithraic religion — a mixture of Mithraic Kronos and Christ.

This 'initiation' was particularly significant for Jung. In the German cultural context he was socialised in, Mithraism was thought to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of the mystery cults in the Hellenistic world. And, furthermore, it had a direct link with the old Aryan homeland, Iran and India. Jung was steeped in all this and believed he was an initiate in the most Aryan of all the mystery cults, the most ancient Aryan spiritual experience you could have.

He rather self consciously gathered his community around him as a religious prophet would. He led them as a prophet. He deliberately created a charismatic religious group.

Tyrrell: Cults have certain characteristics and I think it's important for psychotherapists to know about them because so many 'schools' of therapy are really ideologies and, of course, the danger is that they begin to operate in cult-like ways. A typical pattern, following Freud's example, is to 'define' or 'invent' a condition, proclaim it in books, lectures and workshops, diagnose people as needing specialist treatment for it, and then 'cure' them. It's the same pattern that religious power structures use — invent 'sins', declaim them and then 'forgive' the sins of the true believers. It's a way of gaining power over others. It still goes on. Now we have charismatic figures promoting views such as, for example, that we all have an 'inner child', multiple personalities, repressed memories etc, which need "expert" treatment.

So, when did the Jung cult begin to show the characteristics of being a full blown cult?

Noll: Well, very early on. Certainly by 1916 it was clear, but even in 1912, in Zurich, when he became president of the Society for Psychoanalytic Endeavours, we have plenty of evidence for a charismatic group centred on his work and personality. And this became the basis of his cult.

Jung's circle of followers were characterised by four types of behaviour, which now we would consider essential elements of cult behaviour. Firstly, they had a shared belief in the psychoanalytic view of human nature and in the liberating or healing or revitalising effects of psychoanalytic treatment.

Secondly, there was a high level of social cohesion through a shared identity as analysed individuals. This set them apart from their previous bourgeois-Christian lives.

Thirdly, there was the influence of the group's behavioural norms, such as acknowledging the authority of the psychoanalyst as an expert and therefore as someone with knowledge and power, and the use of the special charismatic language of psychoanalysis (libido, sublimation, complex, penis substitute, and so on) in everyday conversation with fellow group members.

And last, there was the attribution of charismatic power to the psychoanalytic movement as a whole, and to Jung and the psychoanalysts as particular individuals.

So these folks were following a charismatic leader who claimed some sort of contact with transcendent reality, which is really what the collective unconscious is. He came up with that term in 1916, but was playing around with it before then. He sometimes called it "the spirit world" or "the land of the dead", and, when he talks about "the collective unconscious" he is really getting back to his spiritualist roots. Jungians still keep saying to me: "You're wrong, you don't understand psychological reality." But, if you read Jung, it's pretty clear what his beliefs were. He was saying that the collective unconscious was ruled by gods. I'm simply saying that Jung was using, or rather hiding behind, psychological jargon to reintroduce the Hellenistic cosmos.

Tyrrell: What do Jungians themselves say about this? Presumably their argument might be along the lines that these gods and spiritual forces are symbolic of psychological states. Is that the kind of argument you hear from them?

Noll: Well, yes, that's always it. They say that I don't understand what Jung was talking about — that his cosmology was just a metaphor for psychological reality and not that he's actually talking about gods. But if you really read Jung, he is. He certainly did believe in gods communicating with humans, spirits and the spirit world, reincarnation and all of that stuff. Of course, it is primarily those Jungian analysts who are trying to present the ideas as respectable and scientific who get upset when you point this out. Everyday Jungians — they know what he is talking about — and it's the

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© Human Givens Publishing Limited and Richard Noll (1997)

This article first appeared in Volume 4, No, 2 (1997) of the Human Givens journal.

RICHARD NOLL, PHD., is a clinical psychologist and lecturer in the History of Science at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was formerly Resident Fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT, also in Cambridge. His book, The Jung Cult, stimulated controversy when it came out in 1997.

IVAN TYRRELL is principal of Mindfields College.

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

>Read more about cult behaviour in this related article:

Exploring the CULT in culture

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