VIDEO — Jordan Peterson: 6. Carl Jung I (Depth Psychology) – Personality and its Transformations
via Jordan B Peterson
Jan 23, 2014
University of Toronto PSY230
Playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?featu…
Course Information: http://jordanbpeterson.com/Psy230H/th…
PN 
Dr. Peterson,
I was intrigued and impressed by your interview with Sam Harris on his podcast. I decided to check out your work online. Of course my previous scholarly work on C.G. Jung led me to this lecture from your PSY230 course. As I watched and listened, I was intrigued by your lecture. I feel privileged to get to know how you think, and in such an intimate,” persona” way that You Tube lectures often allow. I was happy to get the “feel” of you as a person and an assessment of how you construct your intellectual arguments.
And then then I got to the 19:01 mark and was surprised to see you mention my name with respect to the works on Jung I wrote in the mid-1990s. And then you made me sad.
Without ever having met me, without ever having contacted me, without accurately critically evaluating the evidence I put forth to back up my arguments, you described me to your students as a “jealous” and “crooked guy,” and inaccurately claimed I deliberately used “Nazi” imagery in my books to malign Jung. first, there is no “Nazi” symbols or imagery on the covers of either of my books on Jung.
Second, all illustrations in both books were from the pre-Nazi era of German history. Check the dates in my books — all pre-1920. In both of my books (of 1994 and 1997), I made it clear that Jung was not a Nazi but drew water from the common well of German culture/counterculture and its racialist and Aryan mystical intellectual currents as the National Socialists did (who did not exist when Jung was drawing upon these symbols and literatures). Subsequent historical works by Wouter Hanegraaff and especially Carrie Dohe in her 2016 book “Jung’s Wandering Archetype” have arrived at similar conclusions.
My books, particularly my second one (which was written for the general public, not academics) sometimes use blunt language to make my arguments. My intention back then, some two decades ago, was to fill a gap in the historical literature on him which portrayed him as a perennialist mystic who somehow existed outside history, especially the Germanophone cultural context of the age in which he forged his ideas. Other than a chapter by Henri Ellenberger and a book by Peter Homans, in 1992 there was no significant intellectual history of Jung or critique of his ideas. The language I deliberately chose was designed to burst the overwhelming idealizing transference so many Jungians and Jungian analysts had to his media-manufactured imago. I did not harm Jung. He died in 1962. I did not kill JFK either. He died the following year.
I understand, of course, that you are not a historian but, like me, a clinical psychologist. However, historical context does matter. Jung was not an ahistorical being. Teaching his ideas and his life as if he somehow existed outside of history does your students, and the viewers of this video, a disservice. So, alas, I am sad. I must say, watching this. I am profoundly disappointed in your unfair judgments of my character. I wish you had made the attempt to contact me and engage in a dialogue with me, even if only by email.
Character is important. Civility is important. Honest intellectual engagement is important. We are all entitled to our opinions about the statements or writings of others, but civil discourse in academia usually does not include charges that another scholar is “crooked” or “jealous” because just you have an intellectual disagreement with him. Too bad. We could have had much to talk about. From what I can tell, on a few intellectual issues, there are points of agreement between the two of us.
With maximum respect,
Richard Noll
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February 11, 2017 at 7:44 AM
I sent a copy of the first version of yesterday’s comment in an email to Dr. Peterson, and he responded immediately. We had a brief exchange of emails. In them he apologized, and I accept his apology. I did not request or demand any sort of retraction, but I did express my sorrow and acknowledgment of hurt feelings. His response was gracious. On his own he offered to revise his comments about my character (specifically, that I am a “crooked guy”) and the specific false factual claim he made — that my two Jung books from the 1990s deliberately contained “Nazi” imagery, including on the cover of one of the books, a false memory which he then relied upon to make the assumption that I did this deliberately for my own persona gain and to deliberately malign Jung. All illustrations were from pre-1920, thus pre-Nazi, German cultural sources. The false fact begat a false claim about my motives and character, which served to bolster his initial statement about my “crooked” character.
The arguments I made in my books, the evidence I offered in support of the arguments, and a factual critique of the evidence of my main claims are not offered by Dr. Jordan in this video.
