Friday 26 January 2018

Carl Jung's thoughts on America

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How much closer America now seems in our imagination to Europe than when Jung visited. His first visit was in 1909.



To a keen European eye there is an indefinable yet undeniable something in the whole makeup of the born American that distinguishes him from the born European. [This is very true today.]


There is no country in the world where women have to work so hard to attract men’s attention. [Women have told me that this is still true.]



I made many observations on shipboard. I noticed that whenever the American husband spoke to his wife there was always a little melancholy note in his voice, as though he were not quite free; as though he were a boy talking to an older woman. He was always very polite and very kind, and paid her every respect. You could see that in her eyes he was not at all dangerous, and that she was not afraid of being mastered by him. But when any one told him that there was betting going on he would leave her, and his face became eager and full of desire, and his eyes would get very bright and his voice would get strong, and hard, and brutal. That is why I say his Libido, his vital energy, is in the game. He loves to gamble. That is business to-day.

It takes much vital energy to be in love. In America you give so many opportunities both to your men and women that they do not save any of their vital force for loving. This is a wonderful country for opportunity. It is everywhere. It spreads out. It runs all over the surface of everything. And so the American mind runs out and spreads over the whole country. But there is a dark side of this. The people of America do not have to dig deep for their own life. In Europe we do.


It may be that you are going to produce a race which are human beings first, and men and women secondarily. It may be that you are going to create the real independent woman who knows she is independent, who feels the responsibility of her independence and, in time, will come to see that she must give spontaneously those things which up to now she only allows to be taken from her when she pretends to be passive. Today the American woman is still confused. She wants independence, she wants to be free to do everything, to have all the opportunities which men have, and, at the same time she wants to be mastered by man and to be possessed in the archaic way of Europe.

You think your young girls marry European husbands because they are ambitious for titles. I say it is because, after all, they are not different from the European girls; they like the way European men make love, and they like to feel we are a little dangerous. They are not happy with their American husbands because they are not afraid of them. It is natural, even though it is archaic, for women to want to be afraid when they love. If they don’t want to be afraid then perhaps they are becoming truly independent, and you may be producing the real ‘new woman.’ But up to this time your American man isn’t ready for real independence in woman. He only wants to be the obedient son of his mother-wife.

33 comments:

  1. I had the opposite impression when I spent four months in Pittsburgh in 2004. I rented a room in a house of an upper middle class family in their mid-forties with two children of age about 7 to 10. I found American pater familias much more authoritarian than European heads of family. I didn't have the impression that the wife had much to say in how things should be going in the house, when they eat, how the children should behave, how they spent the Sunday afternoon etc. But I had this feeling of authoritarian men not only in domestic life, but also in public life, the way they talk to you, it's not really as if they boss you around, but still they're quite assertive, loud, and self-assured. I had the very pleasant surprise to see that a bus driver had the guts to stop the bus and threaten a group of loud and unruly young men in the back row of the bus. He felt that it is _his_ bus, and he's responsible of the civil atmosphere in the bus and that it is his duty to keep it civil. No shrug, no "it's none of my business".

    I remember that I thought that feminism had to develop in the USA and not say Southern Europe, just because American men took themselves and their roles as heads of the family so seriously, I felt the atmosphere was a little opressive. There was none of the self-irony that a European man would use. Which reminds me of the following joke:

    Two old friends meet after not having seen eachother for a long time. "How are you? Have you married?" they ask each other. Both answer that they have. "So how's going?" the first one asks. The other answers: "Not so well, we don't get along very well." "Give me an example." "Well, I like tea, she likes coffee, we drink coffee; I like sports, she likes art, we go to theatres and museums." "Ah, you didn't know how to handle the situation, my dear," the first one patronisingly answers, "look at me, we have a policy in the house, and everything runs smoothly: she decides the small things, I decide the important things". "I don't understand," replies the first one, "please give me an example". "She" says the first "decides when we move house, how to decorate, how many children to have, where to spend our holidays, how often we visit our in-laws, when we should change jobs". "If these are the small things" the second perplexedly says "then what do _you_ decide?" "Ah" answers the first "she completely assents to my views regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, the North-Korean missile crisis, the Sunni-Shia proxy wars, the Greek debt crisis etc".

