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Literature about Jung has taken a longish time to get off the ground. Although books written by those whom he inspired now sell better than ever, we still wait for a professional biography of him. There are many trots to understanding Jung's ideas, and a number of fascinating although narrow glimpses in print about what he was like. His collected works were never edited with the care James Strachey brought to Freud, and since Jung is a more opaque writer than Freud, one feels an acute need for more work about him.
Aside from the way Jungian works have made it to the New York Times best-seller lists, he deserves to rank high among those who created psychotherapy as we now understand it. Compared to what we have learned about the early Freudians, too little is currently known about Jung's immediate disciples, but his work has borne important fruit. For example, recent theories about dream life advanced by those knowledgeable about the biochemistry of the brain seem to fit Jung's approach better than Freud's. Even if Jung is rarely credited with how he secured a legitimate place for short-term psychotherapy, he played an important part in evolving an approach at odds with Freud's objectives in his pre-World War I papers on technique.
Richard Noll, a clinical psychologist studying the history of science, has written a surprising book, for The Jung Cult seems bent on assaulting Jung's reputation even before Jung has made it securely to the pantheon of those remembered as part of the history of ideas. Jung's unfortunate politics during the 1930s, at a time when the Nazis were destroying psychotherapy in Germany, has long appeared to be opportunistic if not outright anti-Semitic, from his home in Switzerland Jung travelled to Hitler's Germany, making anti-democratic comments and differentiating between Freud's psychology and Aryan truth.
Noll's book is devoted to dissecting the origins of Jung's ideas in the Nietzschean pagan stream of thought. And there is no doubt that Noll