Richard Noll

Scholarship on Carl Gustav Jung

Noll received the 1994 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly 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.

The background 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. An August 2016 interview with Noll added new details. At the urging of the Jung family and estate, Princeton University Press cancelled the publication of a second book edited by Noll which had already made it into final page proofs form, Mysteria: Jung and the Ancient Mysteries: Selections from the Writings of C.G. Jung (ISBN 0-691-03647-0). A pdf of the page proofs containing only Noll's contributions to the book is available online. A summary of his controversial conclusions was outlined in a short piece in The Times Higher Education Supplement on 22 November 1996.

Noll also summarized his views in a 7 October 1997 interview by Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air."

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 . . . ." Frederick Crews lauded The Jung Cult as "an important study."

Noll was praised for his "groundbreaking analyses" of Jung's life and work by cultural historian Wouter Hanegraaff in his comprehensive 1996 study of New Age religion. In a recent work, noting the absence of any reference to Noll's scholarship on Jung in the publications of prominent Jung historians in the decade after the backlash to Noll ended after 2005, Hanegraaff remarked, "Unfortunately, Noll's historical scholarship is simply discarded along with the 'cult' thesis . . . ." This absence has also been noted by other critics of Noll's work.

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.

The most significant academic criticism of Noll's scholarship and conclusions came from the historian of psychology Sonu Shamdasani. In his 1998 book Cult Fictions, Shamdasani disputed the attribution and interpretation of a central item of documentary evidence adduced by Noll, and also challenged the claim that Jung established a 'cult'. However, documents deposited by Noll in 2014 in the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology in Akron, Ohio, reveal that prior to the publication of Noll's book in September 1994 Shamdasani and John Kerr held nearly identical views to Noll's concerning the cult hypothesis, the importance of Jung's deification experiences, and the interpretation of the contested document as authored by Jung. Shamdasani's letter to Noll of 29 July 1992 and Princeton University Press editor Eric Rohmann's fax to Shamdasani dated 11 March 1994 in the Cummings archives document this. Both Shamdasani and Kerr pressured Noll and the editors of Princeton University Press to remove the document prior to the publication of the book. "We cannot ask Richard to remove this document simply because you have also read it and interpreted it as being what Richard presents it as, i.e., the inaugural address at the Zurich Psychological Club," wrote Rohmann to Shamdasani. Having lost this battle, Shamdasani later argued that the document was actually authored by Jung's associate Maria Molzer. However, Noll himself had previously raised this as a possible alternate interpretation.

Further critics emerged among Jung's family, Jungian analysts and others who were self-identified Jungians. Franz Jung, the son of the psychoanalyst, reportedly told a German journalist that Noll's work was "Mist" (bullshit). In 1999 Anthony Stevens (Jungian analyst) added an "Afterword" to the second edition of his book, On Jung, entitled "Jung's Adversary: Richard Noll." Using the term "adversary" as an allusion to the Biblical "Satan," Stevens wrote that it was necessary to counter "the gravest of Richard Noll's charges" because, "I believe . . . he has been so effective in promoting his ideas that there is a danger that they will enter public consciousness as received wisdom" and tarnish "Jung's memory" and "the whole tradition of psychotherapy practiced in his name."

In a video of a 2014 classroom lecture on Jung posted on You Tube, University of Toronto professor and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson characterized Noll as "crooked." He also incorrectly accused Noll of deliberately using "Nazi imagery" on the cover of his books to gain "economic utility," when in fact no Nazi images appear in Noll's books. After Noll left comments on the two websites hosting this video, in which he pointed out Peterson's factual and interpretive errors, Peterson apologized.

In a 1998 interview the noted Jungian analyst and "archetypal psychologist" James Hillman was asked by interviewer Cliff Bostock what he thought of Noll's books on Jung. "I hate them," Hillman replied. "I think he's a shit."

