Letters

To the Editor:

George Hogenson's review (Psychoanalytic Books, 6, 49-58) of my recent book, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, contains a rather glaring error of fact on its very first page that should be corrected for your readers.

In his opening paragraph Hogenson claims that Isaac Newton derived a certain important alchemical insight from, in part, “his reading of Mrs. Atwood.” As Mary Anne Atwood was born in 1817, it is difficult to imagine how Hogenson could claim such a thing.

I point out this example because it is indicative of the carefulness with which Hogenson, a practicing but unlicensed “psychotherapist” with no apparent expertise in German cultural history or the broader areas of the history of science and psychiatry, seems to have skimmed my book.

Richard Noll, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of the History of Science

Harvard University

George B. Hogenson replies:

While Richard Noll is correct regarding Mary Ann Atwood's date of birth, the rest of his letter is mistaken. Mrs. Atwood, the daughter of the English theosophist Thomas South, was indeed born in 1817, and it is of course evident that Newton could not have read her writings as part of his alchemical studies. Rather, it was Betty Jo Teeter-Dobbs, author of The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy and, until her recent untimely death, professor of history at Northwestern University, who read Atwood's theosophical interpretation of Newton, A Suggestive Inquiry into “The Hermetic Mystery,” published in 1850. From Atwood's book, Teeter-Dobbs derived her own interpretative hypothesis concerning the