Carl Jung gave us the shadow self and asked us to consider who we are within a system of classification. His ideas traveled far beyond the psychoanalysis room, cascading through the mythology of the wildly popular Myers-Briggs personality test and decades of self-help writing. Two things remain true: one, that his clinical ideas genuinely helped patients, and two, the circle around him also organized itself around one man’s personal authority.
While the early Jungian world was nothing like Scientology or NXIVM, the structure of the early Jungians falls well within the bounds of a cult-like atmosphere, complete with its own charismatic figurehead.
Applying the BITE Model
The BITE Model, which I developed, examines four kinds of influence a group exerts over its members, and the letters stand for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control.
Behavior control governs what you do, information control governs what you’re allowed to know, thought control shapes how you interpret the world, and emotional control manages how you’re permitted to feel.
I also describe an “Influence Continuum,” a sliding scale running from healthy and constructive on one end to authoritarian and destructive on the other.
Information within the early Jungian environment flowed on two tiers, one for insiders and one for everyone else. Jung’s Red Book, the private record of the hidden foundation of his psychology, was not published until 2009, nearly a century after he wrote it. For decades, the movement’s most important texts circulated only among trusted insiders.
The Analytical Psychology Club of Zurich also maintained a written cap on Jewish membership, which was limited to 10 percent of members and 25 percent of guests at lectures.
The Club’s own Executive Committee acknowledged this history decades later in a 1993 memorandum. Initially, the Club claimed the document was a secret of the Executive Committee unknown to ordinary members. This claim was later proven inaccurate after older members confirmed the unwritten understanding had been known and discussed long before.
Critics have argued Jung’s writings on Jewish psychology, including his writings that state, “the Aryan unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish,” cannot be separated from the broader pattern of his thought, and his actions in the 1930s.
The historian Sonu Shamdasani has disputed the “cult” framing, yet other analysis pulls the opposite way. For example, Carrie Dohe’s independent 2016 research showed that Jung had framed the German national experience as a collective confrontation with inner divinity, arguably presenting his views as religious.
In general, I find Jungian language functions as a closed, self-sealing system, and by that, I mean that once you adopt it, almost any experience can be reinterpreted through its vocabulary of archetypes and complexes.
In this context, an “archetype,” in Jung’s usage, is a universal symbolic pattern, and a “complex” is an emotionally charged cluster of memories. Once a person adopts the framework, virtually every experience can be reinterpreted through Jung’s archetypes, complexes, persona, anima, animus, and shadow material.
This is a feature of all interpretive systems to some degree, but in the early Jungian inner circle, disagreement with Jung’s interpretations was often pathologized, meaning they were to be taken as evidence of mental illness or resistance to getting better.
Is Jungian Analysis a Cult?
It would be a mistake to throw the baby out with the bathwater and discard what works, as there is some evidence that incorporating Jungian depth therapy holds value. However, the initial structure the Jungians built does arguably display cult-like features such as its black-and-white perspective on what therapy should be, and how resistance to its structure constitutes resistance to recovery. His writings on Jewish citizens and their psyches did not dwell in a silo, but instead, were distributed and interpreted by early Jungian analysts despite their insistence to the contrary.
The reason I dwell on it is that the same temptation is alive today. We should be careful that we are not simply appealing to the charismatic psychotherapy preachers of our own moment, or basing our practice on faith that an idea works because a compelling figure insists it does.
We must be willing to question the current narratives, and be willing to set aside a modality that isn’t helping our patients, no matter how beloved or well-branded it is. Above all, we must always respect the patient’s freedom to walk away without being pathologized for it.
