Richard Noll (1) (1959–)

Noll was raised in a Jesuit prep school. Jung's ideas have always run afoul of traditional religious views so it should be no surprise that someone like Noll wrote this hit piece on Jung. Noll even goes so far as to constantly insinuate that Jung was an anti-Semite with an "essential German character" which considering Jung's close relationship with Jews in his career (Freud) and his warnings against Hitler is utterly laughable. Noll uses little more than insinuation, inference and speculation to "support" his opinions. It's clear that Noll finds Jung's ideas threatening to his own Christian exceptionalism and he exhibits gross obtuseness in his conceptions of Jung's theories . I'm surprised Noll has made any head way in psychology as a career but it just goes to show what a broad spectrum of opinions there are in the mental health profession. However, I must say any influential charismatic public figure like Jung can certainly inadvertently arouse a charismatic cult surrounding him so there's some merit there. But Noll could have just as easily wrote a book like this about Einstein. How many idolatry posters of Einstein do people see on school walls? Quite a lot, but Einstein didn't offend Noll's fundamentalist worldview did he? Now we see that this book tells us far more about Noll than it does Jung or Jungians. This work constitutes a lot of factually unsupported accusatory moralizing from an author with nothing more than a fundamentalist chip on his shoulder.… (altro)

As the Noll states in the introduction, "The book you hold before you is not a biography of Carl Gustav Jung." He then spends the remainder of the paragraph lamenting the fact that "no authentic, comprehensive biography of Jung can be written any time soon," as the Jung family is unwilling to open *everything* in the Jung estate to every Tom, Dick & Harry who comes along.

The idea of opening family documents, in their totality, to anyone who demands a peek is entirely unreasonable, and Noll's employment of the lament as a tactic is rather obvious. The fact is that there are some things, personal & private, that outsiders (to the family) need not know. I'm perfectly fine with that but, then again, I have no agenda.

Noll's stated goal with the book is to provide some of the missing chapters of Jung's life. He ends the introduction with the 'challenges of story telling" and really banks on the reader being incapable of doing what he considers to be the "morally impossible." But it's only morally impossible for those who continue to watch- with passive acceptance- the History Channel, and for those who insist that the spiritual and the physical are designed to somehow exist in isolation from one another.

Incidentally, Noll is not a historian.… (altro)