New Book Shows Scary Side of Jung
by Paul Likoudis
In the past 30 years, a "quiet revolution" has taken place in the Catholic Church as the psychoanalytical teachings of Carl Jung), replaced those of Jesus Christ, St. Paul, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas in the "mainstream" of Catholic teaching in Western Europe and the United States-a revolution which most Catholics have not yet noticed.
How odd that the Swiss psychoanalyst, who considered himself the founder of a new religion to replace traditional Christianity, who wrote of his own "deification" as a lion-headed god from an ancient Aryan mystery cult, should achieve such pre-eminent status.
Odder yet, in our post-Holocaust world, that Jung, a virulent anti-Semite whom the British Foreign Office wanted tried at the Nuremberg war crimes trials as a Nazi pseudoscientist, should be embraced as a spiritual guide by millions of Catholics seeking psychological healing.
Even odder is the fact that Jung, an "apostle for adultery," who believed in (and practiced) polygamy, who devoted his life to overthrowing patriarchal society and reviving the ancient pagan gods of the libido, should have his "insights" into masculinity and femininity and sexuality upheld by a woman Dolores Leckey-who has headed the U.S. bishops' Marriage and Family Life Office in their national conference for 20 years!
These bizarre developments in the Catholic Church have not yet had the hearing they deserve, but a new book by Richard Noll., a clinical psychologist and lecturer in the history of science at Harvard University, should generate. some long-overdue discussion.
Two years after publishing The Jung Cult (Princeton University Press), which demonstrated that Jung deliberately founded a new religious movement, Noll is back with The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of C. G. Jung (Random House), which presents even more explosive revelations detailing Jung's obsession with overthrowing orthodox Christianity.
Noll shows how Jung was, in many ways, the product of his environment. He was the grandson of an apostate Catholic and physician, Karl Gustav Jung, who rose high in Masonic and Illuminati circles. The elder Karl might have been-Carl Jung believed he was-the result of an adulterous affair between K. G.'s mother and Goethe; at any rate, adultery and Masonic mysticism and occultism would continue racing through the Jung genes.
Noll introduces the reader to Carl Jung in 1895, when the 20-year-old medical student is among a circle of his female kin engaged in a seance, contacting the spirits of their dead relatives. These seances, described by Jung himself and narrated by Noll in spine-chilling detail, "marked the opening of a door that never completely closed, an invitation to countless discarnate voices and prescient entities that Jung would consult-and teach others to consult-for the rest of his life. Spiritualists techniques of visionary-trance induction not only introduced Jung to his deceased ancestors but also the spirits and gods of the Land of the Dead, who, under various pseudonyms of psychological jargon remained his traveling companions along the trails of life."
From the years 1900 to 1909, Jung was engaged in clinical research at the renowned Burgholzli, where he specialized in dementia praecox (schizophrenia). By the time he left, he had made his reputation as a leading psychologist in Europe, and had pioneered many of the treatments and coined many of the phrases which are now standard tools of the trade.
During his time at the Burgholzli, Jung wrote a letter to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, concerning a patient, Sabina Spielrein (with whom Jung later had an adulterous affair-one of many), thus beginning a short-lived but affectionate relationship during which Freud anointed the younger Jung his heir apparent-a device which he hoped would liberate psychoanalysis from the charge that it was a "Jewish affair."
By 1910, Jung had come to see in psychoanalysis a replacement for traditional Christianity, which he made clear in a Feb. 10th, 1910 letter, replying to Freud's query on whether it would be wise to join the International Order for Ethics and Culture:
I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for [psychoanalysis] than alliance with an ethical fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into a soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal. That was the beauty and purpose of classical religion.
Noll comments:
This explosive effusion of Christian and Dionysian imagery and visions of psychoanalysis as an "irresistible mass movement" and as a living replacement for orthodox Christianity could only have reminded Freud of certain Nietzschean, Wagnerian, Volkish neopagan cultural themes that would appeal primarily to Germanic Christians-Aryans.
Freud's response was a reprimand. Jung's zealotry was clearly off-putting. "But you mustn't regard me as the founder of a religion," Freud said. "My intentions are not so far-reaching. . . . I am not thinking of a substitute for religion. This need must be sublimated".
