CARL GUSTAV JUNG: A Biography.<i> By Frank McLynn</i> .<i> St. Martin’s: 624 pp., $29.95</i> : THE ARYAN CHRIST: The Secret Life of Carl Jung.<i> By Richard Noll</i> .<i> Random House: 336 pp., $25.95</i>

For most people, Carl Jung’s name is second only to Freud’s in psychiatry. Born in 1875, he was the Swiss psychiatrist who trained in the Burgholzli Clinic in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler and from 1907 to 1912 was closely associated with Sigmund Freud. His first book was published in 1902 and his last book, “Memories, Dreams and Reflections,” was published posthumously in 1961, the year of his death. His collected works take up 20 volumes.

After breaking with Freud, Jung founded a discipline called “analytic psychology,” which is still active. Most eclectic psychotherapists have incorporated theories that originated with Jung. Moreover, his ideas have had an even greater impact on the general public than on professionals in psychiatry.

Thus, it is surprising, given the enormous influence Jung has had on American culture (Joseph Campbell was a disciple and Bill Moyers a great admirer), that we have had to wait until now for the first full-length biography of Jung in English.

Frank McLynn, the author of a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson and a study of the European exploration of Africa, has written an admirably honest book that is both lively and objective and deserves a wide readership. Although he considers Jung a genius and admires his “vast erudition,” he also indicts Jung as unkind, cowardly and opportunistic and provides evidence to support his accusations. He also confirms that Jung was a racist, an anti-Semite and a misogynist. Nevertheless, Jung’s influence on 20th century thought is inarguable.

What, actually, did Jung believe? In addition to his theories of the collective unconscious, archetypes and synchronicity, Jung believed in everything supernatural, from reincarnation and ghosts to telepathy and UFOs, from alchemy and astrology to parapsychology and the occult. McLynn neither questions nor faults him for these beliefs. I suspect that he began his research (confined, as far as I can tell, to published sources) as an admirer and only reluctantly came to acknowledge Jung’s faults.

Among the most glaring of those faults was Jung’s retrograde views of race. McLynn tells us that Jung believed there were “three main characteristics of American blacks: They were ignorant, they were unable to look into their own thoughts, and they were extraordinarily religious.” Jung was convinced that blacks belonged to a lower race.

Jung was profoundly anti-Semitic. The facts concerning his thorough-going prejudice against Jews has become one of the most contentious issues in Jungian scholarship today. McLynn addresses it clearly and straightforwardly. In explaining how some analysts deal with Jung’s collaboration with the Nazis, he writes that others “in a kind of version of ‘politics should have nothing to do with sport,’ say that it is beyond the competence of a psychotherapist, even one of genius, to decide on what is right and wrong in politics,and that Jung followed the correct therapeutic procedure in trying to remain above the fray. But the issue of the society [Society For Psychotherapy, of which Jung was president] and the journal [Zentralblatt, the journal sympathetic to Nazi policies edited by Jung] will not go away. Many of the post-1934 articles in the Zentralblatt go far beyond routine Swiss bourgeois anti-Semitism and contain virulent attacks on the Jews coupled with eulogies of Hitler [while he was still in power]. . . . Jung knew all about the later articles and did nothing. Since he could not claim ignorance, as these articles were edited in Switzerland, he tried after World War II, to shift the blame onto C.A. Maier [his deputy editor], claiming that he did all the editing.”

McLynn paints an even darker picture of Jung’s Nazi sympathies when he discovered that “in 1936 Jung threatened resignation as president [of the Society For Psychotherapy] when the Dutch tried to prevent Nazi sympathizers joining the society. As a calculated snub to his critics, in the same year he appointed Hermann Goering as co-editor of the Zentralblatt. . . . “

Even if, as McLynn argues, the hidden agenda in Jung’s anti-Semitism was a hatred for Freud, rather than pure anti-Semitism, it is still reprehensible. That he would allow hatred for one man to dictate what he would say publicly about an entire people does not speak well for Jung, as McLynn acknowledges. Moreover, he goes on to point out that worst of all was the fact that Jung “never expressed repentance for his errors in the 1930s but instead tried to rewrite them out of history” (by claiming, for example, that in an interview he gave to Radio Berlin in July 1933, he took a principled stance against Hitler). In fact, the original transcript shows that “he used words and phrases with a strong Nazi echo and connotation.” Nor did Jung ever withdraw his adulatory remarks about Mussolini, whom he admired greatly, insisting he was an archetypal religious figure. (He was similarly sympathetic to Franco.)

Jung thought that World War II was a means of getting rid of surplus population and that Hitler was an instrument of God. Perhaps Jung’s belief that his own life, as he looked back on it from old age, was “the only one there ever could have been” infected his view of history, leading him to believe that everything is as it should be. When we realize how baneful an influence Jung proved to be on the people closest to him, this approach to his own life gives evidence of an astonishing lack of self-awareness.

According to McLynn, each of Jung’s relations with men was a disaster. But McLynn reserves some of his harshest judgments for Jung’s treatment of women. It was the women, fatally attracted to Jung, who truly suffered. McLynn sums it up in this harsh, but just, sentence: “In his secret heart he surely knew that he had destroyed both her [his wife, Emma’s] life and that of Toni Wolff [his long-term mistress] as thoroughly as it was possible for a human to do by his habitual infidelities, his coldness, his ruthlessness and his rating of anima archetypes over flesh-and-blood women.”

