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The writings of the Harvard historian of science, Richard Noll, have occasioned much distress among Jungians in recent years, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, where Noll has been assiduous in promoting himself and his ideas. What has been particularly upsetting is not so much the nature of Noll's attacks on Jung's reputation (since they are largely without substance), but the public enthusiasm with which they have been received. When The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement was published in 1994, it received almost universally favourable reviews and was voted the ‘Best Book on Psychology’ for that year by the American Association of Publishers. ‘A highly original, daring and important contribution to Jung scholarship’; ‘Undoubtedly the best book about Jung and his movement which has yet been written’, quotes the blurb of the paperback edition. The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, published in 1997, met with similar acclaim. Yet most of the critics who so warmly endorsed Noll's books are not noted for their familiarity with Jung's work, and their enthusiasm betrays both the ease with which they have been taken in by Noll's misrepresentations and the strength of current prejudice against Jung. There are doubtless many reasons for this.
The Freudian portrayal of Jung as an anti-Semitic defector, who eschewed science for mysticism, still prevails in many quarters, particularly in New York; while the appetite for salacious biographies about famous people, started by Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, has reached a crescendo in the 1990 s. A need to wreck anything perceived as ‘élitist’ seems to have infected academics as much as tabloid journalists with a desire to sniff out all traces of excellence so that they may be subjected to the soul-grinding procedures of ‘dumbing down’. Noll has attempted to perform this operation on Jung, reserving his most damaging and outrageous accusations for the press. In the New York Times (15 O