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    1. Upper middle class Americans don't rent rooms.

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  2. Gentlemen, I pray you very solemnly to put that idea of knowing all things in Heaven and Earth out of your hearts and heads. It is very little that we can ever know, either of the ways of Providence, or the laws of existence. But that little is enough, and exactly enough: to strive for more than that little is evil for us; and be assured that beyond the need of our narrow being, — beyond the range of the kingdom over which it is ordained for each of us to rule in serene αὑτάρκεια [self-sufficiency] and self-possession, he that increaseth toil, increaseth folly; and he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow.

    Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness; every piece of new knowledge diminishes the faculty of admiration; and Death is at last appointed to take us from a scene in which, if we were to stay longer, no gift could satisfy us, and no miracle surprise.

    John Ruskin, "Contentment in Science and Art," The Eagle's Nest (New York: Maynard, Merrill, & Co., 1893), p. 94 and 97

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  3. Carl Jung's face stares out from covers in every book shop that sells psychology, New Age, mythological or self-improvement titles. Sigmund Freud, fellow founder of the psychoanalytic movement, may have wooed intellectuals with his dark theories of infantile sexuality and the rampant id, but it is Jung who has cornered the middle-of-the-road self-improvement market. He is the Frank Sinatra of psychoanalysis - established, approachable, offering the comfort of myths and meaning in a mechanistic world.

    ... Jung's greatest accomplishment may have been turning what probably amounted to a psychotic episode - he maintained he had been transformed into a lion-headed Greek god - into a technique for personal salvation, at the core of which resided an "Aryan inner Christ". Not only are the underpinnings of the theory dubious, says Noll, but Jung resorted to telling lies about the case history that provided crucial evidence for his theory of the Collective Unconscious, the case of the patient known as the Solar Phallus Man. "Jung is the most influential liar of the 20th century," declares Noll flatly.

    ... one of Noll's striking claims is that Jung set himself up as a cult leader, much in the style of Jesus and that he even identified with Jesus.

    Jung was just one of many, Noll shows, who drew on the same Central European cauldron of neo-paganism, and Nietzschean, mystical, Volkisch utopianism that also spawned National Socialism. Noll, a one-time clinical psychologist with links to the Jungian establishment, is careful not to make a direct link between Jung and the rise of the Nazis. But he argues that such Jungian concepts as the need to rely on intuition rather than reason and the importance of an elite group of initiates also fed their poisonous mythology.

    ...Noll fanned the flames in October 1994 by writing an article for the New York Times in the wake of the mass suicide of 53 members of the Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland. "There is another story of a Swiss cult of middle class, sun-worshipping neo-pagans, led by a charismatic man who experienced himself to be Christ," Noll wrote. He went on to paint a picture of Jung's plans for world domination by a spiritual elite trained in Jungian analysis.

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  4. A mark of the bitterness of the dispute came when the Jung estate took the extraordinary step of forbidding Noll access to a collection of papers held in the Library of Congress - again actually within their rights but totally against the spirit of the library. This related to the case history that Noll claimed Jung has lied about. Noll found that the case had actually been handled by another analyst and disciple, JJ Honegger, whose papers were held by the library.

    The case is vitally important to the Jung edifice because the patient, known as the Solar Phallus Man, reported a vision of the sun with a phallus, supposedly a feature of the ancient pagan cult of Mithras. Since the patient couldn't have known about Mithras, Jung concluded, the image must have come from the collective unconscious, a sort of shared memory of the human race. Noll's claim, however, is that books and pamphlets on Mithras were widely available in Germany and that Jung in his writings changed their publication dates to show Solar Man couldn't have seen them. "The whole Jungian belief system will collapse if the collective unconscious is a fallacy," says Noll "If it is proved that Jung knowingly lied."

