Richard Noll - Jung Scholarship

Jung Scholarship

In 1994 he received an award for Best Book in Psychology from the Association of American Publishers for his book, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. The resulting controversy over the book made front-page headlines worldwide, including a front-page report in the 3 June 1995 issue of The New York Times. Princeton University Press submitted The Jung Cult to the Pulitzer Prize competition that year, without success. Although not a definitive treatment of Jung, the book acted as a climacteric, effectively changing the agenda of scholarly debate in Jung studies for the almost two decades that have followed its publication.

The backstory to the controversy over Noll's research on Jung can be found in the "Preface of the New Edition" of The Jung Cult published in paperback by Free Press Paperbacks in 1997 and in an article he wrote for a Random House, Inc., promotional publication, At Random, in that same year. A summary of his controversial conclusions were outlined in a short piece in The Times Higher Education Supplement on 22 November 1996.

In his intellectual history of the 20th century, historian Peter Watson noted that "(Noll's) books provoked a controversy no less bitter than the one over Freud . . . ."

According to an article by Sara Corbett, "The Holy Grail of the Unconscious," published in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, 20 September 2009, the Jung family's fear of "the specter of Richard Noll" was cited as a contributing factor in the decision to allow Jung's "Red Book" to be edited and published by W.W. Norton in October 2009.