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Jay Sherry's study is by turns indispensible for the future of historical research on Jung and disturbing in the picture it paints. Originally undertaken as his doctoral dissertation at the Freie Universität Berlin, his book provides the most comprehensive review available of Jung's various affiliations with conservative groups and figures throughout his life, but particularly in the all-important interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s. Sherry presents an extraordinary amount of information on the groups with which Jung associated, greatly expanding our picture of his life during this period. Future researchers will welcome the wealth of information provided, but they will also be faced with the need to sort, refine, and contextualize Sherry's work.
Early in his study, Sherry highlights Richard Noll's books, The Jung Cult (Noll 1994) and The Aryan Christ (Noll 1997) and argues that they have provided a perverse ‘master narrative’ (p. 2) for critics of Jung. Sherry, however, does not actually take up much of Noll's work, relying on a few asides in the course of the book, while presenting a picture of Jung's involvement with conservative and right wing, even racist, elements that occasionally make one wonder just how far off Noll's account actually is. Sherry heaps on such an abundance of disturbing detail that one finds oneself deeply distrustful of Jung's character. Needless to say, to the extent that this is an accurate picture of Jung's attitudes and affiliations, Jungian scholarship, and the assessment of his work, will have to deal with it directly. There are, however, important paradoxes that present themselves, and they give a different shape to Sherry's account.
Sherry's title is instructive. The conservative movements with which Jung was associated grew out of a response to what has been called the disenchantment of the world (Harrington 1996). This is the issue Jung addressed as early as the Zofingia Lectures where he attacked two of the most prominent advocat