    Noll is sticking to his guns, however, and calls Jungian analysis a form of psychic pyramid selling - after six years' training and $100,000 you are ready to initiate others. And he has attracted some influential supporters. Someone who is even more suspicious of Jung and psychoanalysis as a whole is Frederick Crews, professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. Having penned several devastating attacks on Freud for the part he played in muddying the water over recovered memories, he makes an impressive case in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books for regarding Jung as an occultist on a par with Madam Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society.

    "Jung was a far more committed occultist than Blavatsky herself. She slapped together her claims from published sources and faked her mediumistic feats. But Jung cultivated private visionary experiences and was inclined to believe that he had temporarily occupied the being of Jesus Christ himself. By comparison Theosophy's transcendental claims seems fairly modest."

    `The Jung Cult: Origins of a charismatic movement' is published by Fontana Press on 7 October, price pounds 7.99

    Carl Jung: a `psychic pyramid seller'
    Jerome Burne Monday 30 September 1996 23:02 BST
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/carl-jung-a-psychic-pyramid-seller-1356142.htm

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    1. I am at @Roy_Cam. Been at the individuation thing for decades. Have read Noll's book ten times. A great description of the Euro failing intellectual and spiritual environment, for which, Jung is one of the best people with an Rx that works and is necessary. Also Gurdjieff and more. Anyway, I hope we can talk. There are not that many of us in the world in spite of the popularity of Jung..

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  5. I consider Anthony Storr a genius but I did not rate this book as highly as a friend of mine. It discusses a series of gurus who were imposters and conmen. It mentions only fleetingly Jesus, Mahomet, Freud and Jung. I am certain that many at least of Jung's insights are hugely valuable. The attempt to suggest he was a proto Nazi is disgusting. So many people are accused of being proto or quasi Nazis. He wrote interestingly about the Nazis as a religious phenomenon. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1165099.Feet_of_Clay

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  6. Jung's ablest disciple, Marie Louise von Frank, pointed out that SS officers temded to be mother's boys. She might have mentioned Himmler who, like the Kray twins, was always very good to his mum. I wrote about Jung's thoughts on Hitler here. http://pvewood.blogspot.ro/2015/05/was-hitler-mohammed-who-failed-discuss.html

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  7. The Jung Page
    The Symbolism of UFOs and Aliens

    An event in 1958 led Jung to conclude that it was more desirable for people to believe UFOs exist than to believe they don't exist. One of his final works, Flying Saucers, was an attempt to answer why it was more desirable to believe in their existence.

    Jung came to the conclusion that UFOs were examples of the phenomena of synchronicity where external events mirror internal psychic states. As usual, he saw the UFO situation in a broader perspective than most. For Jung the UFO images had much to do with the ending of an era in history and the beginning of a new one. In his introductory remarks to Flying Saucers he writes about the UFO events:


    "As we know from ancient Egyptian history, they are manifestations of psychic changes which always appear at the end of one Platonic month and at the beginning of another. Apparently they are changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or 'gods' as they used to be called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche. The transformation started in the historical era and left its traces first in the passing of the aeon of Taurus into that of Aries, and then of Aries into Pisces, whose beginning coincides with the rise of Christianity. We are now nearing that great change which may be expected when the spring point enters Aquarius."

    http://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/analytical-psychology/125-the-symbolism-of-ufos-and-aliens

    Wee woo, Wee woo, Wee woo!

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  8. In a similar manner that the medieval alchemists projected their psyche into matter, Jung felt that modern man projected his inner state into the heavens. In this sense, the UFOs became modern symbols for the ancient gods which came to man's assistance in time of need.

    Jung writes, "At a time when the world is divided by an iron curtain...we might expect all sorts of funny things, since when such a thing happens in an individual it means a complete dissociation, which is instantly compensated by symbols of wholeness and unity." It was very relevant to Jung that the shape of the flying saucers was round, the shape of the ancient Mandala, symbol of wholeness throughout history.

    ...nee-nah, nee-nah, nee-nah...

    http://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/analytical-psychology/125-the-symbolism-of-ufos-and-aliens

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  9. JUNG ON U.F.O.S JUNG, CARL GUSTAV:

    As a matter of fact the psychological aspect is so impressive, that one almost must regret that the Ufos seem to be real after all.

