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This book is a most interesting one and, at the same time, most disturbing. The author's major thesis is that Jung wished to form a cult around himself in a manner similar to Nietzsche and that Jung's concept of the collective unconscious and the archetypes was borrowed from the religious and philosophical context of Europe in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and, therefore, was not so original.
Let me begin with the second hypothesis that Jung's ideas were borrowed from the European philosophy of the day. Here we immediately run up against a vexing problem that is the sociology of knowledge. When a new discovery is made, it is, of course, somehow related to the time and place, and the new idea or scientific discovery do not come out of a vacuum. There is always a context. In Jung's case, he was part of a general reaction against the scientism and rationalism of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. There was a turning back to the religious and mystical roots of religious experience, in which the numinous inner experience of the individual was central. Jung was deeply influenced by the various archeological findings unearthed in the late nineteenth century, as well as the various types of Naturphilosophie, which were influential at that time. In Germany this return to its völkisch roots is at the core of this movement. Of course, the term völkisch has many connotations with race and indirectly with national socialism, so by innuendo (never mentioned) that is how Jung had his connections to the later Nazis. What Noll does not distinguish in this book is the difference between the word Germanisch representing all the peoples whose language and cultural origin is the German language, such as the Dutch, Flemish, Austrian, Germans, and Swiss,