<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: A lesson in with holding judgement
Review: Four years ago I was completely smitten with Noll's Jung Cult and the many facinating threads to follow from the book's many descriptions of cults, personages and movements at the time of the fin de siecle. I thought Noll truly brilliant. This past year I followed one of those threads from Noll to Sonu Shamdasani's Cult Fiction. Reading the two led me to a lesson in scholarly research and withholding judgement. I could have founded a Noll cult after reading his writing. I learned to question it more objectively reading Shamdasani. The two do a great tango and I have found it of essence to read them both. I don't know and find it ridiculous to say they hate each other--hey they sell each others' books and I am a different thinker and Jung adept after reading both authors. Noll is rich with references and associations--Sonu questions very thoroughly and almost without flaw Noll's argument. Shamdasani does grip Noll's hamstring but the joy of reading the Jung Cult for me isn't flagged--only changed in the sense of I am glad I got past Noll to read Sonu.
Rating: 
Summary: Not very convincing
Review: I cannot add much to the prior customer review of this volume, which is comprehensive. Let me just add that, as a practicing attorney, I found this volume a delight to read. The author demonstrates a (proper)scholarly indifference to the outcome of his study, and seems content to deal with whatever the evidence actually shows about Jung. This book lacks the sensationalist "juice" of Noll and McLynn, but who needs the latter? I would rather read the relatively dull truth about Jung than entertaining (but misleading) insinuations and faulty research.
Rating: 
Summary: Nowhere near as bad as Noll, but not the reply he deserved
Review: Noll's terrible attacks on Jung are just sensationalistic propaganda, and they deserved a detailed, thorough and entirely irrefutable response. Given Jung's status as the greatest psychological theorist of all time - compared to him, Freud is nothing (and the Freudian organisations are far more cult-like than the Jungian ones - remember all those psychiatrists who were expelled from psychoanalytic societies, even after Freud's death, simply from refusing to dogmatically assert that all his theories are true!) - such a response to Noll would easily be achievable by the properly erudiate, learned scholar. Unfortunately, this book does not achieve that, and so is a completely wasted opportunity. So, while I am glad someone is responding to the ranting, speculative nonsense of Noll, if someone reads this and Noll, they will not be so convinced of Jung's innocence (and brilliance) as they definitely should be (he deserves some long overdue wider recognition) and as this book could have easily done so.I recommend Ellenberger's "Discovery of the Unconscious" and Stevens' "Intelligent Person's Guide to Psychotherapy". Stevens refers to this book and puts an end to the anti-Jung myth properly, while Ellenberger shows how Freud stole most of his ideas from other people and unscruplously ruined the lives of many patients and colleagues, while forming a Freudian cult circle, while Jung not only was far more modest than he needed to be (attributing to Freud and to many pre-20th Century thinkers like Nietzsche and so on far more credit than they even deserved), but also was immensely more original and brilliant.
