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September 21, 1997

Psychiatrist of the Gods?

By WALTER KENDRICK

Read the First Chapter of "Carl Gustav Jung"

More on Carl Jung from The New York Times Archives

n December 1913, a funny thing happened in

Kusnacht, Switzerland. According to Frank
McLynn's ''Carl Gustav Jung,'' during that month Jung CARL GUSTAV JUNG
fought a ''skirmish with insanity,'' possibly brought on By Frank McLynn.
by a midlife crisis; he had a series of portentous dreams 624 pp. New York:
that culminated in the apparition of Philemon, ''a A Thomas Dunne
mythological creature recalling centaurs, mermaids and Book/St. Martin's Press.
the Minotaur,'' who dropped in for chats in Jung's $29.95.
garden. But Richard Noll's ''Aryan Christ'' paints a
more lurid picture: Jung's ''head changed into that of a THE ARYAN CHRIST
lion and he became a god. He became the Deus The Secret Life of Carl
Leontocephalus, the lion-headed god whose image is Jung.
found in the sanctuaries of the mystery cult of Mithras By Richard Noll.
(first to fourth centuries C.E.).'' There is a discrepancy Illustrated. 334 pp. New
here. York:
Random House. $25.95.
It is due in part to McLynn's and Noll's different
sources. McLynn's account of Jung's ''descent into the
underworld'' relies chiefly on the official version recorded by Aniela Jaffe in ''C.
G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections'' (1963). Noll regards this source as
tainted by ''a significant, deliberate omission'': ''the long-suppressed story of
Jung's deification,'' which ''has been hidden for more than 80 years.'' So Noll goes
back to the notes on a 1925 seminar, where Jung plainly said, ''The animal face
which I felt mine transformed into was the famous Leontocephalus of the
Mithraic Mysteries.'' Jung presented this flapdoodle as a dream, not a real event,
but according to Noll Jung believed it to have been real: ''He had been initiated
into the most ancient of mysteries and had become a god.'' The truth, of course,
had to be kept dark, lest Jung lose his ''modicum of respectability.'' Only the great
man's most intimate associates have been aware of it -- until now.

The differences between McLynn and Noll go deeper than their choices of
documentation. McLynn's ''Carl Gustav Jung'' is a full-fledged biography by the
author of five others, including lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Henry
Morgan Stanley, the African explorer. McLynn, a professional biographer and
neither pro- nor anti-Jung, recognizes that ''Jung is in many ways a battlefield''
and has sought to avoid absorbing ''any of the conscious or unconscious parti pris
the man and his doctrines provoke.'' The result is an evenhanded chronicle that
follows Jung from cradle to grave and attempts to explicate the theories he
constantly spun out.

McLynn's tone remains coolly reasonable, though he often finds Jung

exasperating: ''It was typical of him to muddy the waters so that a good argument
became dissolved in a bad one''; Jung's exposition of general ideas was ''typically
turbid and confused''; in his last years, he displayed a ''maddening insistence,
whenever he had lost something, that it had been spirited away by supernatural
forces.'' McLynn's Jung emerges as an oversized Swiss version of an eccentric
Englishman -- annoying to have around but dangerous only to those whose
stupidity deserves what it gets.

Noll's Jung is a different creature altogether. ''The Aryan Christ'' doesn't pretend
to be a biography; it skims across Jung's early years to focus on that crucial
month in 1913, and it largely ignores his life after about 1930. In part, Noll does
for Jung what Frank Sulloway did for Sigmund Freud in ''Freud: Biologist of the
Mind'' (1979): he places Jung's dreams and theories in the context not of biology
but of contemporary mythological studies, showing how virtually all his
supposed revelations can be found in books by once-popular authorities like
Friedrich Creuzer and Franz Cumont. The Jungian panoply of archetypes, the
collective unconscious and so on, may be simply a byproduct of ''cryptomnesia,''
or ''implicit memory,'' which is ''implicated in such contemporary issues as 'false
memory syndrome' in cases of alleged child abuse,'' Noll says. ''If so,'' he
concludes, ''the collective unconscious may still be said to exist, but only on the
shelves of Jung's personal library.''

Debunking, however, ranks second on Noll's agenda. His first aim is to prove
that Jungianism should be called neither psychotherapy nor philosophy but
religion, ''an Aryans-only cult of redemption and rebirth.'' Jung and his followers,
Noll maintains, knew this dire truth and concealed it from the world under a
series of masks. The inconsistencies and contradictions in Jung's work make
perfect sense to Noll because ''Jung was careful to always speak and write in
code.'' Like other conspiracy theories, Noll's explains everything. The Jung
conspiracy, furthermore, continues to this day, he insists, carried on by the
jealous guardians of Jung's personal papers.

