In 1934, James Joyce sent his schizophrenic daughter Lucrezia for treatment by Carl Jung. The psychotherapist blamed Joyce for her condition, accusing Joyce himself of being a latent psychotic. In the end Lucrezia walked away, commenting " . . . to think that such a big, fat materialistic Swiss man should try to get hold of my soul."
Getting hold of people's souls was precisely Jung's business, as this splendid biography by Ronald Hayman shows. Jung - prone to psychotic breakdowns himself - creatively adapted his own bizarre experiences to concoct a seductive mysticism that seduced millions over a meaning-hungry 20th century.
Jung had sex with the chosen among his predominantly female patients, promoting some to therapists who went on to be the priestesses of his cult. One of these early conquests - Sabina - was dismayed when, after he had been her lover for several months, he demanded 10 Swiss francs per hour for seeing him in future. And to add injury to insult, he then plagiarised her idea of the death wish and popularised it as his own.
Jung's cold and ruthless courting of Nazi ideology was not just calculating careerism - he was also dangerously anti-Semitic, and this was one of many factors contributing to his famous split with Freud. An unsavoury dalliance with fascism also allowed him conveniently to sweep aside the overwhelmingly Jewish Freudians in his struggle to control the psychoanalytic movement.
But surely the ideas are what are important, not the man, however distasteful his behaviour may have been? Yes, but in that strange world of middle-European psychotherapy, the theory was often as interwoven with its founder's personality as was Naziism with Hitler's. Before their split, Freud and Jung discussed discipline, dynastic rule and the rooting out of heterodoxies in the psychoanalytic movement. We are talking cults here, not science.
Jung's claims that he was a scientist studying the mind's mechanisms do not survive Hayman's careful, finely-written scrutiny. His theories of archetypes and the collective unconscious were based on some very dubious data from the dreams, visions and fantasies of patients who were supposedly naive to the written sources of the mythological tales and symbols that Jung detected in them. Yet Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophists were making these common currency at the time, exciting the likes of W. B. Yeats into seances and visions stuffed with this allegedly archetypal material.
Unlike in Freud's case, where a proportion of his ideas have received some scientific support, relatively few of Jung's ideas have stood the test of time. Yet he continues to exert a fascination and a devotion that cannot simply be ignored. The heady blend of mysticism and psychotherapy may explain this. Jung offered meaning to his patients. Not for them, sordid little sexual fixations to explain their neuroses. No, theirs was a much grander field of play involving the cosmic, collective consciousness of mankind and its jostling archetypes. It seems that mankind has a need for this stuff - let's call it religion - and science has yet properly to explain why.
Ian Robertson is Professor of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin. His book Mind Sculpture was published last year.