Lacan’s “Real,” Jung’s “Psychoid,” and Jordan Peterson’s “Dragon of Chaos”

“It may hearten aggrieved fans of Jordan Peterson, whose status as representative of Jungian thought I took umbrage with in a previous article, that I recognize some value in this aspect of Peterson’s work from a psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic perspective.”

In this article, I would like to expand on my previous response to Matt McManus and Conrad Hamilton that I wrote after reading a preview of their new book Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson. (The book was co-authored by McManus and Hamilton, along with Ben Burgis and Marion Trejo.) In the preview, McManus and Hamilton leveled an interesting and engaging analysis on the figure of Jordan Peterson,  as well as on his work as a public academic, political figure, and psychological professional. Putting aside their critiques of Peterson’s political views, which I would largely like to sidestep (as this is not my area of expertise), for the purpose of this article, I am again interested in their writing on the psychoanalytic aspects of Peterson’s ideas. This is particularly the case when it comes to their descriptions of the dialogue Peterson identifies within the psyche between “chaos” and “order.” It may hearten aggrieved fans of Jordan Peterson, whose status as representative of Jungian thought I took umbrage with in a previous article, that I recognize some value in this aspect of Peterson’s work from a psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic perspective. However, I would like to point out how similar some elements of Jacques Lacan’s work, which is often labelled incorrectly with the moniker “postmodern,” are to Peterson’s preferred Jungian perspective. I’ll also re-state some problems I have with the mixing of Jungian and evolutionary psychology within Peterson’s work. To begin—in following from my previous article—I would like to identify similarities and analogies between Jung’s work with the psychoanalysis of Lacan when it comes to the question of what chaos consists of. I will, then, move on to some psychoanalytic critiques of the concept of order in development and discuss why I think it is healthy to retain it as a teleological goal.

The Real and the Dragon of Chaos

When responding to McManus and Hamilton’s article on political psychoanalysis, I surmised that similarities between the psychoanalytic ideas of Jung and Lacan perhaps had been overlooked. These similarities may have also been ignored by Peterson and Slavoj Žižek, with Peterson perhaps viewing Lacan as a “postmodern neo-Marxist” and Žižek expressing public disgust at the idea of debating a Jungian. At first glance, one might be inclined to believe that the perspectives these two thinkers represent are utterly irreconcilable. Occluded similarities may, however, be partly the reason Peterson and Žižek were able to find common ground in their public debate in April of 2019. It may also be partly the reason why the anti-Oedipal, “social justice warrior” Left has alternately targeted both Peterson and Žižek. McManus and Hamilton’s previous article mentions briefly the Lacanian concept of the “Real” and the “mirror stage” of development. As such, in this article, I would like to begin by exploring how these may be analogous to the Jungian idea of the “psychoid” and the primordial experience of the undifferentiated “Self,” as well as how this reflects what Peterson represents as the uroborus, the “dragon of chaos.”

The Lacanian Real

McManus and Hamilton describe the “Real,” as applied to Lacanian theory, as a sort of teleological void in the psyche, drawing the person’s attention towards it. Their suggestion was that an infant starts life within what Lacanians call the mirror stage. The infant then moves towards the Real through entering into the symbolic (the register of language and symbols we use to make up our world) and encountering the “gaps” in it. This is the point at which words fail. These gaps fascinate and horrify us in equal measure. This description is partly correct; however, this is not quite the whole story, though I empathize with how hard it is to grapple with Lacan in a short article.