Criticism of American Psychiatry

He was an early public critic of the American psychiatric profession’s complicity in the moral panic of the late 1980s and early 1990s concerning Satanic ritual abuse. "Except for the work of very few mental-health professionals, such as psychologist Richard Noll and psychiatrists George K. Ganaway and Frank W. Putnam, what little psychiatric writing has emerged on survivors and their therapy has uncritically embraced the literal truth of survivors' claims."

At the invitation of psychiatrist and researcher Frank Putnam, then the Chief of the Dissociative Disorders Unit at the National Institute of Mental Health, Noll was one of four members on a plenary session panel that opened the 7th International Conference on Multiple Personality/Dissociative States in Chicago on 9 November 1990. In a ballroom filled with television cameras and more than 700 conference participants (including feminist intellectual Gloria Steinem, who was a firm believer in the veracity of "recovered memories" of satanic ritual abuse) the members of the panel presented, for the first time in a public professional forum, a skeptical viewpoint concerning SRA reports. The panel cast doubt on the corroborating evidence for the thousands of claims from patients in treatment that they were recovering memories of childhood abuse at the hands of persons (often family members) who were members of satanic cults. Such satanic cults were claimed to be intergenerational in families and had been abusing and ritually sacrificing children in secret for almost 2000 years.

When American psychiatrists published purported historical evidence supporting these beliefs in the peer-reviewed journal Dissociation in March 1989, Noll challenged their extraordinary claims in a subsequent issue. His December 1989 conclusion that SRA beliefs were "a modern version of (a) paranoid mass delusion -- and one in which all too many clinicians and law enforcement officials also share" was the first unambiguous skepticism of the moral panic to be published in a medical journal. Noll continued his public skepticism elsewhere. Noll's 1990 panel presentation was an elaboration of this earlier published critique. Other members of the 1990 conference panel were anthropologist Sherrill Mulhern and psychiatrist George Ganaway.

Noll’s participation on the panel was viewed by SRA believers as part of a deliberate disinformation campaign by Frank Putnam, who was skeptical of the reality of satanic cults. This set Putnam apart from other prominent American psychiatrists who were less critical, such as conference organizer Bennett G. Braun, a member of the Dissociative Disorders work group for the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual, DSM-III-R (1987). According to an account based on interviews, "conference attendees characterized (Noll) as a professional expendable who had no idea he was being used. Through him, they contended, Putnam could cast doubt on the contentious issue of linking MPD to ritual abuse." However, Noll's skeptical presentation did have an effect: "Mulhern and Noll cut a line through the therapeutic community. A minority joined them in refusing to believe sacrificial murder was going on; the majority still believed their patients' accounts."

Psychiatric Times published Noll's memoir of the 1990 conference online on 6 December 2013. However, after a week online the article was removed by the editors without explanation. The backstory to this controversial editorial decision was explored in blog posts by the author Gary Greenberg and psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John "Mickey" Nardo. The PDF of the published article is available on the web.

Prompted by Noll's article, psychiatrist Allen Frances, who was editor-in-chief of DSM-IV (1994) and who led the DSM-IV Task Force during the height of the satanic ritual abuse moral panic, formally apologized for his public silence during that era and explained his reasons for keeping MPD (as Dissociative Identity Disorder) in DSM-IV despite his belief it was a purely iatrogenic idiom of distress.

On 19 March 2014 the Psychiatric Times reposted Noll's retracted article under a different title and with text deletions selected by the editors. Along with the article was commentaries by three American psychiatrists who were discussed in the article as well a response from Noll. Allen Frances added additional comments reproducing his blog posts from other websites.

The controversy drew to a close in August 2014 with two letters to the editors of Psychiatric Times in response to an article by psychologist and attorney R. Christopher Barden who sharply criticized Noll for failing to address the "repressed/recovered memory" controversy and the fact that legal challenges in the courts effectively ended the ability of mental health professionals to perpetuate the moral panic.