    Letter Signed, "C.G. Jung,Estimate $2,000 - 3,000
    Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $3,840

    http://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/asp/fullCatalogue.asp?salelot=2316++++++65+&refno=++674273&saletype=

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  10. Jung was a great man from whom I have learnt a vast amount. Probably no other writer taught me so much. What do you have against him?
    This is something Dr Jordan Peterson tweeted recently by Jung about, inter alia, drugs.

    https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2012/02/21/carl-jungs-letter-to-victor-white-2/

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  11. ' What do you have against him?'

    Nothing... just playing with google search... harmless fun. You know stuff like 'is jung nuts?' and finding that i'm not the only one wondering...

    Carl Jung. Nut, or misunderstood genius? - Stormfront
    https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t150027/

    "Sometimes I wonder if there are long forgotten "buttons" that could be found that would activate White racial awareness." Very interesting stuff.

    ' What do you have against him?'

    Nothing... just playing with google search... harmless fun. You know stuff like 'is jung nuts?' and finding that i'm not the only one wondering...

    Carl Jung. Nut, or misunderstood genius? - Stormfront
    https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t150027/

    "Sometimes I wonder if there are long forgotten "buttons" that could be found that would activate White racial awareness." Very interesting stuff.

    No the man was no Nazi... he was a fruitcake...

    We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our opinion on economic, political, and psychological factors. But if we may forget for a moment that we are living in the year of Our Lord 1936, and, laying aside our well-meaning, all-too human reasonableness, may burden God or the gods with the responsibility for contemporary events instead of man, we would find Wotan quite suitable as a causal hypothesis.
    In fact, I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together. There is no doubt that each of these factors explains an important aspect of what is going on in Germany, but Wotan explains yet more. He is particularly enlightening in regard to a general phenomenon, which is so strange to anybody not a German that it remains incomprehensible, even after the deepest reflection.

    Apparently everyone had forgotten that Wotan is a Germanic datum of first importance, the truest expression and unsurpassed personification of a fundamental quality that is particularly characteristic of the Germans. The emphasis on the German race – commonly called ‘Aryan’ – the Germanic heritage, blood and soil, the Wagalaweia songs, the ride of the Valkyries, Jesus as a blond and blue-eyed hero, the Greek mother of St. Paul, the devil as an international Alberich in Jewish or Masonic guise, the Nordic aurora borealis as the light of civilization, the inferior Mediterranean races – all this is the indispensable scenery for the drama that is taking place and at the bottom they all mean the same thing: a god has taken possession of the Germans and their house is filled with a ‘mighty rushing wind’.

    ‘The German Christians’ are a contradiction in many terms and would do better to join Hauer’s ‘German Faith Movement’. These are decent and well-meaning people who honestly admit their Ergriffenheit and try to come to terms with this new and undeniable fact. They go to an enormous amount of trouble to make it look less alarming by dressing it up in a conciliatory historical garb and giving us consoling glimpses of great figures such as Meister Eckhart, who was, also, a German and, also, ergriffen. In this way the awkward question of who the Ergreifer is is circumvented. He was always ‘God’. But the more Hauer restricts the world-wide sphere of Indo-European culture to the ‘Nordic’ in general and to the Edda in particular, and the more ‘German’ this faith becomes as a manifestation of Ergriffenheit, the more painfully evident it is that the ‘German’ god is the god of the Germans.

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  12. There are people in the German Faith Movement who are intelligent enough not only to believe, but to know, that the god of the Germans is Wotan and not the Christian God.

    Jung is advising that the best course for German religiosity to take is an overt recognition of the primacy of Wotan, without being mixed with an ‘Aryan Christ’ or Indo-Aryan scriptures from the East, all of which were popular among German folk-nationalists, who sought a wider ‘Indo-European’ heritage for Germanics stretching to India and Iran. Hence Jung advised to return to the fundamentals that had shaped the German folk, without attempting to synthesise Christ, the Eddas and the Upanishads into a ‘German Faith’ that would still not give Wotan his full realisation.

    https://www.counter-currents.com/2015/12/wotan-as-archetype-the-carl-jung-essay/

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  13. “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 Nürnberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. His body does not suggest strength. The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler’s is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, and unreasonable. … So you see, Hitler is a medicine man, a spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or, even better, a myth.”

