Some “science” bears the clear marks of science, as we think of it. It works on the empirical, it has hypotheses that can be tested, re-tested, confirmed, discarded. Early on, Sigmund Freud’s theories were put under a microscope, and many were found wanting. On the other hand, Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychiatry, hasn’t received the [mainstream] thrashing that Freud did.
The global mental health market reached a value of over $400 billion last year and is expected to reach nearly $500 billion by 2027, so it is not surprising that there is no loud public outcry against an industry with such a poor success rate—head-shrinking and brain-medicating is an extremely lucrative business. Many people are getting wealthy off it. Nearly $250 billion is spent on psychiatrists, another $40 billion on psychologists.
Big Pharma has made a fortune on antidepressants by promoting “chemical imbalance in the brain” as a leading cause of depression. Many people have been led to believe that their depression has a biochemical cause and have taken the prescribed antidepressants. A new study out of University College London casts doubts on that theory and indeed the entire industry. Dr. Joanna Moncrieff said, according to The Guardian, “It is always difficult to prove a negative, but I think we can safely say that after a vast amount of research conducted over several decades, there is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abnormalities, particularly by lower levels or reduced activity of serotonin.”
I started researching the New Age in earnest three months ago and no thorough examination of the New Age can be conducted without stumbling upon Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), again and again. Jungian psychology is a religion, it is a belief system prominently featuring spiritualism. It is a study of myth and metaphysics. In Psychology and the Occult, we read a series of lectures that Jung presented at Basel University, in which he said that “the soul does exist, it is intelligent and immortal, not subject to time and space.” He also affirmed “the reality of spirits and spiritualism, on the evidence of telekinesis, messages of dying people, hypnotism, clairvoyance…and prophetic dreams.”
Jung grew up in an atmosphere of séance and persistent poltergeist activity. His father’s side of the family were conservative Protestant Christians, but his mother was an eccentric who said spirits visited her at night. Jung wrote that a spirit named “Philemon” visited him in a dream in 1913; Jung described Philemon in a seminar he delivered in 1925. Memories, Dreams and Reflections was published posthumously so the following quote may have been edited by his long-time assistant Aniela Jaffé:
“Philemon represented a force which was not myself…It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche…He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru.”1
While Jung undermined Christianity by embracing spiritualism, Sigmund Freud, who was at one time a mentor of Carl Jung, took a more frontal approach to attacking Christianity with “science.” Professor of psychiatry Thomas Szasz said “The popular image of Freud as an enlightened, emancipated, irreligious person who, with the aid of psychoanalysis, discovered that religion is a mental illness is pure fiction…One of Freud’s most powerful motives in life was the desire to inflict vengeance on Christianity…” 2
There’s a story that, as they sailed into New York Harbor on a visit to America, Sigmund Freud stood on the deck with Carl Jung and gazed out at the statue of liberty. Freud turned to Jung and whispered,
“They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague.”
Whether this famous quote is true or merely apocryphal I cannot say, but it is an accurate sentiment if we measure by the damage inflicted on people in the name of psychoanalysis. I think most psychology and a great deal of psychiatry shares more in common with a religious creed than a branch of science but nowhere is this more obvious than when considering Jung, and his theory of the collective unconscious.
Journalist Martin L. Gross wrote, “One of the most powerful religious ideas of the second half of the twentieth century is the Great [Collective] Unconscious. In this religion of the Unconscious, our conscious mind is a second-class being…a mere puppet of the unknown true self…Is there an [Collective] Unconscious? From a scientific point of view, it is a theological device which fills the gap in man’s biological ignorance…” 3
Jung, because of his own experiences, opposed the completely atheistic view of Freud. He knew there was more to the human psyche than just conditioned responses and a bunch of neurons in the brain. He also had the insight to understand that religion provides a counter-balance to the secular, technocratic, totalitarian state that emerged in the 20th Century:
"In order to free the fiction of the sovereign state -- in other words, the whims of those who manipulate it -- from every wholesome restriction, all socio-political movements tending in this direction invariably try to cut the ground from under the religions. For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him. But religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. These do not refer directly to social and physical conditions; they concern far more the individual psychic attitude."
“But it is possible to have an attitude to the external conditions of life only when there is a point of reference outside them. The religions give, or claim to give, such a standpoint, thereby enabling the individual to exercise his judgment and his power of decision. They build up reserve, as it were, against the obvious and the inevitable force of circumstances to which everyone is exposed who lives only in the outer world and has no other ground under his feet except the pavement. If statistical reality is the only reality, then it is the sole authority.”
Jung goes on to explain that he is defining religion as the relationship of an individual to God whereas when a religion compromises with the State it becomes a creed.
