Book #35 of 2020: The Aryan Christ by Richard Noll

Does nothing to diminish Jung's work or his contributions as a major 20th century intellectual. Most of what Noll decries about Jung, such as his focus on myth and spirituality,  is pretty obvious to anyone who reads Jung or knows about Jungian analysis, and is hardly 'the secret life' of Jung.

Yes, Jung found science and medicine to be only part of the picture (like most literary and philosophical thinkers and mystics of all ages), and thought there was more at work which was inexplicable. Yes, he dabbled in the occult and spirituality and religion and astrology. He wrote openly about these things in his own works. So using a focus on myth or spiritualism or pseudo-science in an attempt to tarnish Jung simply backfires. And the fact that Jung's estate kept unsavory things about his affairs out of published works does not indicate Jung was a sinister monster--this is pretty standard practice and is true of most literary estates.

Noll attempts to paint Jung's obsession and interest in hauntings and spirits as evidence he was founding a new religion and not a method of analysis. But Jung was open his entire career about his interest in hauntings and spirits, and the much-publicized break with Freud was partly a result of this. This is not "the secret life" of Jung at all. And sure, maybe there is a New Age-y air to Jungian analysis and to the Joe Campbell school of Lit Crit which sprung from Jung's influence on academe. But does any of that diminish Jung's work? Throughout this book Noll routinely praises Jung's accomplishments in the field and mentions how they are still in use or relevant to the field of psychology. I recently read a dialogue about the release of Jung's Red Book which focused anew on this debate in the light of Jung's illuminated manuscript and what it portends for the future of analytical psychology as a science.

Maybe the point, Mr. Noll, is that anyone who regards psychology as a science is wrong. Perhaps that's what bugs you? Psychology is like economics--it gives you some outlines and some ability to explain, but it's mostly a system of belief. So what?

There is a lot of "ooh, here's a sentence in a letter about Jung with the word cult in it. See Jung WAS the leader of a cult!" But the worst most egregious thing about this book is the final chapter which attempts to paint Jung as a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite. Throughout the entire book is a continual building of this case, that Jung's ideas about polygamy and German myth and sun-worship and paganism were the same soil out of which Nazism sprung, so therefore Jung is a Nazi and a terrible human as well. The entire last chapter can be summed up in these short passage:

Gene Nameche, to his credit, specifically asked almost all of his interviewees who knew Jung in the 1930s and 1940s about his attitude toward Jews and National Socialism and his possible involvement with the Nazis. The vast majority of [Jung's] disciples absolve him of this. Others equivocate. The truth is no doubt somewhere in between.

Notice the 'logic' of this sequence. Almost everyone said Jung was not Anti-Semitic or Nazi, some don't come out and say it...so the truth is between. What nonsense! The next paragraph goes on to talk about Jung's interest in solar worship and myths associated with the sun, and the swastika was a solar symbol so JUNG MUST BE A NAZI.

Followed by this: "there is no evidence that he was ever a Nazi. This is not to say he opposed the Nazis, either."

Much of the book is sloppy and flip-floppy guilt by association of this nature. BUT--I enjoyed the portraits of some of Jung's 'disciples' and the critique of his cynical use of a niece as a spiritual medium was interesting. Particularly interesting and sensitive are the portraits of Fanny Katz, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, and Constance Long. Noll intends the stories of these women to damn Jung and his 'cult,' but on the contrary they show that Jung was a major part of the intellectual scene at the time, and some drifted in and out of his circle much as is the case with any artist or intellectual of note in a vibrant culture of ideas.

I think this book is worth a read. As an admirer of Jung as a scientist turned mystic and what he attempted I have my biases. The book was insufficiently well-argued to overcome them and I am not convinced by Noll's arguments or evidence. I imagine for someone with anti-Jung biases that the opposite might be the case.

Book #13 of 2020: Alice James A Biography by Jean Strouse

My first encounter with the James family was William. As a teen I'd discovered Joe Campbell and Carl Jung and I'd just finished Campbell's The Masks of God: Complete Four Volume Set when I stumbled upon The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature . A few years later I was in a seminar on American Realistic Fiction finishing my senior year in college, and had discovered Henry James via The Ambassadors. That novel tumbled me down a decade dominated by Henry and his serpentine sentences. The most intense and delightful year was my first year at Temple U in grad school, and another seminar focused entirely on James. We read I believe 7 or 8 of the novels and a couple dozen short stories in that class.

Strouse's biography of Alice is a loving and critical examination of the James family and its social milieu with Alice its central focus. The portrait of Henry Sr. is sensitive and illuminates how a pseudo-mystical Swedenborgian with somewhat retrograde ideas about the place of women in society managed to raise up a cluster of young intellectuals who would play no small part in challenging those views. Alice grew up in a house where her dad had long regular conversations with Emerson and Thoreau and other Boston Brahmins, where the Howes and Adams family were neighbors and friends, Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells were guests, a house filled with art and literature and Transcendentalism and philosophy, a home where Abolitionism and the beginnings of Women's Suffrage were a few of the real-world topics of discussion. Henry Sr. was restless and curious and afflicted by sufficient fortune to drag his family back and forth to Europe several times on whims. He hoped to expose his young brood to as much of Western culture and ideas as he could, and to give them a strong grounding in languages.

William and Henry of course benefited substantially from this life and went on to careers in science and literature respectfully, Both are regarded as among the top tier of American writers and thinkers. And both had "obscure hurts" and regular bouts of depression and unexplained physical ailments. Alice also suffered these, and to a much more debilitating degree. But Strouse brings full attention to Alice's rich social and intellectual life despite her physical and emotional suffering, and analyzes her treatments and relationships with different physicians, and situates her in a phenomenon of upper-crusty women undergoing similar long-term and unexplained prostrations and complaints. But Alice is never merely a symbol of women born too smart and too soon into an age where their gifts had no place--women at the cusp of a new age where their options were about to flourish. Her own individual experience is brought forth brilliantly. Her relationships with her brothers--a flirty, pseudo romantic one with William, and a deep, sisterly bond with Henry Jr.-- are attentively rendered, and there is ample attention to the affects of Alice and her reality on William's psychological theories and Henry's female characters, in particular Millie Theale.

The Diary Of Alice James was preserved by her long-time friend and nurse Katherine Loring, who had copies printed for her surviving brothers and for herself, and who then had the Diary published (much to Henry's chagrin--"OMG," he WhatsApped to William. "What if Ms. Loring includes all the shit I said to Alice in confidence about folks in our circles!?"). Immediately it was a smash, and was accounted as important a document as any other James family production. Alice was revealed as much more than a sad invalid whose misery inspired her brother's medical and artistic success--she was a daring independent spirit who had a ferocity for experience and making sense of it with a voice all her own.

Kudos to Strouse, who did the research necessary for biographies of multiple James family members in order to distill down this moving portrait of Alice.

Drawing of Alice James by Henry James, Jr.