Holding Tension: Postmodernism, Jungian Psychology and C-19
A Strategy for Deep Coping in a Time of Crisis
Presumably, seeing as you are here, the title of this piece was sufficient to warrant your attention, but the question no doubt remains: What line of thought could there be that links C-19, Postmodernism and Carl Jung? To put it briefly, and to give you some indication of where this essay is going: I want to make the claim that C-19 is (among other things) a truly global moment; it affects every person on the planet and is therefore a unique chance for us to observe the plurality of perspective and interpretation which I regard as the central postmodern concern. One shared phenomenon giving rise to billions of different experiences. The second suggestion I want to make here is that analytical psychology can, if bridged with the appropriate caution and sensitivity, provide us with a way of describing this postmodern multitude of viewpoints in a language that is closer to plain english than that which has been provided by many postmodern theorists. Furthermore, because it is a field developed primarily as a therapeutic framework, it can offer us guidance and practices to help us navigate the current moment. Some will no doubt be quick to claim that Jung is a poor choice, and that Lacan, Winnicott or even Freud would be more suited to this task, and I do not doubt that such a case could be (and has been) made, and fruitful comparisons drawn there too. However it’s Jung that I know something about, and so it is to Jung that I will assign the task. I do not intend to show a definitive causal link between Jung and the Postmodern, such an argument would be antithetical and a waste of time, but I will draw attention to occasions when parallels occur, where I believe such comparisons to be pertinent to our current situation. For a deeper examination of parallels and connections between Jungian analytical psychology and the postmodern I recommend Christopher Hauke’s fine book “Jung and the Postmodern — The Interpretation of Realities” which has, in large part, inspired this essay.
For lovers of Jung another question may well present itself: Why bother? What could Jung’s work possibly have to gain from being shoehorned into dialog with postmodernism? Fans of the postmodern philosophers who are not overly acquainted with Jung may well ask a similar question, only inverted. All of the above might also ask: What does any of this have to do with the coronavirus pandemic? I hope to answer these questions more comprehensively throughout the essay, but for now I will simply point out that C-19 has/is/will precipitate a hastening decline and probably eventual demise of many systems and structures which themselves constitute the last strongholds of institutionalised modernity. The banking and finance industries, globalised supply chains, traditional mainstream broadcast media, our various political systems and the pharmaceutical industry all spring to mind. Attempts to navigate the fallout from C-19 will therefore be necessarily illuminated by a discussion of the postmodern. The symbolic and psychotherapeutic language of Jungian analysis will be utilised to facilitate a conversation which attempts to grapple with postmodern concerns which is (I believe) necessary if we are to avoid collapsing into the very modes of thinking which have precipitated the cultural moment we find ourselves in. Jung’s work is of particular relevance as it contains the constant presence of an anthropological perspective, and his work as an observer of the psychology of mass movements produced insights which would later be echoed by prominent voices within postmodernism and which still have practical and theoretical uses to us today.
In short, modernism has given us scientific and rational progress, which has taken on its own momentum, and brought us to a moment when qualitative global change is going to happen whether we like it or not. Postmodernism provides us with an insightful critique of modernism, but is yet to prove itself as a capable of providing us with coherent guidance — or as psychoanalyst/feminist theorist Jane Flax has put it
“Appealing alternatives to [modernity’s] characteristic set of beliefs are lacking. The socially prevalent ones seem to be fanatical theocracies, unrelenting dogmatism, absolutist states, chaos, or a moral relativism so paralysing that it elides into nihilism.” (J. Flax 1990)
It is my speculative hope that by inserting Jung as a guide, I might be able to make a home for his gnostic spirituality, prescient social commentary, and deep relationship to the unconscious — better; to the unknown, within a postmodern worldview which can otherwise seem to land us alone in an ocean of uncertainty. Similarly I’d like to try to find, with Jung’s help, a place in our psyches for those aspects of postmodern theory which are not only inevitable, but might actually be preferable if we can humanise them and find a way to create a set of practices which enable us to participate in their expression.
In addition to the central figures that this essay will focus upon, I have been deeply inspired by John Vervaeke, Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmactenberger, and Iain Mcgilchrist (among others) and followers of these thinkers will no doubt recognise their influence upon the way that I articulate and formulate ideas, and on my view and understanding (such that it is) of our current situation. For those who have not come into contact with any of the above, let it be noted that my thought is guided and made possible by the free public sharing of ideas by people such as this. I am deeply grateful for it.
It seems prudent also to openly state that I’ve read a lot more of Jung than I have of the postmodernists, and that my reading of the Lyotard, Deleuze and Foucault in particular has been filtered through what is inevitably something of a Jungian frame, as I had not honestly become at all familiar with them until deciding to undertake writing this essay. As a result it is probably more likely that the reader who is similarly acquainted with Jung will find the ideas represented here stimulating than one who is coming at it from the other side. My intentions are not to overly criticise the postmodernists, but defend them (as I will Jung), so I hope that any apparent lopsidedness of this essay may not be of such vital importance as to derail the overarching aims already stated. What follows is perhaps best seen as an attempt to make the postmodern a viable, comprehensible and convincing frame through which those typically more interested in psychology might become open to it, though I hope that its conclusions will be at least somewhat relevant to many different types of people. The value of the exercise, will ultimately be judged (by the reader) according to whether or not they find any useful insight into navigating the sociocultural landscape of crisis as a result of engaging with the juxtaposition.
