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The Christian millennium approaches, with millennialist phenomena - the ‘Cult of the Sun’ arrange mass suicides in Switzerland and Tenerife. According to American clinical psychologist Richard Noll's best-seller The Jung Cult (1994), C.G. Jung counts with them: an extreme right-winger, begetter of a personality cult - The Arian Christ (Noll 1996); hence the Cult Fictions of the title of the book under review.
Noll's thesis received much academic acclaim. If true, analytical psychology is not therapy, but rather a cabal of greedy charlatans engaged in ‘one of the most successful examples of pyramid selling in human history’. This is a serious charge with highly damaging consequences for patients and professionals alike.
Sonu Shamdasani, Historian of Psychology at the Wellcome Institute, London, inadvertently provided fuel for Noll's fire. In his book, Appendix Three, ‘Of Scholarship’, recounts a tangled web of intellectual skulduggery surrounding a tattered piece of paper at the centre of the debate. Labelled ‘Analytical collectivity’, the document was found amongst papers belonging to Fanny Bowdich Katz, a young American whose father was a close friend of William James. Suffering from depression, she was sent to Zurich, saw Jung, and analysed with Maria Moltzer, one of his early assistants.
Noll takes the document as Jung's founding address to the Analytical Psychology Club, Zurich. His book gives a ‘fly on the wall’ account of its reverential reception at the Club's first meeting. Unfortunately, Shamdasani suggests, this never happened. The ‘Inaugural Minutes’, reproduced here, are a prosaic procedural record, in tone more Women's Institute than Satanist ring.
Shamdasani reveals in this book his claim that ‘Analytical collectivity’ is by Moltzer. He cites the original catalogue record and provides detailed textual support, presenting it as an unpublished sketch for a paper on the transcendent function, the relationship between individual and collective, mundane and