We all sometimes say boneheaded things about others whose work we have read but whom we have never met in the heat of academic arguments. We’re all human, after all. The problem is that the young students in the room that day were most likely prejudiced against Richard Noll’s character, which then of course affects one’s scholarly reputation. And now that a video of this lecture has been uploaded at least twice on You Tube with 36,000+ views on this page and another 18,000+ on another, the possible damage to my reputation is exponentially increased. We saw this happen to “Crooked Hillary” during the recent election cycle. These sorts of things “stick” in the minds of people. It comes down to the heuristics of cognitive processing. We remember the “spin” of gossip, and do not bother checking facts. That’s how the human mind/brain evolved.
Fans of Dr. Peterson — of which their are legion — should not be disappointed in him for making such thoughtless remarks about my character and making mistaken factual claims about my books. The words coming out of his mouth were familiar to me — it was the same spin or discourse that the Jungian community had crafted and mutually reinforced among themselves. I became the “shadow” of the Jungian community. Hence, because of the strong idealizing transferences that so many Jungians had to the imago of Jung — an intellectual and spiritual hero whose ideas somehow existed outside of historical context — I had to be demonized. To Anthony Stevens, a prominent British Jungian analyst, I was “Jung’s Adversary” according to the title of an appendix to the paperback edition of his book, “On Jung.” As any good Jungian knows, Satan is “the adversary.” That is a heavy projection for the hook of that “Richard Noll avatar” who wrote those books in the 1990s to carry.
Dr. Peterson is a man of excellent character. I bear him no ill will.
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February 11, 2017 at 7:47 AM
Thank you for the update. Before reading your second comment I was almost about to try to contact Peterson myself to send him your concern but I’m glad you beat me to it.
Interestingly, I suppose this exchange illustrates the importance of freedom of speech. For instance, if I had been a snob/tyrant or engaging in hero-worship then I might have been less inclined to approve these comments but I thought it best to give everyone a fair opportunity, especially since your comment didn’t come off as trolling and also because a quick Amazon search confirmed what you said about the covers.
Also, I think there’s a lunar eclipse around now which astrologically often represents a period where buried information comes to light.
“Any eclipse is a significant event in the heavens. In truth, a solar eclipse is really a new moon on steroids and a lunar eclipse is a full moon on steroids – they have the strength of three new moons or full moons.”
source: https://www.astrologyzone.com/all-about-eclipses-a-guide-for-coping-with-them/
“During a Lunar Eclipse, the Earth is exactly between the Sun and the Moon (known as an opposition between the Sun and the Moon). For a brief spell, we can see the Earth’s shadow turning the luminous Full Moon intense shades of reds, browns and grays. According to astrology, Lunar Eclipses give us a glimpse into what Carl Jung referred to as the “shadow self.” ”
source: http://astrostyle.com/learn-astrology/solar-and-lunar-eclipses/
How synchronous, then, that you enter to mention/clarify “I became the “shadow” of the Jungian community” more-or-less during a lunar eclipse which deals with “shadow” stuff in the first place.
At any rate, with all this in mind, the end result of my permitting the comments seems to be that we are brought one small step closer to mitigating the damage that was done. Indeed, we do not grow via “safe spaces” or hostile territorial/intellectual domination. And if a person who seems to be near the center of the free speech debate at this time is advocating for free speech, then giving him fair scrutiny would be a great opportunity to illustrate why free speech is useful/necessary and I imagine Peterson would welcome this opportunity and it appears he has.
I’ll have to add your book to my reading list. I had no idea that Jung advocated polygamy, as your book description mentions.
(As an aside, personally, I still think Hillary is crooked, but perhaps that was besides the point, and the analogy was adequately illustrating the viral nature of (some types of) information transfer among a given audience/population.)
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February 11, 2017 at 8:34 PM
Holy crap, dude. Not to seem off-topic or to at all take away from what is written above – in a crude and useless guilt-by-association or ad hominem fashion – but I must say you seem to have quite a wikipedia page. I just looked now. You went to a Jesuit high-school, done some anthropological work on shamanism, schizophrenia, Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the New School for Social Research which is apparently linked to the Club of Rome, Fabian Society, and Rockefeller Foundation according to the Gnostic Media web-brain https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6FBA86B0-0C57-9FCA-5CF9-D742DA541AAA#-3351
You’ve worked at Harvard, etc. Were a visiting scholar at MIT…
The thing that stands out the most, If I’m reading this correctly, is that you were apparently involved at a conference casting doubt on SRA victim claims…
Sir, with all due respect, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that some of these connections that I see during my cursory overview represent possible red-flags, or at the very least are raising my eye-brows and the eye-brows of my audience who by now are very familiar with the work that Gnostic Media has done concerning dark-shamanism, weaponized-anthropology, archaic revival, MK-ULTRA, satanism, the new age movement, transhumanism, feminism, destruction of the family, normalization of mental illness, the creation of a new world religion exemplified by the likes of Burning Man and Aldous Huxley’s nightmarish “utopia”/blueprint.