''The Aryan Christ'' is an excellent example of the kind of parti pris that McLynn
avoids. Noll has suffered at the hands of ''The Jung Cult'' (the title of his previous
book on the subject): those guardians refused to answer his letters, and the
publication of an anthology he edited, which presumably would have supported
his theory, was canceled ''due to objections by the Jung family.'' Noll seems
weary of the whole business, but he's still licking his wounds. For all its ominous
evocation of cults and conspiracies, ''The Aryan Christ'' fails to convince me that
any serious damage has been done by a few people's adherence to an obviously
wacko creed. I prefer McLynn's no-nonsense summation: ''Acres of print could
have been saved if Jung had come clean and admitted that he was a prophet.''

McLynn's reasonableness never flags, even when he must handle such crazies as
Jung's mother, Emilie, who bore him on July 26, 1875, and devoted herself
thereafter to scaring the daylights out of him. Or his cousin Helene Preiswerk, a
fake medium, whose antics formed the basis of Jung's dissertation at the
University of Basel, where he qualified as a medical doctor in 1900. Or Jung
himself, who throughout his youth (some might say his life) exhibited frequent
signs of an ''unbalanced mental state.''

McLynn patiently follows Jung through his years at the Burgholzli hospital in
Zurich; through his love affair with Freud, who called him his ''beloved son''
until their bitter split in 1913; and through all the gyrations of Jung's later life --
his fascination with alchemy and ''ambivalent'' attraction to Nazism in the 1930's,
his turn toward astrology and flying saucers in the 1950's, his ascension as ''the
New Age guru'' in the years just before his death on June 6, 1961. McLynn never
loses his straight face, calmly reporting for instance that Jung hated jet travel
because ''the body went too fast for the soul, which had to catch it up; this was
the true meaning of 'jet lag.' ''

Yet one gets the impression that McLynn, although he never says so, regards
Jung as certifiable and his followers as worse. There's no accounting for the
followers, but McLynn has a key to Jung's case: he was Swiss. As a nation, says
McLynn, the Swiss are ''xenophobic, conservative, earthbound, introverted,
money-minded''; so was Jung. He displayed ''the characteristic Swiss mixture of
obstinacy, doggedness, stolidity and innate pride''; in some ways he was simply
''a home-loving Swiss bourgeois.'' Recent revelations of Swiss banking activities
have given those traits a sinister cast. Still, it's a provocative thought: along with
cheese, complicated pocket knives and cuckoo clocks, the world has Switzerland
to thank for the infuriating genius of Carl Gustav Jung.

Walter Kendrick is a professor of English at Fordham University and the editor,

with Perry Meisel, of ''Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix
Strachey, 1924-1925.''

More on Carl Jung

From the Archives of The New York Times
REVIEWS:

"Psychology and Religion: West and East" C.G. Jung, and "The Undiscovered
Self" by C.G. Jung (1958)
"Memories, Dreams, Reflections" by Carl Jung (1963)
"The title is an apt one, for the main purpose of his recollections, dreams and visions is to illuminate
his inner development, to trace the effect of his 'confrontation of the unconscious' at various stages
of his life, in a form unhampered by the necessity for scientific presentation and valuation. It is a
personal testament and, above all, a religious testament.
"C.G. Jung: Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950" and "C.G. Jung" by Anthony Storr;
reviewed by Robertson Davies (1973)
"The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung" reviewed by
Lionel Trilling (1974)
"A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein, Between Jung and Freud" (1982)
"A patient has an affair with her analyst and consults another analyst to help sort out her ensuing
problems. A banal situation, scarcely worth a book? Maybe, but the analysts were Jung and Freud.
"Freud, Jung, and Hall The King-Maker: The Historic Expedition to America
(1909)" (1993)
"Jung: A Biography" (1988)
 "It is comprehensive, well written and superbly translated. Unlike previous biographies, it avoids
psychoanalytic partisanship, but when Mr. Wehr leaves the safe path of factual detail for
interpretation, problems appear.

ALSO:

Dr. Carl G. Jung Is Dead at 85; Pioneer in Analytic Psychology (1961)

"...In an attempt to bring some definition to the subconscious mind, Dr. Jung created special terms.
These terms were soon to spread beyond the mental clinic to become part of the language of the
educated. The Jungian terms such extrovert and introvert become stock dinner conversation
clichés."
Jung Views Dreams as a Key to 'Isms' (1937)
In his first lecture at Yale, Jung publically disagrees with Freud
'Shadow' Carried by All, Says Jung (1937)
Jung's second lecture at Yale
'Voice' of Dreams Called Superior (1937)
Jung's third lecture at Yale

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