Richard Noll is an American psychologist and an historian of medicine who has published two books about Jung. His award-winning 1995 book The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement caused huge controversy and pressure from Jung's family which resulted in Princeton University Press cancelling the publication of a second book, Mysteria: Jung and the Ancient Mysteries: Selections from the Writings of C.G. Jung. From the inside flap of The Jung Cult
“Richard Noll has made a signal contribution to the study of the life, thought, and followers of Carl G. Jung, and through that to the study of depth psychology as a whole . . . all those who hold Carl G. Jung in high esteem also owe a debt of thanks to Richard Noll, even though he will be persona non grata with many of them." -Peter Homans, University of Chicago, San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal
Another Noll book on Jung was, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung. Amazon tells us that, “Richard Noll reveals Jung as the all-too-human man he really was, a genius who, believing he was a spiritual prophet, founded a neopagan religious movement that offered mysteries for a new age.”
Noll was also an early public critic of the American psychiatric profession's complicity in the moral panic of the late 1980s and early 1990s concerning child sex abuse and the idea of “recovered memories”, which resulted in scores of innocent people going to prison for child sexual abuse that never happened. Some of you might be old enough to remember the McMartin preschool trial in the U.S. in the early 1980s. Members of the McMartin family operated a preschool in California and were charged with hundreds of acts of sexual abuse of children in their care. The case lasted seven years, but there were no convictions. All charges were dropped in 1990. Other cases include the Kern County case, the “Wee Care” nursery school case, the “Little Rascals” day care in Edenton, North Carolina, and many others.
A more recent example of mass hysteria was “pizzagate,” when an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist named “Q-anon” whipped up a frenzy over a purported child sexual abuse ring operating in a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. Edgar Welch drove from North Carolina to Washington to rescue sexually abused children he believed were hidden in a mysterious basement complex beneath the restaurant. He fired a shot from his AR-15, but ultimately surrendered without hurting anyone.
You can find plenty of statistics that will support a claim that psychiatry and psychology have done much good. Many of these statistics have been “peer-reviewed.” Yet millions of people suffer from depression and millions take antidepressants and the number of sufferers and medicated continues to grow. Whatever science ultimately decides about the origins of depression, we are suffering a crisis of purpose, a crisis of meaning.
I know people who have found value in the Jungian archetypes, the universal patterns and images that Jung believed are part of the collective unconscious. Jung originated the “inner child” concept in his “divine child” archetype and many people claim that it has only been by respecting and communicating with this inner child have they been able to come to terms with and get behind serious childhood abuse and trauma. (I have never undergone Jungian therapy. I cannot measure its effectiveness with the yardstick of experience.)
Jung taught that our unconscious is purposeful, our dreams are purposeful, the images and symbolism have meaning that can guide us. I know people who insist that analyzing and understanding the imagery of their dreams has been enormously helpful to their personal growth and creativity. I know artists and musicians for whom dream imagery is an essential part of their palette.
How do we know what is truth? It’s a central and large part of all philosophy. There are countless theories of truth. What is the nature of truth? “A belief is true if and only if it corresponds to a fact.”
Joachim insists that “what is true is the whole complete truth.” Peirce said “Truth is the end of inquiry.” The slogan “Truth is satisfactory to believe” is attributed to Peirce and James. I find it satisfactory to believe that in my current incarnation, I am Napoleon, but satisfactory though that may be to me, is it true?
Jesus stood before Pilate (the governor), and the Jews cried out for his crucifixion. Then Pilate said to Jesus, 'So you are a king, are you?' Jesus answered, 'You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.' Pilate said to him, 'What is truth?' After saying this, he went back out to the Jews and told them, 'I find no guilt in him'” (John 18:37-38). The truth for Pilate was that Jesus was innocent, but he soon discovered that the “truth” for the Jews was that Jesus was guilty. He decided that the politically prudent course was to give the people what they wanted.
Someone told me recently about a study group they had attended to read and discuss C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. This book was written from the point of view of “Screwtape,” one of the Devil’s helpers, as a series of letters to his young nephew Wormwood. Screwtape is encouraging Wormwood as he tries to procure a young man’s soul for eternal damnation. In one of the letters, he tells Wormwood that he needn’t be too concerned about his “patient” discovering some of the finer points of free will because nobody bothers to read anymore and if they do, it’s for the wrong reasons.
“Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating The Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (especially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the “present state of the question.” To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge – to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour – this would be rejected as unutterably simple minded.”
The friend who relayed this story told me that he was eager to discuss the “dusty old books” with the minister who was leading the study group, agreeing with Lewis that very old books could be sources of profound wisdom. But the minister launched into the importance of understanding the history, the times in which the book was written, and if it was possible to read the text in its original language, Aramaic for instance, that would certainly be helpful, as historical context was vital for real understanding. In other words, the minister was espousing the very attitude to old texts that the Devil’s helpers were pushing! My friend wasn’t terribly surprised when the minister later revealed that he was a psychologist and a “licensed clinical aromatherapist” and counseled the small class that the point of prayer was to “merge with Jesus.”
