Cult Fictions

C. G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology

Sonu Shamdasani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134664610
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Psychology

Controversial claims that C.G. Jung, founder of analytical psychology, was a charlatan and a self-appointed demi-god have recently brought his legacy under renewed scrutiny. The basis of the attack on Jung is a previously unknown text, said to be Jung's inaugural address at the founding of his 'cult', otherwise known as the Psychological Club, in Zurich in 1916. It is claimed that this cult is alive and well in Jungian psychology as it is practised today, in a movement which continues to masquerade as a genuine professional discipline, whilst selling false dreams of spiritual redemption.
In Cult Fictions, leading Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani looks into the evidence for such claims and draws on previously unpublished documents to show that they are fallacious. This accurate and revealing account of the history of the Jungian movement, from the founding of the Psychological Club to the reformulation of Jung's approach by his followers, establishes a fresh agenda for the historical evaluation of analytical psychology today.

1

CULT AND ASSOCIATION

I was nobody: I might have turned out to be a country doctor. A man finds himself singled out, isolated and alone: People are attracted and come.

(Jung to Edward Thornton, 1951)¹

What is a psychological association? From the inception of modern psychotherapy, this question has never ceased to be asked, whatever the particular therapeutic school. Should psychotherapists organise themselves according to a traditional model? Or was there something within the very nature of the psychotherapeutic enterprise and its understanding of human relations that contained the conception of a new form of social order? If so, how was this to be implemented? These questions were not simply limited to the issue of how psychotherapists should arrange their institutions, but had bearings on whether they could make wider contributions to society. Modern psychotherapy held out the promise of a deeper understanding of human nature than had previously been possible. It was hoped that this would in turn lead to a new era of transformed social relations. There has been no end of psychologies of the nursery, of school, of industry, of corporate life, of the nation and international relations propounded this century. There has been no form of social organisation that has not – for better or worse – met with an attempted psychological reformulation. Today, the institutions of psychotherapy are undergoing a legitimation crisis, and the societal legacies of psychotherapy are increasingly contested. Hence it is important to consider their historical genesis.

At the beginning of the twentieth century psychotherapy assumed the traditional medical model of one-to-one private practice. It established its own institutions, distinct from the medical schools and the university, which became the operative bases of modern psychology and psychiatry. A principal figure in these institutional developments was C. G. Jung. During his association with Freud, he was a prime architect of the International Psychoanalytic Movement. Psychoanalysis truly became international with the arrival of the Zurich school. It was Jung, the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, who organised its first congresses and established its first journal. As Freud recalled:

Nowhere else did such a compact little group of adherents exist, or could a public clinic be placed at the service of psychoanalytic researches, or was there a clinical teacher who included psychoanalytic theories as an integral part of his psychiatric course. The Zurich group thus became the nucleus of the small band who were fighting for the recognition of analysis. The only opportunity of learning the new art and working at it in practice lay there. Most of my followers and co-workers at the present time came to me by way of Zurich, even those who were geographically much nearer to Vienna than Switzerland.²

For psychiatrists interested in psychoanalysis, it was Zurich and not Vienna that was initially the instruction centre of choice. As Ernst Falzeder points out, many significant figures in dynamic psychiatry and psychoanalysis either worked at or visited the Burghölzli:

Karl Abraham, Roberto Greco Assagioli, Ludwig Binswanger, Abraham Arden Brill, Trigant Burrow, Imre Décsi, Max Eitingon, Sándor Ferenczi, Otto Gross, August Hoch, Johann Jakob Honegger, Smith Ely Jelliffe, Ernest Jones, Alphonse Maeder, Hans Meier, Hermann Nunberg, Johan H. W. van Ophuijsen, Nikolai J. Ossipow, Frederick Peterson, Franz Riklin, Hermann Rorschach, Tatiana Rosenthal, Leonhard Seif, Eugénie Soloknicka, Sabina Spielrein, Fülöp Stein, Wolf Stockmayer, Johannes Irgens Stromme, Jaroslaw Stuchlíck and G. Alexander Young – and this list is certainly by no means complete.³

This gives some indication of the critical role played by the Burghölzli in instigating the development of a psychogenic orientation in psychiatry.

It was Jung who first introduced the rite of training analysis, stipulating that any would-be analyst would first have to submit to analysis. This has become the one standard feature in the plethora of psychotherapeutic schools in the twentieth century. Like psychoanalysis, analytical psychology came to organise itself around training institutes. By contrast, alongside these institutes there were also organisations comprising a combination of lay and professional members called Clubs. These continue to exist to this day.⁴ While the conditions of membership for these clubs vary, they generally include the requirement of members having had some Jungian analysis. Given the historical and social transformations that analytical psychology has undergone, it would be a mistake to conflate in any way the present Clubs with their predecessors. The peripheralisation of the Clubs has been a major factor in the development of the modern profession of analytical psychology.