    “When, for instance, the belief in the God Wotan vanished and nobody thought of him anymore, the phenomenon originally called Wotan remained; nothing changed but its name, as National Socialism has demonstrated on a grand scale. A collective movement consists of millions of individuals, each of whom shows the symptoms of Wotanism and proves thereby that Wotan in reality never died, but has retained his original vitality and autonomy. Our consciousness only imagines that it has lost its Gods; in reality they are still there and it only needs a certain general condition in order to bring them back in full force.” –Dr. Carl Gustav Jung in a letter to Miguel Serrano

    https://volkischpaganism.com/2014/10/08/carl-jung-on-hitler-as-personification-of-the-wotan-archetype/

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  14. But it is possible that the Christian symbolism expresses man’s mental condition in the aeon of Pisces, as the ram and the bull gods do for the ages of Aries and Taurus. In this case the post-mortal solu­tion would be symbolic of an entirely new psychological status, viz. that of Aquarius, which is certainly a oneness, presumably that of the Anthropos, the realization of Christ’s allusion; “Dii estis.”16 This is a formidable secret and difficult to understand, because it means that man will be essentially God and God man. The signs pointing in this direction consist in the fact that the cosmic power of self-destruction is given into the hands of man and that man inherits the dual nature of the Father. He will [mis]understand it and he will be tempted to ruin the universal life of the earth by radioactivity.

    That is the reason why there are compensatory functions. The in­troverted thinker is very much in need of a developed feeling, i.e., of a less autoerotic, sentimental, melodramatic and emotional relatedness to people and things. The compensation will be a hell of a conflict to begin with, but later on, by understanding what nirdvanda17 means, they18 become the pillars at the gate of the transcendent function, i.e., the transitus to the self.

    Fides in its ecclesiastical meaning is a construction expressed by the wholly artificial credo, but no spontaneous product of the unconscious. You can swear to it in all innocence, as well as I could, if asked. Also you can teach, if asked, the solid doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, as I could if I knew it. You can and will and must criticize it, yet with a certain discrimination, as there are people incapable of understanding your argument.Quieta movere24 is not necessarily a good principle. Being an analyst, you know how little you can say, and sometimes it is quite enough when only the analyst knows. Certain things transmit themselves by air when they are really needed.

    I can only hope that the doctors will feed themselves thoroughly with mescalin, the alkaloid of divine grace, so that they learn for themselves its marvellous effect.

    https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2012/02/21/carl-jungs-letter-to-victor-white-2/


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  15. “In America. as in all countries entered by a conquering race, the conquerors always drop toward the level of the conquered, for it is much easier to go down ten feet than to climb up one. The whole effort toward human development is to push us up that one foot, and if we let go of any of the things which we have gained by civilization, we slip quickly. In South Africa the Dutch, who were at the time of their colonizing a developed and civilized people, dropped to a much lower level because of their contact with the savage races. The savage inhabitants of a country have to be mastered. In the attempt to master, brutality rises in the master. He must be ruthless. He must sacrifice everything soft and fine for the sake of mastering savages. Their influence is very great; the more surely they are dominated, the more savage the master must become. The slave has the greatest influence of all, because he is kept close to the one who rules him.

    https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2015/02/09/carl-jung-america-is-the-most-tragic-country-in-the-world-to-day/

    All of the above are the rants and ravings of a lunatic... But like I said, it was fun...

