The mysterious Jung - psychotherapy and the occult

cultish beliefs that they are attracted to.

Jung saw psychoanalysis as path of redemption, of revitalisation, of rebirth. Indeed, he wrote of psychoanalysis becoming a totalising worldview, saying, "Great is the power of the psychoanalytic truth, and it will prevail". For him, psychoanalysis was the new salvation of the world, with Jung as the prophet who understood its religious nature. Religion, he believed, could only be replaced by another religion.

Tyrrell: And he studied ancient religions avidly.

Noll: Yes, and he particularly made an intensive study of the work of the classical scholars of his day on the ancient mystery cults. Jung viewed neurotic symptoms as a form of initiation that could lead to the inner mysteries of the human personality. But what were these deeper mysteries that would arise from within? Jung had to experience them himself first before imparting his vision of them to his tribe of disciples.

Tyrrell: This is where his knowledge of the occult comes in?

Noll: Yes. His interest in spiritualism had shown him how easy it was to deliberately enter a dissociative trance state. Once in that state, automatic writing or alternate personalities can easily be created. Jung had seen this at séances he had attended. His mother's side of the family, including his maternal grandfather, regularly engaged in talking with spirits. Jung's first encounter with the feminine entity that he later called the "anima" began with his use of mediumistic techniques.

Tyrrell: And these trance phenomena really convince people.

Noll: Right. Just like the initiation into ancient mystery cults. The culmination of a period of concentration, in and out of trance, can be an amazing, explosive experience. Jung promised this same extraordinary spiritual experience through his brand of analysis. He is very explicit about this. He makes an unsubstantiated scientific argument for something he calls the "collective unconscious". So his disciples believed, and it's clear from the numerous diaries I've read that they actually did, that, by each individual working on his or herself, they were transforming the soul of the world. They were redeeming the world. And these beliefs had a great cohesive effect on the little band he gathered around him during World War I.

Tyrrell: So who were the original Jungian patients?

Noll: In the early days, during World War I, it was mainly rich people that gathered around Jung. He was becoming famous and Edith Rockefeller came to him and then other wealthy American women started showing up and it became 'the thing to do' if you had the money.

If you were actually somebody in need (as Edith Rockefeller was — she was on the edge of a breakdown) Jung basically just opened up your head to his crazy ideas and made it fuzzier. His techniques took away people's ability to focus their attention and to separate out thoughts. Their cognitive resources were just shot to hell after a while because all he did was induce visions all the time. His patients were constantly lost in their dreams and visions, looking for mythic symbols, signs of Greek gods and goddesses. From World War I onward, Jung would tell people in therapy to keep a visionary diary like he did. His followers actually called his vision book 'The Bible'!

So Jung removed people from the everyday world and from pragmatic problem solving.

Tyrrell: Which is the last thing you should do when you're trying to help distressed or disturbed people.

Noll: Exactly. Jung's solution to every mental problem was to encourage the patient to have some sort of religious experience. And that's where some of the danger lies. Jungian psychology attracts people who have experiences like this, or feel they have the potential to have such experiences, and maybe that's fine. Definitely visions happen and there is a place for them in the world. I had enough myself when I was young. Maybe it was puberty, I don't know. People try to see what's going on, and explore that side of life. But some people get sucked into the worldview that goes along with what is, after all, just an interpretation of an experience.

Tyrrell: Hundreds of people in this country describe themselves as Jungian therapists, and I'm sure there are thousands in America. What impact are they having and why do you find them so disturbing?

Noll: What's happening (and I think it's been going on in Europe for quite a while longer, but now in the States it is really evident), is that the old organised Western religions — Protestant, Catholic, Jewish — are collapsing. We're rapidly turning into a secular society but people are still looking for some sort of spiritual guidance — something to believe in that makes the world magical and makes sense in some way.

Tyrrell: And, of course, psychotherapists — and I've seen this happen – get seduced themselves into fulfilling that need, don't they? It's a great temptation. They start to mention spiritual development, Buddhism, or some other esoteric sounding things in their leaflets. And, before you know where you are, they're slipping over into the human development movement and becoming 'spiritual' guides on the guru circuit.

