Analytical psychology
Criticism

Since its inception, analytical psychology has been the object of criticism, emanating from the psychoanalytic sphere. Freud himself characterised Jung as a "mystic and a snob". In his introduction to the 2011 edition of Jung's "Lectures on the Theory of Psychoanalysis", given in New York City in 1912, Sonu Shamdasani contends that Freud orchestrated a round of critical reviews of Jung's writings from Karl Abraham, Jung's former colleague at the Burghölzli hospital, and from the early Welsh Freudian, Ernest Jones. Such criticisms multiplied during the 20th century, focusing primarily on the "mysticism" in Jung's writings. Other psychoanalysts, including Jungian analysts, objected to the cult of personality around the Swiss psychiatrist. It reached a crescendo with Jung's perceived collusion with Nazism in the build-up and during World War II and is still a recurrent theme. Thomas Kirsch writes: "Successive generations of Jungian analysts and analysands have wrestled with the question of Jung's complex relations to Germany." Other considered evaluations come from Andrew Samuels and from Robert Withers.

The French philosopher, Yvon Brès, considers that the concept of the collective unconscious, "shows also how easily one can slip from the psychological unconscious into perspectives from a universe of thought, quite alien from traditional philosophy and science, where this idea arose." ("Le concept jungien d'inconscient collectif "témoigne également de la facilité avec laquelle on peut glisser du concept d'inconscient psychologique vers des perspectives relevant d'un univers de pensée étranger à la tradition philosophique et scientifique dans laquelle ce concept est né'").

In his Le Livre Rouge de la psychanalyse ("Red Book of psychoanalysis"), the French psychoanalyst, Alain Amselek, criticizes Jung's tendency to be fascinated by the image and to reduce the human to an archetype. He contends that Jung dwells in a world of ideas and abstractions, in a world of books and old secrets lost in ancient books of spells (fr: grimoires). While claiming to be an empiricist, Amselek finds Jung to be an idealist, a pure thinker who has unquestionably demonstrated his intellectual talent for speculation and the invention of ideas. While he considers his epistemology to be in advance of that of Freud, Jung remains stuck in his intellectualism and in his narrow provincial outlook. In fact, his hypotheses are determined by the concept of his postulated pre-existing world and he has constantly sought to find confirmations of it in the old traditions of Western Medieval Europe.

More problematic has been, at times, the ad hominem criticism of academics outside the field of analytical psychology. One, a Catholic historian of psychiatry, Richard Noll, wrote three volumes but was able to publish only the first two in 1994 and 1997. Nolls argued that analytical psychology is based on a neo-pagan Hellenistic cult. These attacks on Jung and his work prompted the French psychoanalyst, Élisabeth Roudinesco, to state in a review: "Even if Noll's theses are based on a solid familiarity with the Jungian corpus, they deserve to be re-examined, such is the detestation of the author for the object of his study that it diminishes the credibility of the arguments." ("Même si les thèses de Noll sont étayées par une solide connaissance du corpus jungien, elles méritent être réexaminées, tant la détestation de l'auteur vis-à-vis de son objet d'étude diminue la crédibilité de l'argumentation.") Another, a French ethnographer and anthropologist, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, criticized Jung over his alleged misuse of the term archetype and his "suspect motives" in dealings with some of his colleagues.
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