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  16. Did you read my blog post about his thoughts on Hitler? I posted link above somewhere amidst your torrent of quotations

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    1. Your link:This is something Dr Jordan Peterson tweeted recently by Jung about, inter alia, drugs.

      https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2012/02/21/carl-jungs-letter-to-victor-white-2/

      ...sent me to this:

      CARL JUNG, CHRIST, EVIL, GODS, REDEEMER, VICTOR WHITE

      Carl Jung’s Letter to Victor White

      There are some crazy quotes above..."the Christian symbolism expresses man’s mental condition in the aeon of Pisces, as the ram and the bull gods do for the ages of Aries and Taurus." etc

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    2. Oh, I got it! It was way up...
      Good stuff. Well written.
      Jung, the creep, was flattering Hitler by comparing him to Mohammed. He admired muslim religion:

      "We need feel no surprise that in Russia the colourful splendours of the Eastern Orthodox Church have been superseded by the Movement of the Godless -- indeed, one breathed a sigh of relief oneself when one emerged from the haze of an Orthodox church with its multitude of lamps and entered an honest mosque, where the sublime and invisible omnipresence of God was not crowded out by a superfluity of sacred paraphernalia."

      WOTAN [First published as WOTAN, Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zurich). n.s., III (March, 1936), 657-69. Republished in AUFSATZE ZUR ZEITGESCHICHTE (Zurich, 1946), 1-23. Trans. by Barbara Hannah in ESSAYS ON CONTEMPORARY EVENTS (London, 1947), 1-16; this version has been consulted.] "In Germany Shall diverse sects arise, Coming very near to happy paganism. The heart captivated and small receivings Shall open the gate to pay the true tithe." -- Propheties De Maistre Michel Nostradamus, 1555

      http://docs1.minhateca.com.br/1010194177,BR,0,0,C.-G.-Jung---Wotan.pdf

      But, after all, he has a good excuse for being a loony , he was abused as a child...

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  17. Check this out:

    Psychiatrist of the Gods? By WALTER KENDRICK

    CARL GUSTAV JUNG By Frank McLynn.
    624 pp. New York:
    A Thomas Dunne Book/St. Martin's Press. $29.95.

    THE ARYAN CHRIST The Secret Life of Carl Jung.
    By Richard Noll.
    Illustrated. 334 pp. New York:
    Random House. $25.95.

    McLynn's tone remains coolly reasonable, though he often finds Jung
    exasperating: ''It was typical of him to muddy the waters so that a
    good argument became dissolved in a bad one''; Jung's exposition of
    general ideas was ''typically turbid and confused''; in his last
    years, he displayed a ''maddening insistence, whenever he had lost
    something, that it had been spirited away by supernatural forces.''

    Noll's Jung is a different creature altogether. ''The Aryan Christ''
    doesn't pretend to be a biography; it skims across Jung's early years
    to focus on that crucial month in 1913, and it largely ignores his
    life after about 1930. In part, Noll does for Jung what Frank Sulloway
    did for Sigmund Freud in ''Freud: Biologist of the Mind'' (1979): he
    places Jung's dreams and theories in the context not of biology but of
    contemporary mythological studies, showing how virtually all his
    supposed revelations can be found in books by once-popular authorities
    like Friedrich Creuzer and Franz Cumont. The Jungian panoply of
    archetypes, the collective unconscious and so on, may be simply a
    byproduct of ''cryptomnesia,'' or ''implicit memory,'' which is
    ''implicated in such contemporary issues as 'false memory syndrome' in
    cases of alleged child abuse,'' Noll says. ''If so,'' he concludes,
    ''the collective unconscious may still be said to exist, but only on
    the shelves of Jung's personal library.''

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  18. Debunking, however, ranks second on Noll's agenda. His first aim is to
    prove that Jungianism should be called neither psychotherapy nor
    philosophy but religion, ''an Aryans-only cult of redemption and
    rebirth.'' Jung and his followers, Noll maintains, knew this dire
    truth and concealed it from the world under a series of masks. For all
    its ominous evocation of cults and conspiracies, ''The Aryan Christ''
    fails to convince me that any serious damage has been done by a few
    people's adherence to an obviously wacko creed. I prefer McLynn's
    no-nonsense summation: ''Acres of print could have been saved if Jung
    had come clean and admitted that he was a prophet.''