Noll: Yes. And especially in the Jungian world which is so blatantly religious. That's the thing which attracts people to Jungian analysis; they are expecting a religious experience. It's like going to a spiritual adviser.

What Jungians should do is come out with a policy or position paper at one of their major conferences that they have every five years. You know, something like, "What is the scientific status of Jung's ideas today?", "What is the evidence for 'collective unconscious' pro and con?", and spell these things out. But they won't do that because even the therapists that aren't so caught up in the spiritual role nonetheless know that their business depends on patients looking up to them as spiritual gurus.

Tyrrell: And the whole New Age movement has fed off Jungian ideas, and that's rather made some people almost despise more scientific approaches. They are not nearly so interested in what works as they are in getting excited about magical, cult beliefs.

Noll: It's not just fringe New Age spiritual groups in California that are into Jung. In the United States, what's left of the major Christian denominations, including the Catholic church and certainly most of the Protestant denominations, are almost totally Jungianised. Especially among certain Protestant sects. Some of these ministers, both male and female, are all speaking Jungian jargon and attending Jungian workshops. Jungian ideas are almost totally absorbed into orthodox religious life. It has seeped in everywhere.

Tyrrell: But does it matter? People are disappearing into this Jungian world of mystery and archetypes because it's more exciting than Christianity. People always go for the excitement, the emotional arousal. These religions are not about spirituality, are they? The word 'religion' comes from a root word meaning 'to bind'. Yoga, the Indian word for religion, means 'to yoke'. Institutional religion was the means used to bring some measure of civilisation to barbarians — 'to bind' them to civilised practices so that cultures could stabilise and develop. The more religions muddle up this civilising process with spirituality, the more they degenerate. That seems to be what you've observed.

Perhaps, throughout the ages, these belief systems take off because in one way they resonate metaphorically. The limbic system — our emotional life — is something that we experience as taking us over or leaving us out of control. When we are angry, or in love, or anxious or depressed we seem to be possessed. Although, of course, we now know these are focused trance states.

Noll: Absolutely. There are so many different levels of parallel processing in the brain.

Tyrrell: It's in the language. We say: "I'm not myself today", "I don't know what came over me", "I'll soon be my old self again". The individual mind can feel like a crowd of different people. We wheel out different aspects of ourselves to deal with different circumstances. The tough company boss can also be a gentle father, a dutiful son, a lover, a practical gardener, a cry baby, one of the lads — all in the same person. And it can seem to outsiders as if the person is quite different in each role, and we feel different in each role. I'm sure this is why multiple personality disorder is such an attractive fad to many people. Therapists latch on to how easy it is to create as many personalities as you want in a patient with a bit of suggestion, and then emphasise them. Very dangerous.

Noll: Right. This is the model of the mind that Jung was using before he worked with Freud, and he kept using it while he was with Freud and took it up more intensely after he split with Freud, endlessly embellishing it. He took this theory that the mind is made up of a multiplicity of complexes, like stars in a constellation, and, basically, with his ideas of collective unconscious and archetypes, he just grandiosely blew it up to cosmic proportions. He claimed these forces were no longer just within but were transcendent; they were connecting all of us like magnetic fluids. These were forces that were not only working between people in a sort of field-like way but also were in the landscape, the place you lived, the very earth.

Tyrrell: Which certainly takes you right back to primitive religious beliefs — the idea that every stream and tree is sacred and so forth.

Noll: Everything is connected to everything else.

Tyrrell: Which, again, resonates, because it's true too.

Noll: I know. This fragment of the truth is what hooks people in. So this was where Jung's genius came in, I think. He took the psychiatry of his day, the dissociationist model, hooked it up with German romanticism, this idea of the archetypes, these organising forces in the world, and merged that with Hellenistic cosmology which was also polytheistic. He blended these things together. His psychology is a synthesis, with a little bit of everything in, and it attracts people one way or another. It just rings true with some of our personal experience and so, if something feels a little bit true, many people are willing to bite off the rest of it — hook, line and sinker.

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© Human Givens Publishing Limited and Patrick Holford (2003)

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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