Pertaining to the SRA tidbit, Wikipedia states,
“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.[28] “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.”[29]
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.[30] 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,[31] 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.[32] Noll continued his public skepticism elsewhere.[33][34][35][36] 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).[37] 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.”[38]
Psychiatric Times published Noll’s memoir of the 1990 conference online on 6 December 2013.[39][40] However, after a week online the article was removed by the editors without explanation.[41][42][43][44] The backstory to this controversial editorial decision was explored in blog posts by the author Gary Greenberg[45] and psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John “Mickey” Nardo.[46][47][48][49][50][51][52] The PDF of the published article is available on the web.[53][54]
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.[55][56][57][58][59]
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.[60][61][62] Allen Frances added additional comments reproducing his blog posts from other websites.[63]
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.[64][65]”
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Noll
By and large, what I’m seeing out in the world is that most/much of society and the globe is embracing satanic values and it has become apparent that the true weight/clout of satanism is often overlooked. For instance, I know that a number of black metal fans/musicians were indeed involved in literally burning Christian Churches in the early 90s but these are just the more prominent examples of this propagation. With Miley Cyrus, etc, the degeneracy is now more out in the open. It appears to me that one way or another, this satanic worldview is getting propagated rapidly and has largely crystallized within society, so it stands to reason that we may underestimate the extent of the damage that satanists have caused over the years.
I’m admittedly not very well read on the “satanic panic” per se. That said, I’ll take this opportunity to ask you what you personally find to be the best source of information refuting the veracity of SRA victims’ claims.
I mean no disrespect to you by inquiring about this. Merely, I realize that I should treat people the way I want to be treated and so I am holding you to as much scrutiny as I would expect to experience myself if I had your profile/resume. I also am trying to be fair and honest to my audience. We all want to get to the bottom of why there is so much tyranny in the world and my audience needs to see me be consistent and to ask the relevant questions. Again, to be clear, this doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on the first couple comments pertaining to Peterson’s claims.
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February 11, 2017 at 11:15 PM
Furthermore, I realize the onus of proof exists so, like I said, I’ll have to set aside time to do my grammar on this event, the “satanic panic”.
As another aside, recently, someone asked me to disprove the Nice attacks, and I pointed the person to a couple short videos which cast doubt on the official story and the person ignored that and asked me specifically to specifically walk him through all the points, which I had no time for because it was 4am and I already had put the data on my facebook wall which he refused to look at and demanded I explain it all via my smartphone typing a bunch of text. If no proof for an event exists, why is it up to me to disprove it? This example is perhaps not the best comparison, but anyway…
So I’ll have to backtrack a bit and see just what the SRA victims said before I ask you to disprove what they said, but I figured while I got you here anyway I might as well ask you since you seem to have been more or less at the center of this stuff, from what it appears at first glance.
As quoted above wikipedia stated “Noll’s memoir of the 1990 conference online on 6 December 2013.[39][40] However, after a week online the article was removed by the editors without explanation.”
I suppose the next question is do you know if there is anywhere that I can find your original “memoir of the 1990 conference” uncensored?
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February 12, 2017 at 12:40 PM
I was reminded of this thread when I read the following horoscope for all signs today. Perhaps this may provide further context:
“Mercury forms a semi-square with Chiron this morning, and we can particularly sensitive about communications. Communications may be careless, hurtful or perceived as hurtful under this influence. It can be hard to read the intention behind the words, and there may be impatience with rules, worry or guilty feelings, and conflicting viewpoints to contend with now. We don’t have enough faith or confidence in our choices to make effective decisions at the moment, but this gives us a chance to learn more about areas where we feel uninformed. The Moon is in Virgo all day, harmonizing with Pluto this evening. We want to be useful and productive, and focusing on details is our route to making headway. We are inclined to be analytical, critical, and technical under a Virgo Moon.”
source: https://cafeastrology.com
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February 12, 2017 at 3:44 PM
I interviewed Dr.Noll in the late 90’s (for my website at that time, Zaius) following the publication of his controversial book, ‘The Aryan Christ’. Interested parties can read that (re-posted) interview by following this link:
http://www.noisetank.com/noll
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February 20, 2017 at 6:51 PM