Noll, however, does not mention that when Jung penned that letter in 1910, Freud had reason to worry: Anti-Semitism was rife in Central Europe. Government sanctioned, underwritten by wealthy industrialists, nurtured in the universities, public schools, and cafes, anti-Semitism was the key ingredient in the rising wave of Volkish and neopagan ideologies extraordinarily popular in Germany.
The Case Of Otto Gross
Before their eventual split, however, Freud passed on to Jung for treatment at the Burgholzli a client, one Otto Gross, described by Noll as "one of the most dangerous men of his generation a threat to the bourgeois-Christian universe of German Europe. . . .
"Gross was the great breaker of bonds, the loosener, the beloved of an army of women he had driven mad.... He coaxed one lover/patient to suicide, and then another patient died under similar circumstances. . . .
"He was a Nietzschean physician, a Freudian psychoanalyst, an anarchist, the high priest of sexual liberation, a master of orgies, the enemy of patriarchy, and a dissolute cocaine and morphine addict. He was loved and hated with equal passion, an infectious agent to some, a healing touch to others. He was a strawberry-blond Dionysus.
Gross, the son of the founder of modern scientific criminology, would become-Freud not excepted-the greatest single influence on Jung, the man who persuaded him of the therapeutic value of adultery as a cure for every kind of neurosis.
Of the many fascinating characters Noll describes entering and exiting Jung's world, Gross is by far the most intriguing and one of the most important: "Through Otto Gross, psychoanalysis first leapt from the bourgeoisie to the bohemian counterculture, beginning a literary and artistic fascination with Freudian theory that continues to this day," observes Noll.
Gross was the prophet of a "sexual communism," and among those he inspired were D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and a host of other writers and artists. During Jung's and Gross' long periods of psychoanalysis, Gross "captivated Jung with his theories of sexual liberation, his Nietzscheanism, and his utopian dreams of transforming the world through psychoanalysis."
The analysand became the teacher. Writes Noll:
During the course of their time together, Gross offered Jung forbidden fruit. After a period of tormented consideration, Jung finally bit. Jung's conception of what constituted a 'sin' changed: 'Doing evil' could have a beneficial effect on the personality by freeing one from 'one-sidedness' and putting one back in touch with an Edenic instinctual being. Jung came to believe that not giving in to a strong sexual impulse could result in illness or even death. These are all ideas that everyone who knew Jung for any length of time would hear him urge on others.
Once Jung submitted to the temptations Gross offered, profound alterations in his concepts on the place of sexuality and religion in life took place. Because they denigrated the body and sexual activity-especially outside of holy matrimony-the repressive orthodoxies of Christianity now seemed to him to be the true enemies of life. Sexuality had to be brought back into spirituality.
By 1912, Jung found another model-the spirituality of pagan antiquity-that he held sacred. Although Gross die not share Jung's fascination with spiritualism or the occult, his "religion" was finding ways to rejuvenate and indeed redeem humankind through the sacrament of uninhibited sex. Jung soon learned of the spiritual sacredness of sex through personal experience and implored others to consider the call of the flesh.
Jung is also indebted to Otto Gross for the concepts of extraversion and introversion . . . the fundamental ideas of Jung's theory of "psychological types".
Gross died in a sanitorium in 1920.
The Religion Of Sex
Many of Jung's patients became his devoted "apostles." Noll brilliantly introduces us to them, and we watch as they physically and mentally (to say nothing of spiritually) deteriorate.
There is Medill McCormick, part-owner of The Chicago Tribune, who suffered from both alcoholism and depression. In a 1909 letter to his wife, Ruth Hanna McCormick, he disclosed that Jung had prescribed mistresses as a cure for his ills.
He rather recommended a little flirting, and told me to bear in mind that it might be advisable for me to have mistresses-that I was a very dangerous and savage man, that I must not forget my heredity and infantile influences and lose my soul-if women would save it.
Jung similarly recommended adultery to Henry A. Murray, the psychologist and personality theorist at Harvard University, when Murray was contemplating divorcing his wife-and, of course, Jung was taking his own advice. While his wife was bearing children, Jung brought his mistress, Toni Wolff, to live with him.
By the time Murray met [Jung and Wolff] in 1925, [they] had been lovers for more than a decade. And they, too, were convinced that they had founded a new religion. They believed in a new faith in which former sins and evils became necessary for spiritual rebirth. God-no longer One would emerge from individual visionary experiences and automatic writing as a multitude of natural forces or entities that were both good and evil, writes Noll.
