Jung's fun house

"Jung the Mystic" takes us on a tour of the bizarre underworld of psychoanalysis, a veritable fun house where you soon wonder who's mad and who's the psychoanalyst.

Freud gets fainting fits in the presence of Jung, a poltergeist manifests in Freud's bookcase, and a manager of the Burghölzli mental hospital ends up a patient...at his own hospital. Jung sleeps around with his female patients, who later become psychoanalysts themselves. Otto Gross and Honegger lecture at psychoanalytical conventions, only to be hospitalized. As a patient, Gross manages to morally corrupt his own doctor (Jung).

The ghosts of the crusaders invade Jung's home, but retreat after hearing a sermon on Abraxas. Ab...who? Jung talks to the kettles and utensils in his private retreat at Bollingen, and insists that his visitors do the same. In a climactic scene, Jung encounters his guru Philemon, who has bull-horns, a flowing beard and wings like a kingfisher. Somehow, I wonder why Jung's cantankerous family refused to publish "The Red Book"? I mean, the man's idiosyncracies have been known for decades...

Was Jung ay mystic? I for one believe it, but I don't think Iggy Pop's old guitar player Gary Valentine a.k.a. Lachman manages to defend the Swiss psychoanalyst in a very convincing way. In fact, those too lazy to read Richard Noll's classical hatchet job "The Jung Cult" might consider "Jung the Mystic" a lite version of the same. Carl Gustav Jung was definitely fit for the fun house, in more ways than one, LOL.