Jordan Peterson and Carl Jung’s Worldviews Have Been Greatly Oversimplified

“With respect to McManus and Hamilton, who have admittedly produced a very interesting article, there are characterizations and theoretical points within their article that I feel need to be addressed.”

Introduction

As a practicing psychotherapist investigating political expressions of psychoanalytic thought, I was very interested to read Matt McManus and Conrad Hamilton’s recent critique of Jungian and Lacanian perspectives. I was also intrigued by McManus and Hamilton’s choice to assign, respectively, these thinkers to the “Right” and “Left” of the political spectrum. They did this, in large part, through their interpretations of how Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek have, in turn, drawn from each psychoanalyst’s work. With respect to McManus and Hamilton, who have admittedly produced a very interesting article, there are characterizations and theoretical points within their article that I feel need to be addressed. In particular, it is necessary to demonstrate more accurately the complexity of the perspectives held up as representatives (I believe inaccurately) of “Left”-situated or “Right”-situated expressions of psychoanalysis.

Although clear divisions of Lacanian thought into the “Left” and Jungian thought into the “Right” might make for an engaging—yet choppy—article,there are a number of similarities between the two perspectives. There are also complexities internal to these perspectives that have to be eclipsed for this interpretation to hold. Especially noticeable in reading their article were the failure to acknowledge the left-wing Jungian streams of theoretical development (that have largely been ignored since Jung’s death), the equation of Peterson’s focus on “order from chaos” with the aim of Jungian analysis in general, and the erasure of theoretical similarities between Lacan and Jung’s perspectives. Also, I believe there were some inaccuracies regarding admittedly difficult aspects of Lacanian theory (the misrepresentation of the early infant’s relationship to the mirror stage, for example), as well as a degree of irony when the two authors (themselves influenced by Marxism) invoke charges about lacking evidence or unfalsifiability—when it comes to those with whom they disagree. However, I will sideline these later concerns in favor of primarily addressing the implicit characterization of Jungian thought as being inherently conservative or “right-wing” in analytic approach.

To a degree, I believe that the authors are aware and acknowledge partially the complexities of Jungian thought, and this causes some discomfort with the original premise of their piece. McManus and Hamilton take pains to differentiate and separate the decidedly un-progressive personal figure of Jacques Lacan (“Freud was not a progressive”) from the interpretations of Lacan’s interlocutors. These interlocutors were often the resolutely fashionable left-wing figures, who haunt the bookshelves and syllabuses of continental philosophy departments. These names include Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and, of course, the focal figure of their article: Slavoj Žižek. This highlighting of the development of Lacanian theory through its academic interpreters allows it to be positioned on the “Left,” within the topology of McManus and Hamilton’s article.