Richard Noll
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.
[1] 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.
[2] 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.
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.
"[23] 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.
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'.
he has been so effective in promoting his ideas that there is a danger that they will enter public consciousness as received wisdom" and tarnish "Jung's memory" and "the whole tradition of psychotherapy practiced in his name.
"[36] In a video of a 2014 classroom lecture on Jung posted on YouTube, University of Toronto professor and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson characterized Noll as "crooked."
"[41] At the invitation of psychiatrist and researcher Frank Putnam, then the Chief of the Dissociative Disorders Unit at the National Institute of Mental Health, Noll was one of four members on a plenary session panel that opened the 7th International Conference on Multiple Personality/Dissociative States in Chicago on 9 November 1990.
In a ballroom filled with television cameras and more than 700 conference participants (including feminist intellectual Gloria Steinem, who was a firm believer in the veracity of "recovered memories" of satanic ritual abuse) the members of the panel presented, for the first time in a public professional forum, a skeptical viewpoint concerning SRA reports.
When American psychiatrists published purported historical evidence supporting these beliefs in the peer-reviewed journal Dissociation in March 1989,[44] In a following issue (December 1989) Noll dismissed their arguments, claiming that SRA beliefs were "a modern version of (a) paranoid mass delusion -- and one in which all too many clinicians and law enforcement officials also share" was the first unambiguous skepticism of the moral panic to be published in a medical journal.
Noll's participation on the panel was viewed by SRA believers as part of a deliberate disinformation campaign by Frank Putnam, who was skeptical of the reality of satanic cults.
[55][56][57][58] The backstory to this controversial editorial decision was explored in blog posts by the author Gary Greenberg[59] and psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John "Mickey" Nardo.
[74] In April 2014 Douglas Misicko (alias Doug Mesner, alias Lucien Greaves), co-founder of the international nontheistic religion and political activist organization The Satanic Temple, published a lengthy article on his website Dysgenics in support of Noll's stance against mental health professionals who promote satanic cult conspiracies and the discredited "recovered memory" psychotherapy.
[76] Mesner's initial formation of The Satanic Temple on a Facebook page in 2013 was inspired by his longstanding public opposition to SRA proponents and the fact they continued to exist long after scientific and legal challenges had discredited their claims.
[78][79] The controversy drew to a close in August 2014 with two letters to the editors of Psychiatric Times in response to an article by psychologist and attorney Christopher Barden who sharply criticized Noll for failing to address the "repressed/recovered memory" controversy and the fact that legal challenges in the courts effectively ended the ability of mental health professionals to perpetuate the moral panic.
[85][86] In 1994 Richard Noll and his colleague from Ohio State University, anthropologist Kun SHI, explored Manchuria (just south of the Amur river, the natural border with Russian Siberia) and Inner Mongolia and interviewed the last living Tungus Siberian shamans who had openly practiced prior to being forced to abandon their nomadic life and spirits after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
[87] All visual media, fieldwork notes and other supporting correspondence and documents from this project became part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Studies Film Archives in October 2014.
[89] Noll's photograph of Chuonnasuan appears as the fronticepiece in Le Chamanisme de Sibérie et d’Asie centrale [fr] (Paris: Découvertes Gallimard [vol.
[90] A second published report of this fieldwork concerning the life and training of the Solon Ewenki shamaness Dula'r (Ao Yun Hua) (born 1920) appeared in the journal Shaman in 2007 (15: 167–174).
Both Noll and George delivered presentations to the Institute of Philosophy of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in Ulaanbaatar at the invitation of Chuluunbaatar Gelegpil, Mongolia's Minister of Education and Culture.
[95] Video clips by Noll of the multi-hour summer solstice "fire ritual" for the Ulaan Tergel (literally "Red Disk") performed by Mongol shamans which was held out on the steppes 15 km from Ulaanbaatar on 21 June 2017 can be found on YouTube[96] Noll and George were invited to this event by Jargalsaikhan, the head of the Mongolian Corporate Union of Shamans.
"[98] Noll was introduced to both the scholarly study and techniques of shamanism in the fall of 1980 by the anthropologist Michael Harner, then a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
[99] Noll's most recent book, American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox, was published by Harvard University Press in October 2011.
[104] "Tales of personal drama enliven Noll's story in a way that few would imagine possible for a historical account of nosology," said a reviewer in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
"[106] In a September 2012 review in Isis historian John C. Burnham noted, "It is clearly written and is based on a remarkably thorough literature search and reading of primary sources.
"[107] Since 2011, Noll has occasionally collaborated with an interdisciplinary group of schizophrenia researchers at the Bahn Laboratory at the University of Cambridge (UK) and the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam (the Netherlands).