McLynn believes that Jung married his wife for money (he seemed little interested in the five children they had together). Many of his patients also became (some during, some after, therapy with Jung) his mistresses. The most celebrated was the Russian psychoanalyst, Sabina Spielrein, a young, beautiful and brilliant Jewish medical student, about whom several books have been written. Jung wrote a letter to her parents, after they were told (by none other than Jung’s wife) that he was having an affair with Spielrein, in which he dared to say that he would stop sleeping with her if the parents paid him: “I would suggest that if you wish me to adhere strictly to my role as doctor, you should pay me a fee as suitable recompense for my trouble. In that way you may be absolutely certain that I will respect my duty as a doctor under all circumstances.”

Freud became involved in the messy Spielrein affair as well and, before the break with Jung, took his side, believing that Spielrein’s account of the affair was merely an erotic fantasy. (Many of Jung’s supporters say the same today, despite the existence of his letters, which make it clear that Jung was sleeping with her). At least Freud turned his error into a beautifully crafted bon mot: “An incomparable magic emanates from a woman of high principles who confesses her passions.” Jung, as was his custom, stubbornly refused to acknowledge he had done anything wrong.

How does Richard Noll’s “The Aryan Christ” deal with these issues? Noll’s primary thesis is that Jung considered himself a god, that he went through an actual ritual of self-deification, that he believed he was on a mission to save the soul of the world and that his disciples were sent to him to perform service in his new religion, thereby fulfilling their own special destiny. This central point is well worth pondering.

I have often wondered why so many people in analysis with Jung felt they benefited from his therapy. Jung, for instance, insisted on interpreting their dreams as archaic residues from long-lost religious symbols of things they knew nothing about in their prosaic, everyday lives. Noll comments that “this wild ride into mythological symbolism was indeed therapeutic. It helped make their individual, mundane lives seem much more interesting and even important on a cosmic level.” Obviously it is heady stuff to be told that you are a member of a holy order, a secret one at that, and that the work you are doing will ultimately redeem the entire world.

Noll suggests that he wanted to create a powerful race of spiritually superior human beings. But how? And what was Jung willing to do to arrive at this point? Noll does not let us know. If this insight taught us more about Jung’s other defects, then it would be interesting. Standing alone, it is not. Is it possible that the belief that he was a god lies behind his anti-Semitism? That would be an interesting notion to explore had Noll decided to do so.

But it is precisely when writing about the most contentious issue in Jung’s life, his “possible involvement with the Nazis,” that Noll’s tendency to sit on a fence becomes most evident. He writes that “the vast majority of his disciples absolve him of this. Others equivocate. The truth is no doubt somewhere in between.” Between what? Absolution and equivocation? Noll does not answer this question straightforwardly, and it is difficult to know what he means to say.

Later on the same page, he writes that Jung “may have been a Volkish German and perhaps anti-Semitic, but there is no evidence that he was ever a Nazi.” A page later Noll quotes Jung as having said: “You know, I would never like to have children from a person who has Jewish blood.” And he points out that in 1933, Jung told Michael Fordham, an English disciple, that “Jews were different from other people and that they ought to be dressed up in different clothes because otherwise we mistook them for people like ourselves.” When Jewish analysts fled to London, their non-Jewish English colleagues were not always happy. Jung told his English disciples that they had a right to feel “swamped” by the Jews, and that they had good grounds to fear that they would be “caught in a pogrom” started by the Jews.

It is shocking that Jung would use the word pogrom to indicate something he believed the Jews would inflict on English analysts, when it was the Jews who were the victims of pogroms. Even the most rabid anti-Semite could hardly accuse the Jews of a pogrom. Can Noll in all good conscience really ask whether Jung was only perhaps anti-Semitic? These quotes from Noll’s book contradict his assertion that “there is no evidence that he was ever a Nazi.” What is Noll’s definition of “Nazi”? Does he mean that since Jung was not literally a member of the Nazi Party, that he was not a Nazi?

Jungians, in response to the evidence of Jung’s undeniable anti-Semitism, attribute it to his “shadow side.” Everybody has one, they say. But not everybody would speak as an anti-Semite before and during the war, then in 1945, right after the war, pretend that he had always been on the side of the Jews. And Noll brings no new documents to bear on the vexing and essential question of whether Jung was anti-Semitic or not. Surely this is not just a tangential issue, even for purposes of Noll’s main thesis. How could a man who claims to be God also be an anti-Semite? Nor does Noll ever seriously raise the issue of Jung’s racism or his misogyny, both of which were extreme.

Whenever an expose reveals one of our cultural heroes to be deeply flawed, there are always defenders who argue that the life is not necessarily linked to the creative work. A case can be made that Picasso’s wretched treatment of the women in his life did not adversely affect his art, or that Wagner’s hatred of Jews did not make his music poor. Perhaps, some might argue, life and art can be separated. But surely when one is looking at a psychotherapist, whose art is his character and therefore his life, what kind of life the person leads is hardly a tangential issue; rather it is essential.

In Jung’s case, one can discern a direct link between the practice of his psychotherapy and the decisions he made in his life. The essence of the defect of Jungian psychotherapy is the attempt to avoid touching on those issues that are most concrete, most related to the body and to a specific moment in history. Jung’s notorious lack of interest in his patients’ sexual histories and their family histories cannot be accidental.

Jung could not afford to urge his patients to examine their pasts, for he needed to avoid thinking about his own past, tainted as it was by collaboration with the Nazis. What better way than to erect a powerful theoretical model of psychotherapy in which the past played only a minor role? Jung’s psychotherapy was a convenient curtain behind which he could conceal his own unpalatable past.