Richard Noll (born 1959 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American clinical psychologist and historian of medicine. He has published on the history of psychiatry, including two critical volumes on the life and work of Carl Gustav Jung, books and articles on the history of dementia praecox and schizophrenia, and in anthropology on shamanism. His books and articles have been translated into fifteen foreign languages and he has delivered invited presentations in nineteen countries on six continents.https://www.academia.edu/168535843/CV_2026_Richard_Noll
Early life and education Noll grew up in the Belton-Mark Twain Park neighborhood in southwest Detroit. In 1971 he relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, where he attended Brophy College Preparatory, a Jesuit institution. From 1977 to 1979, he lived in Tucson, Arizona and studied political science at the University of Arizona. In the fall of 1978, he spent a National Collegiate Honors Council semester at the United Nations in New York, returning to complete his B.A. in political science in May 1979. In 1992, he received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the New School for Social Research. His dissertation research was an experimental study of cognitive style differences between paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenia. The chair of his dissertation committee was Nikki Erlenmeyer-Kimling of the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Career From 1979 to 1984, Noll was employed in the resettlement of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian and Hmong refugees for both Church World Service and the International Rescue Committee in New York City. From 1985 to 1988, Noll was a staff psychologist on various wards at Ancora Psychiatric Hospital in Hammonton, New Jersey.
In 1981 he was a summer research student at the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, the Institute of Parapsychology, in Durham, North Carolina. He was a research assistant for an unpublished study on the psychokinetic resuscitation of anesthetized mice. In a "Reply" to comments to a 1985 article on shamanism, Noll revealed he had been a subject in the noted Ganzfeld parapsychology experiments conducted by Charles Honorton at the Psychophysiological Research Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., probably in 1982. In November 1978 Noll experienced a purported anomalous "phantasmogenetic centre" event (a term coined by psychical researcher Frederick W.H. Myers) and donated a binder of documents relating to it to the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University in Houston in 2018 just prior to its formal opening.
Before assuming a position as a professor of psychology at DeSales University in Center Valley, Pennsylvania in August 2000, he taught and conducted research at Harvard University for four years as a postdoctoral fellow and as Lecturer on the History of Science. During the 1995–1996 academic year, he was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a resident fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology.
On December 25, 2017, Noll was awarded a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Invitational Fellowship for Research in Japan. As a JSPS fellow, in June 2018 he delivered invited lectures on shamanism at the University of Shiga Prefecture in Hikone, the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU) in Osaka, and at the Research Institute of Islands and Sustainability at the University of the Ryukyus in Naha, Okinawa. Together with anthropologist Ippei Shimamura, he also conducted fieldwork among the indigenous female yuta (mediums/shamans in Ryukyuan religion) on Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands and the ascetic monastic yamabushi / shugenja community on Mount Omine in Nara Prefecture who practice the form of Esoteric Buddhism known as Shugendo. While at the Ominesan-ji temple they observed a goma fire ritual involving the ritual invocation of Fudō Myōō 不動明王.
In June 2018, Noll was appointed honorary visiting professor at the University of Shiga Prefecture in Hikone, Japan.
Carl Gustav Jung scholarship
In February 1995 Noll, received an award for best professional/scholarly book in psychology published in 1994 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 (). 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." The full broadcast is available on the NPR website.
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."Crews, Frederick. Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays. New York: Counterpoint, 2007 (page 247).
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.Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996) page 497 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 . . . ."Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Restricted Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), page 283. 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'.Sonu Shamdasani, Cult Fictions: C. G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology (London: Routledge, 1998) p. 107 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 alternative interpretation.
In a letter to Noll from Shamdasani dated 29 July 1992, which resides in the collections of the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology in Akron, Ohio, Shamdasani wrote: " . . . in focusing on the deification experience and the forming of a cult, you are more right than you realise." This quote was referenced without full citation in a book by historian of religion Carrie B. Dohe.
In a book review published on 17 January 2020 in the Los Angeles Review of Books classicist Gregory Shaw credited Noll for being the first to document in 1994 that Jung's concept of "individuation" was actually a recipe for "deification."
Further critics emerged among Jung's family, Jungian analysts and others who were self-identified Jungians. Franz Jung, the son of C.G. Jung, reportedly told a German journalist that Noll's work was "Mist" (bullshit).Richard Noll, At Random(Fall 1997), p. 59, https://www.academia.edu/6662539/_A_Christ_Named_Carl_Jung_Fall_1997_ 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."Anthony Stevens, On Jung: An Updated Edition with a Reply to Jung's Critics(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 275.
In a video of a 2014 classroom lecture on Jung posted on YouTube, University of Toronto professor and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson characterized Noll as "crooked." He also accused Noll of deliberately using "Nazi imagery" on the cover of his books to gain "economic utility,".
In a 1998 interview 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."Cliff Bostock, "James Hillman: On Richard Noll, Therapy and the Image," Creative Loafing (Atlanta), 11 April 1998, http://www.soulworks.net/writings/paradigms/site_026.html
Criticism of American Psychiatry during the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" moral panic of the 1980s and 1990s 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."