Anthropological fieldwork

In 1994 Richard Noll and his colleague from Ohio State University, anthropologist Kun SHI, explored Manchuria (just south of the Amur river, the natural border with Russian Siberia) and Inner Mongolia and interviewed the last living Tungus Siberian shamans who had openly practiced prior to being forced to abandon their nomadic life and spirits after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. All visual media, fieldwork notes and other supporting correspondence and documents from this project became part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Studies Film Archives in October 2014.

The story of the life, initiatory illnesses, and shamanic training of the last living shaman of the Oroqen people, Chuonnasuan (1927–2000), was published in 2004 in the Journal of Korean Religions and is also available online. Noll's photograph of Chuonnasuan appears as the fronticepiece in Le chamanisme de Siberie et d'Asie centrale (Paris: Gallimard, 2011) by anthropologists Charles Stepanoff (l'Ecole practique des hautes etudes, Paris) and Thierry Zarcone (also EPHE [Sorbonne], Paris).

A second published report of this fieldwork concerning the life and training of the Solon Ewenki shamaness Dula'r (Ao Yun Hua) (born 1920) appeared in the journal Shaman in 2007 (15: 167-174). The Wenner-Gren Foundation supported the fieldwork that produced these reports. The rationale for the research was provided in a 1985 article in Current Anthropology which examined the ethnographic literature on shamanism from the perspective of cognitive science. Tanya Luhrmann, the Watkins University Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, lauded Noll's 1985 article as a novel turning point in the anthropological study of religion.

In June 2017 Noll and Canadian psychologist Leonard George of Capilano University conducted fieldwork in Mongolia and observed the practices of shamans and Buddhist lamas who follow the Tibetan (Vadrayana) tradition and practice visualization meditations. Their fieldwork was conducted in both the Ulaanbaatar area and near Sainshand in the southeastern Gobi Desert in Dornogovi Province. Both Noll and George delivered presentations to the Institute of Philosophy of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in Ulaanbaatar at the invitation of Chuluunbaatar Gelegpil, Mongolia's Minister of Education and Culture.

Video clips by Noll of the multi-hour "fire ritual" for the Ulaan Tergel (summer solstice) performed by Mongol shamans which was held out on the steppes 15km from Ulaanbaatar on 21 June 2017 can be found on You Tube

Noll was introduced to both the scholarly study and techniques of shamanism in the fall of 1980 by the anthropologist Michael Harner, then a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. "Noll has trained with me firsthand in the classic shamanic methods," wrote Harner.

Scholarship on the history of dementia praecox and schizophrenia

Noll's most recent book, American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox, was published by Harvard University Press in October 2011. A brief interview with Noll appears on the Harvard University Press Blog (30 January 2012).

In April 2012 it was announced that American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox was the winner of the 2012 Cheiron Book Prize from Cheiron, International Society for the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences.

On 13 September 2012 it was announced in London that American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox won a 2012 BMA Medical Book Award - Highly Commended in Psychiatry from the British Medical Association.

In March 2013 Scientific American Mind incorporated findings from American Madness in its print and online "timeline" on the history of schizophrenia.

"Tales of personal drama enliven Noll's story in a way that few would imagine possible for a historical account of nosology," said a reviewer in the American Journal of Psychiatry. According to sociologist Andrew Scull in the Journal of American History, "Richard Noll's American Madness is an important book that deserves a wide readership among those interested in understanding the development of American psychiatry between 1896 and the 1930s."

In a September 2012 review in Isis historian John C. Burnham noted, "It is clearly written and is based on a remarkably thorough literature search and reading of primary sources. . . . Noll's book will become a useful narrative for much of the modern history of psychiatry in the United States." He further added, "the research and thinking that went into this book make it refreshing and valuable."

Collaborative scientific research on schizophrenia

Since 2011 Noll has occasionally collaborated with an interdisciplinary group of schizophrenia researchers at the Bahn Laboratory at the University of Cambridge (UK) and the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Their research program seeks to identify valid biomarkers that might serve as molecular endophenotypes of schizophrenia and become the basis of a valid biological diagnostic test for psychosis and its developmental risk factors.