Richard Noll

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 on 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.

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 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.

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.

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He was a research assistant for an unpublished study on the psychokinetic resuscitation of anesthetized mice.

From 1985 to 1988, Noll was a staff psychologist on various wards at Ancora Psychiatric Hospital in Hammonton, New Jersey.

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 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.

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.

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.

A summary of his controversial conclusions was outlined in a short piece in The Times Higher Education Supplement on 22 November 1996.

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.

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.

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."

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.