Rating:
Summary: An honest reply to an unfounded attack on C.G. Jung
Review: Sonu Shamdasani's book `Cult Fictions' is a welcome reprieve for serious scholars of C.G. Jung and the history of analytical psychology. This is especially true since the appearance in print of such caricatured views of Jung and Jungian ideas which only recently Richard Noll in his `Aryan Christ' (1997) and `The Jung Cult' (1994) has tried to popularize. Mr. Shamdasani's work is a short, scholarly work, honestly practicing a hermeneutics which one has learned to appreciate in his earlier works. It is a pity that Mr. Shamdasani has to set the record straight visavis such walk-on `historian of science' as Mr. Noll has demonstrably turned himself into. This seems a terrible waste of time, yet it needed to be done, for Mr. Noll's scholarship is ingenious, but simply wrong! Let me elaborate: 1) For a scholarly `historian of thought', and Noll insists on being a scholar, it is certainly odd that he omitts in his own work the one work of a prior scholar who was certainly one of the first to show Jung in a critical light. I refer to Paul J. Stern, C.G. Jung: The Haunted Prophet, George Braziller:New York, 1976. Such unkind and unscholarly practice may be due to Noll's own unchartered career in a science which must be new to him. For if one checks Noll's amazing 'scholarly' development and publishing record, he has morphed himself from an erstwhile clinical psychologist into an unpedigreed `historian of science'. During this process, unfortunately, he seems never to have heard of a science of hermeneutics nor the epistemological uncertainty. The result is not more `Verstehen' but mere caricature of historical figures and movements. 2) Let's look at some details: To show with what broad brush Noll paints: In his Aryan Christ, page 71, he says in reference to Otto Gross: "To Jung he (Otto Gross) was so much more, but neither Jung nor his followers have acknowledged his importance. As he (Jung) revised his published works over the course of his life, Jung carefully removed references to colleagues, who fell prey to scandal or suicide. Otto Gross was certainly one of them. Nevertheless, Jung's cataclysmic encounter with Gross is a critical episode in the secret history of his life." Now, isn't it strange that when taking in hand the General Index to Jungs Collected Works, looking up Gross, Otto, there are entries to Otto Gross and his works in Jung's Collected Works, volumes 2, 3, 4, 6, some two dozens page references in all. Yet, Noll would like his readers to believe that Jung banned Otto Gross from his scholarly works. It is simply not true. What smoke screens is Noll trying out here? In the above reference, Noll mentions Jung's colleagues `who fell prey...to suicide'. Obviously, this remarks refers to J. Honegger, an early associate of Jung's, while at the Burghoelzli mental hospital in Zuerich. Now, it is true, that in the Collected Works, Jung took out the reference to Honegger when he rewrote his seminal work 'Symbols of Transformation' in 1950. Rewriting a book is any author's prerogative, and Jung has, in a lengthy foreword to the rewritten work, stated clearly why he felt he had to rewrite that work. On the other hand, the original German "Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido" was republished in 1991, (in its exact 1911/1912 text), and of course, there, the two references to Honegger are in place, just as they were in the original text. Again, here, it is clear that Noll is guilty of cryptomnesia, or plain lying, or whatever one wants to call his ingeniously devious method. The critical reader is taken aback noticing how Noll charges Jung with just the kind of obfuscation that Noll himself is practicing on nearly every page. There are several other dubious scholarly things Noll does, but let this suffice for the time being. 3) Coming back to Jung and Noll's interest in him, Noll has certainly moved from Paul back to Saul. Between 1992 and 1994, Noll had no problem publishing his informative and gushing adulations as well as his renegade und puerile views of Jung in mainstream Jungian journals, notably the Journal of Analytical Psychology (JAP) and SPRING (A Journal of Archetype and Culture). But at that time, Noll's methodical madness had not truly come into the open. Now, after two books by Noll on Jung it is patently clear: To anyone having even an inkling of the scholarship on Jung and Freud as well as the scholarship on literary and artistic developments in Germany, Austria and Switzerland at the turn of the century, Noll is practicing a method last known to have been practiced by Senator McCarthy during the anti-communist Witch Hunt in the USA. Noll's misuse of the term 'volkish' and 'aryan' in reference to Jung - geared specifically to an American audience - is blatantly racist in its own terms - but it will sell books. Sonu Shamdasani outlines in a point-by-point account his particular answers to Noll as regards his imagined existance of 'cults' and 'secret lives', none of which ever existed when viewed in the clear light of reason while practicing a responsible 'history of science'. Sonu Shamdasani is to be congratulated for his excellent scholarship into Jung and the early years of analytical psycholgoy. We can only hope for others to continue.
Rating:
Summary: Noll gets it
Review: well deserved razor sharp slashing of Richard "Hoo-Hmmm" Noll's books. I wonder why Noll rates himself as "scholar", and as Sonu demonstrates in this work, no one really should. In fact Sonu exposes the many levels of deceipt and manipulation spread in Noll's dishonest work.
Rating:
Summary: Noll gets it
Review: well deserved razor sharp slashing of Richard "Hoo-Hmmm" Noll's books. I wonder why Noll rates himself as "scholar", and as Sonu demonstrates in this work, no one really should. In fact Sonu exposes the many levels of deceipt and manipulation spread in Noll's dishonest work.
<< 1 >>
|