In one interview, Richard Noll said “Jung is the most influential liar of the 20th century.” In another interview, Noll cautioned, “The average person who reads Jung is not a scholar or a scientist, but usually someone who is spiritually minded and is looking for "answers." The average person would not have Jung's vast erudition and would be unable to assess for him or herself if Jung's evidence "makes sense" or not. They assume that because Jung was so smart, and so credentialed, and was a physician and a former colleague of Freud's that he is an "authority" whose opinion must be placed above their own. This reliance on an "authority" to provide "truth" is a big, big mistake. And one which Jung and Jungian analysts have long promoted.”
Later in that same interview he said,
“Jung claimed his concepts were merely "hypotheses," but then refused to put them to any test. Jungian analysts wallow in the same unfortunate ignorance. And, to repeat myself, to make matters worse, Jung actually falsified his evidence for a collective unconscious and archetypes in his publications. The "whole" that Jung offers us collapses when we realize it was constructed with faulty parts. Again, if -- as I argue in my books -- Jung was more interested in founding a religious movement, then the scientific status of his concepts should not matter to "believers." But Jungians should be aware that Jung's theories are NOT congruent with 20th century science and in fact are contradicted by many, many discoveries in evolutionary biology, genetics, cognitive science, biochemistry, anthropology, and experimental studies of human memory in psychology. If Jungians want to be like Scientologists and claim that their religious principles have a scientific basis, they are free to do so. But Jungians should be aware that the scientific world does not agree with Jung's claims of what is "scientific." Science deals in potentially falsifiable theories and claims. Jung's "hypothesis" is actually nothing of the sort: it is a metaphysical concept regarded by uncurious Jungian analysts as eternal, unchanging, and NEVER potentially falsifiable. It's a free country. Believe what you want, I say. Just don't expect the rest of the world to agree with you if you say it's "science".”
My two months of research is woefully inadequate for any kind of grand judgement – if that was my goal. I didn’t set out to prove a premise. I asked questions. Did Jung think that he was participating in a new science? Was he wittingly attacking or “improving” upon the prevailing religion? Did his theories play a dominant role in the New Age movement as it unfolded in the 20th century and into our own?
I asked for the thoughts of people who have spent years studying Jung’s writings and was fortunate to receive their input. One man has read and re-read Jung’s letters many times and had good insights to share. He said that in the Letters, Jung hammered away at his public persona as an empiricist, a scientist when that was still noble, the learned university man. He went on to add that Jung is clearly some kind of religious reformer or extender of religious principles of the west. This comes through in the Letters.
Jung writes that the essence of Christianity is concerned with the individual way of life of a man, the Son of Man; the very process of individuation is the incarnation of the revelation of God Himself. Jung rightly believed that Christianity as a vital support of civilization was not finished but that its living representation must be meditated upon deeply and its forms revitalized for the current age. Richard Noll asserts that Jung’s “individuation” was actually “deification,” the process of becoming God, and that Jung was fully conscious that was indeed the meaning.
As an aside, I will say that my own interpretation of what Jung said is very different from what happened in the Catholic Church after Vatican II, as it sought to bring its structure into harmony with the modern world. What Jung focuses on in his critique of Christianity (for the casual reader who hasn’t time to read all of his correspondence to probe for hidden meanings) is the necessity for individual development, the assertion that a functioning society is dependant upon the process he calls individuation, the process of developing a separate identity, an important goal of adolescence, but something that continues throughout a person's life. He chastises the church hierarchy for not encouraging the individual but rather organizing in a way that promotes the collective. As Jung points out, Jesus went His own way and this often put Him in conflict with the formal Judaism of His day. Was Jung championing an individual’s search for God or men becoming gods?
Metanoia, rebirth or conversion might sometimes be referred to as being “born again.” Jung writes that it cannot be achieved without effort and suffering. I find the red letters of the New Testament the safest guides for that Holy Spirit-led journey.
***
“Self-Authoring” Your Way to an $8 Million Net Worth
Prior to this research, I was blissfully ignorant of Richard Noll, his books on Jung and the controversy they sparked. Naturally, many Jungians were outraged by the books and attacked Noll’s scholarship and his character. I hadn’t heard of most of the psychologists and scholars who attacked Noll, but I am familiar with Jordan Peterson who called Noll a not very nice pejorative based on Noll’s books about Jung.
Back in 2016, when Peterson surfaced with his YouTube videos critical of Canada’s Bill C-16 and gender-neutral pronouns, I dug into a bit of research and watched some of Peterson’s series, Maps of Meaning. They might be educational, they might be meaningful, but clearly, I’m not the target audience.