A distinctive feature of Jung’s work was its attempt to provide psychological understanding of the processes of personality transformation which he claimed underlay religious, hermetic, gnostic and alchemical practices. He developed these at a time when such subjects were dismissed out of hand by the positivist and behaviourist approach dominant in psychology, or were reduced by psychoanalysis to nothing but psychopathology. For many, his non-derisive attention to such subjects was enough to brand him as an occultist, a charge which he persistently denied. In the fifties, Henri Ellenberger noted apropos Jung’s detractors: ‘The adversaries of Jung accuse him of having revived old gnostic or theosophical systems under a psychological disguise’.⁵ Nor were such statements only made from a negative perspective; many proponents of the Perennial Philosophy, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Alchemy and Magic were quick to claim Jung as one of their own and use his name to lend credibility and legitimacy to their ideas. Hence the widespread presence of works on Jungian psychology in occult bookshops, amidst the amulets, incense, crystals and New Age music. The one academic field in which Jung’s work has been most engaged with is that of religious studies. It has been claimed that ‘no psychologist of religion has influenced contemporary scholars of comparative religion more than Carl Gustav Jung’.⁶

After Jung, possibly the first to draw a parallel between the practices of analytical psychology and ancient mystery cults was the analytical psychologist C. A. Meier, in his Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy (1949). He claimed that Jung had made psychological discoveries which offered close contact with the ancient healing cults.⁷ These were, that the psyche has a religious function, and that in the second half of life healing consisted in experiencing this. Meier raised the question of whether modern psychotherapy was a cult. Jungian psychology, he recounted, had often been accused of being a cult and an esoteric secret society.⁸ He argued that this was not the case, because Jung had ‘labored unremittingly to describe and elaborate the result of his research and practice’.⁹ For Meier, the extent to which Jung had striven to make public his findings indicated that analytical psychology was not an esoteric secret society.

Controversy has raged concerning the nature and legitimacy of the institutions of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology from their inception. In 1953 Henri Ellenberger characterised the newly founded Jung Institute in Zurich in the following way:

I do not know any place where one breathes the atmosphere of a ‘theosophical sect’ more stiflingly than at the Jung Institute in Zurich – no other chapel where the master is more divinised or is becoming so. Many of the disciples of Jung openly devote themselves to astrology, to occultism and to divination with the aid of the Chinese oracle, the I Ching. It is often maintained that Jung has, apart from his official doctrine, an esoteric doctrine, following the example of the ancient philosophies, which he always denies.¹⁰

The characterisation of analytical psychology as occult or esoteric went hand in hand with the designation of the Jung institute as a sect or a cult.

During the same period, Michael Fordham, the leading analytical psychologist in Britain, noted the existence of a cultic tendency in analytical psychology, which he strove to oppose. Fordham was in personal contact with Jung from 1935 until Jung’s death.¹¹ He saw this tendency as diametrically opposed to Jung’s own intentions:

I became very aware of the tendency of analytical psychology to become a quasi-religious cult, not at all Jung’s idea as I understood him both from his writings and personally.¹²

It was explicitly to combat this tendency that Fordham wrote a series of essays which became the volume The Objective Psyche (1958). In his memoirs, Fordham expanded on this theme:

My personal relation with him [Jung] made me aware of a trend amongst some of his followers, and his detractors as well, which he deplored. It hinted that analytical psychology was a sort of religion.¹³

For Fordham, some of Jung’s followers were responsible for attempting to turn analytical psychology into a quasi-religious cult, but not Jung himself.¹⁴ This distinction is critical.¹⁵

In a little-known book in 1976, James Webb attempted to locate Jung’s work in the context of the turn of the century occult revival. Webb claimed that for many, Jung’s psychology restated ideas at the centre of the occult tradition in a manner accessible to those who were uneasy with religious language.¹⁶ He argued that there were many affinities between Jung’s work and that of the religious elements of the occult revival:

It is certain that the tradition to which Jung belonged wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Cult and association
• 2 A case of mistaken identity?
• 3 'The experiment must be made'
• 4 The tribunal
• 5 The Imitation of Christ
• 6 A text in search of an author
• 7 Sister Maria
• 8 The cult that never was
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2 'The relation between the Zurich School and the Club'
• Appendix 3 Of scholarship
• Bibliography
• Index