It was a religion conceived through polygamy.
Then there are Harold McCormick (cousin of Medill), heir of International Harvester, and his wife, Edith Rockefeller, daughter of John D. Without Edith, Noll speculates, Jung might never have succeeded-for she poured her family's fortune into publicizing him on this side of the Atlantic, even while her own life deteriorated via the standard course: psychoanalysis, adultery, divorce, alienation from her larger family, and, eventually, a lonely death in the Drake Hotel in Chicago.
It makes painful reading.
Then there is the case of Constance Long, a British physician who never married. After her professional experiences during World War I and her contact with Jung, Long began to develop her theories on bisexuality and hermaphroditism. Her theories posited that there are no exclusively masculine or feminine genders, but each person is a blend of both.
These notions, daring for the time, have now become part of the contemporary vocabulary through such authors as the U.S. bishops' longtime marriage and family life director Dolores Leckey.
No one should be surprised that Noll's book reads like a walk through a mental hospital: it is. It is full of sick people, generally the idle rich searching for a cure for their profound angst; or, in the case of Constance Long, someone seeking a spiritual support for her lesbianism.
In the chapter on "The Passion of Constance Long," Noll discloses-for the first time, based on Long's diary Jung's view of himself as a "heresiarch of the first order. "
In this letter of January, 1920, filled with spiritualized eroticism and more than just a touch of Gnostic philosophy, Jung told Long how to discover the little child, the god living within her:
This child in its infinite smallness is your individuality, wrote Jung, and with practice, it is a god-smaller than small yet greater than great. The primordial creator of the world, the blind creative libido, becomes transformed in man through individuation [i.e., doing whatever you want], and out of this process which is like pregnancy, arises the divine child, a reborn god. . . .
Please do not speak of these things to other people. It could do harm to the child. . .
Noll explains: If there was ever any doubt that Jung was quite self-consciously the charismatic leader of his own mystery cult, this private letter to his disciple should dispel it. Jung considered himself a heresiarch of the first order, a redeemer who offered redemption to others so that they, too, could be involved in the grand work of bringing to life the new god that was trapped within everyone, waiting to be released.
Fitting In
Many Catholic readers of Aryan Christ will find especially valuable Noll's final chapter, "From Volkish Prophet to Wise Old Man." This chapter situates Jung in his era, a time when Volkish ideologies of racism and anti-Semitism, occult spirituality, sun worship, neopaganism, and a farrago of pseudoscientific philosophies prevailed.
At the heart of these potent ideologies that prepared the Germans for the Third Reich was a bitter anti-Catholicism nurtured for over a century in the state schools, the universities, and popular literature.
Noll shows, via a letter Jung wrote to Oskar Schmitz in 1923, that Jung considered Christianity a foreign growth on Germany. Like Wotan's oaks, Jung lamented, the gods were felled and a wholly incongruous Christianity, born of monotheism on a much higher cultural level, was grafted onto the stumps. The Germanic man is still suffering from this mutilation. . . . We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will there come what we need: a new experience of God.
Not surprisingly, as Richard Wolin wrote in his review of Noll's book, published in the Oct. 27th issue of the New Republic, Jung adored Hitler.
In a January, 1939 interview with Hearst's International Cosmopolitan, Jung described Hitler in glowing terms: There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. As somebody commented about him at the last Nuremberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler's is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, curious, and unreasonable. . . . So you see, Hitler is a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or, even better, a myth.
Richard Noll's Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung powerfully documents Jung's life's mission to subvert and overthrow the Catholic Church and traditional Christianity, the human wreckage he left in the wake of carrying out his goal, and his unsavory associations, including individuals involved in supporting Hitler on his rise to power. Some of the more minute details will be surprising such as Noll's revelation that an official with the International Harvester Company helped Hitler design his Nazi flag.
How odd, then, that Jungian spirituality is a staple in Catholic education, Catholic spirituality, and Catholic retreat centers across America. How could it happen? Those who read Noll's book might not find the answer to that question, but they will find themselves reflecting time and time again on Pope Paul VI's lament: The smoke of Satan has entered the Catholic Church.
To be fair; Mr Noll has his detractors.
Carl Jung called Adolf Hitler a Demi Deity, in print, in 1939.
Detract That.
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