You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In The Jung Cult, Richard Noll makes multiple and, I will argue, unsubstantiated charges against Jung and Jungians. He begins by dismissing the reliability of Memories, Dreams, Reflections [hereafter MDR] for reconstructing Jung's life: ‘MDR is unenlightening to those interested in history but compelling to those drawn to mystery’ (p. 13). But the reliability of the work has long been challenged, most fully by Peter Homans (1979, pp. 28-30). Homans's objections are that the work both ignores Jung's external life and interprets his internal one in wholly Jungian terms. Partly duplicating Homans, Noll objects that the work both ignores external influences on Jung and depicts Jung's life as the embodiment of Jung's theory. In saying that ‘Jung thus becomes the only icon of complete individuation to be found in Jungian literature’ (p. 14), Noll proceeds to charge that the work thereby deifies Jung: ‘Thus, with MDR we do not have the human history of a renowned physician and scientist, but instead the myth of a divine hero, a holy man, a saint, a life produced directly by essentially a religious community, and therefore a biography as “cult legend”’ (p. 15). Noll, beholden to the research of Sonu Shamdasani (which Noll in fact misrepresents, see Shamdasani 1995b), compares the unreliability of MDR with that of the Gospels. Noll's charge that MDR evinces the deification of Jung by his disciples merely sets the stage for the yet more severe, central charge: that Jung deified himself.
If Noll is complaining that MDR is less autobiography then biography, he cannot consistently be charging Jung there with self-deification. By all accounts, Jung was reluctant to write an autobiography or even to authorize a biography, so that he cannot be held accountable for the reverence toward him expressed in MDR and in the biographies of devotees like Barbara Hannah (1976) and Laurens van der Post (1976).
At the same time, MDR is less hagiographical than Noll's comparison of it with the Gos