    McLynn's reasonableness never flags, even when he must handle such
    crazies as Jung's mother, Emilie, who bore him on July 26, 1875, and
    devoted herself thereafter to scaring the daylights out of him. Or his
    cousin Helene Preiswerk, a fake medium, whose antics formed the basis
    of Jung's dissertation at the University of Basel, where he qualified
    as a medical doctor in 1900. Or Jung himself, who throughout his youth
    (some might say his life) exhibited frequent signs of an ''unbalanced
    mental state.''

    McLynn patiently follows Jung through his years at the Burgholzli
    hospital in Zurich; through his love affair with Freud, who called him
    his ''beloved son'' until their bitter split in 1913; and through all
    the gyrations of Jung's later life --his fascination with alchemy and
    ''ambivalent'' attraction to Nazism in the 1930's, his turn toward
    astrology and flying saucers in the 1950's, his ascension as ''the New
    Age guru'' in the years just before his death on June 6, 1961. McLynn
    never loses his straight face, calmly reporting for instance that Jung
    hated jet travel because ''the body went too fast for the soul, which
    had to catch it up; this was the true meaning of 'jet lag.' ''

    Yet one gets the impression that McLynn, although he never says so,
    regards Jung as certifiable and his followers as worse.

    http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/21/reviews/970921.21kendrit.html

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  19. Again:

    'Yet one gets the impression that McLynn, although he never says so, regards Jung as certifiable and his followers as worse.'

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  20. 'You're a loony. '
    'They called Galileo a loony.'
    'Yeah and they also called a lot of loonies loonies.'
    Pete and Dud
    I and most people put Jung into the Galileo category.

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    1. McLynn
      never loses his straight face, calmly reporting for instance that Jung hated jet travel because ''the body went too fast for the soul, which
      had to catch it up; this was the true meaning of 'jet lag.' ''

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  21. Ok Toma, you know how to use google and block quote a lot of other people's opinions on Jung. Great. What about your own opinion though? Why don't you get one of Jung's books and read it? If you get halfway through and think 'No, this guy's barking up the wrong tree' at least you can say you gave him a fair hearing.
    Using second hand opinion and internet articles to base your opinion about a man's work is like trying to describe someones house when you've never been in the house. If we are seekers of knowledge and understanding that is not good enough. We must go inside the house and look around and experience it for ourselves, come to our own conclusions.

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    1. Look, I never denied the genius of your beloved Aryan Christ... nor that of his prophet Mohamet. Those texts I quoted suggest that he might be, perhaps, a bit deranged upstairs... I know, he's Swiss... it runs in the family, child abuse and 'this is your brain on drugs' stuff....all the assorted excuses... but anyway... Tell me the guy is not a fruitcake... Show me where's his brilliance hidden and I'm willing to eat, in a public, any of his books you recommend... Just don't ask me to read something written by someone who believes in UFOs. Or that " 'jet lag' is the soul trying to catch up with the body traveling in an airplane." No. I can't. Not to mention the astrology, symbology and numerology crap embedded everywhere... By the way...
      Thanks for complimenting my google search and copy paste skills... I'll tell my mom...

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    2. Why not, instead of quoting things people have said about Jung, talk about the things he said about America that I quoted? I never understand the logic of ad hominem attacks.

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  22. These may be just travel notes.. Living in the US, helps one understand the fine line between the futility of generalization, and the the necessity to categorize reality. In other words, there is a huge difference in dating and American of German descent as opposed dating an American of Chinese South American or Palestinian descent, although there are individuals who make an effort to change, and they are a yet different type. Even more, there is a huge difference between dating a Texan and a New York-an, even if they both work in high tech for example.
    Under the apparent uniformity of shallow rules and norms there are vast variances in principles. And girls know and keep the this in mind when they choose.
    America I think will always strive to melt the divergent cultures of it's peoples, and the more diversity is being pushed down into the culture, the more the culture is being ruptured and replaced by the 'Hollywood' story of the day.
    I agree with Jung about the fact that American women have to work harder to make the right choice.
    About being afraid, Jung is being proven wrong by the epidemics of Asian women seeking European American men. Main reason is fact that they are less domineering and more egalitarian than their Asian men.
    All in all I think that these notes are quite superficial and not thought through.

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  23. 'quite superficial and not thought through'

    This is code for bullshit, boss...

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