I do not have a burning desire to jump on the Let’s-Criticize-Jordan-Peterson bandwagon. I’ll leave it to others to ask, Is Jordan Peterson our new Aryan Christ? Or declare, ‘Grifter’ Really Is the Only Word to Use for Jordan Peterson. But he had popped up in that way during my research and so I thought I’d take another look, watch a few of his interviews, and try to allow for the possibility that his meteoric rise could have been the result of something other than authorized promotion.
I discussed him with a friend who wasn’t concerned about his personal life, his ethics, his morals, his inconsistencies. “In the war against woke, we have to take our allies wherever we can find them. If we can only align with people who think just like us, we’ll find ourselves alone.”
I watched a couple of interviews. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes people just rub you the wrong way and there’s no explaining why. There was an interview with a news crew in Sweden I watched with my “let’s appreciate Peterson because he’s anti-woke” friend and there were several pretty obvious examples of him dancing all around questions he didn’t want to answer. My friend (the fan, but still in possession of his critical faculties) pointed out that Peterson accepts all the rules of the Leftist anti-patriarchal narrative while playing the part of a critic.
But it was in a 2018 interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival (AIF) -- part of the Aspen Institute -- where I was really able to get a handle on just what bothers me. First of all, the Aspen Institute was formed for the express purpose of bringing together individuals from various backgrounds and fields of expertise for discussions about global and social issues and innovative ideas. Past AIF speakers have included President Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Ehud Barak, Madeleine Albright, Stephen Breyer, Sandra Day O'Connor, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Frum, Salam Fayyad, and Paul Ryan. But I only thought about the venue and types of people it attracts after the interview.
Jordan Peterson was expressing his anger to the interviewer, that he had been required by his university to address students by their preferred gender pronouns. He told her that his training as a psychologist gave him the ability to recognize if their request for this change in pronoun was coming from a deep need or from some other motive. He’d take it on a case-by-case basis. There was lots of banter back and forth between Peterson and the host about clarity and precision of language.
Towards the latter part of the interview there was a question from the audience and if you want to see how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, please fast forward to 01:11:33. A gentleman who we don’t see introduces himself as a professor of linguistics. He is known to the interviewer, and she is delighted to see him. He says that he teaches trans students and starting about four years ago (2014) students began asking him to address them by their preferred pronouns. Clearly, there is a little bit of baiting Peterson here, as the linguistics professor asks what in Peterson’s training as a psychologist allows him to know if the student’s request for gender-neutral pronouns is coming from a place of deep need or if the student was being manipulative.
“Based on your training, how would you know which students to go along [with] and which to discount?” This dance on the head of a pin lasts until 01:20:00 and that eight and a half minutes gives us a lot of insight as to what is wrong with our cultures, globally. Two professors will argue for eight and half minutes about whether the student is deserving or not deserving of this “courtesy” of being referred to by his preferred pronouns. In other words, as my friend pointed out, they are happy to accept all the rules of the official narrative. They might be “rebellious,” but they are still boxing in the official ring. Neither of them ever said, or ever will say, “I will not legitimize this insanity. What stands before me is a male student, and I’ll be damned if I call him “she” or “they”.” The whole exchange was perfectly woke.
The patient presents himself to a psychologist as Napoleon and the psychologist agrees to call him “Emperor?” Has the doctor been helpful? Is it true?
Truth is indeed the first casualty of war, but then again, what is truth?
Additional reading:
Recycled Wind Turbines Could Be Made into Plexiglass, Diapers or Gummy Bears
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recycled-wind-turbines-could-be-made-into-plexiglass-diapers-or-gummy-bears/
Little evidence that chemical imbalance causes depression, UCL scientists find
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/20/scientists-question-widespread-use-of-antidepressants-after-survey-on-serotonin
Big Pharma May Have Made Billions Based On A Falsehood About Depression, New Research Shows
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/big-pharma-may-have-made-billions-based-on-a-falsehood-about-depression-new-research-shows/ar-AAZQwac
The mysterious Jung: his cult, the lies he told, and the occult
https://www.hgi.org.uk/resources/delve-our-extensive-library/interviews/mysterious-jung-his-cult-lies-he-told-
Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pizzagate-from-rumor-to-hashtag-to-gunfire-in-dc/2016/12/06/4c7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html
Carl Jung: a `psychic pyramid seller'
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/carl-jung-a-psychic-pyramid-seller-1356142.html
‘Grifter’ Really Is the Only Word to Use for Jordan Peterson
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/grifter-really-only-word-jordan-030149901.html
Jordan Peterson: From the Barricades of the Culture Wars (especially at 01:11:33)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6H2HmKDbZA