The Coronavirus Crisis
As indicated above, what I am especially interested in doing here is to use the current situation as a kind of case study to illuminate the relationships between Modernism, postmodernism and Jung, more than to discuss the aspects of the medical situation in detail. I will at times talk about the crisis in terms of medical systems and institutions, but when such topics arise, they are supposed to be taking part in a conversation of a social, philosophical, anthropological nature. In many respects I’m talking simultaneously about the events which constitute C-19 crisis directly, and the wider (what some have called) meta-crisis which I take C-19 to be emblematic of.
A Word on Jung
Jung has often been accused of “being a mystic”, of advocating for Judeo-Christian values, of being a romantic or an essentialist. I’m not going to bother contesting these points really. Suffice it to say that Jung was fascinated by myths, and by every religion of every kind, but to see him as a simple advocate for those things is a lazy error and a misreading. With regards to claims of romanticism, and essentialism, I admit that Jung, read in the context in which he was writing, does fall prey to these kinds of simplifications, but they do not, for him, constitute foundational presuppositions. They are more conveniences of cultural grammar which were probably somewhat opaque to Jung himself, and whose bias we can now factor in a reading of him which is more broadly consonant with contemporary ‘values’.
I will also just take a moment to give some context to the allegations of anti-semitism which are so often casually flung at Jung. Many people may not know that letters between Jung and Allen Dulles, (wartime director of the allied intelligence agency: the OSS) reveal that during the second world war, he was working as an informant for the allies, creating psychological profiles of high ranking members of the Nazi party for use by the OSS. Allen Dulles is quoted as saying “Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war.” Now, I’m not so naive as to claim this as complete exoneration and proof that Jung was not in any way anti-semitic, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s complicated. He undoubtedly had many cultural and cognitive biases, blind spots and prejudices, (as we all do) and his are characterised by the time that he lived in. One could certainly find a handful of sentences within his collected works which clearly demonstrate this, and they should not be brushed aside. However, not many intellectuals who were actively publishing work in the 1930s came out of it looking altogether clean.
The Modern Period/Modernism
I won’t bore us all with a timeline, though to do so would serve to demonstrate the description of history through construction of a simplistic narrative which is typical of ‘modern’ thinkers. But you’ll get bored and so will I, so for the sake of definition, let it suffice to say that when I talk of “the modern period” (or “modernity”), I mean roughly 1500 up until today. The way that I’m using the word is not meant to imply a dividing line between the modern and postmodern, the past 70–80 years, in my view, contain both modern and postmodern aspects. This is broad strokes so let’s not get too hung up on it. When speaking of “Modernism” I’m referring predominantly to the movements within philosophy, science and the arts from just before and around the turn of the twentieth century, which again, persist until today in some form, overlapping with aspects of the postmodern more and more so as the decades go by.
It’s important to avoid the temptation to imply too clean a break between modernity and postmodernity. In fact it is better conceived of as a mess. We might think of “Modernism” as the culmination of the values of “the modern period” (a period when the sweeping industrialisation of western nations, and revolutionary developments in science and technology seemingly legitimated and concretised the embedding of modern values into infrastructure, institutions and cultural grammar), however the work of many thinkers who are typically classified in this sense as ‘modern’ (Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Marx and many others including, I would argue; Jung) actually became foundational to the postmodern or at least helped (intentionally or otherwise) to precipitate the gradual fragmenting of modern values. Whether we describe these men and their work as the crowning achievement and embodiment of modern values, or attribute to them the revolutionary act of heralding the demise of modernity, is really a matter of perspective. Neither and both can be and are ‘true’.
The Postmodern/Postmodernism
Attempts to define postmodernism/the postmodern by delineating its origins and history are always limited by the fact that the ‘claims’ of postmodernism deny the universal validity of any singular historical narrative. But I will go ahead and do the stupid thing and ‘define’ the ‘postmodern’ (/postmodernity) as a broad cultural movement (encompassing philosophy, literature, art, political movements, and so on) that has gradually come (in earnest) into being during the time period between the end of the second world war and today. This process is ongoing still. At times I will speak of modernism and the postmodern as stages of development, invoking the developmental stages of individual people metaphorically. A strong metaphor, I hope, but designed to be thought provoking as opposed to definitive. Postmodernity is resistant to being pinned down by any such framework which attempts to define it in terms of a reaction to or an outgrowth from modernism, as such attempts can themselves become examples of grand, overarching meta-narratives which disingenuously show history as a straightforward linear procession. So the terms ‘(the) postmodern’ and ‘postmodernity’ will be used to refer to the broad cultural movement. The word ‘movement’ I find acceptable only insofar as it is removed from any sense of particular teleology, and simply denotes a sense motion, and perhaps a directionality, but never a specific direction.
When I use the terms ‘postmodernist’ / ‘postmodernism’ I am referring predominantly to the philosophers who are associated with the broad movement; Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Rorty, and others. Obviously to group all these together under a single heading with the outcome of implying uniformity between them is absurd. This and many other absurdities are grappled with and made visible by postmodern theory and so I will often observe the convention of using quotation marks to denote the ironic insufficiency of such ‘categories’. This invocation of irony is a feature of some postmodernists, and is demonstrative of their urge to question and undermine the ‘values’ of modernism such as ‘truth’, ‘reason’ and ‘science’. The scare quotes serve to draw attention to the implicit assumptions of language which otherwise go unnoticed, and which when examined, give rise to not a unified graspable definition, but a perplexing plurality. For example, when Sam Harris or some other such commentator cries out for ‘a return to enlightenment values of truth and reason’, a postmodernist might counter that the words ‘enlightenment’, ‘values’, ‘truth’, and ‘reason’ can all be interpreted in a multitude of ways which solicits more investigation and discussion than is generally granted by advocates for modernism.
A couple of other demonstrative examples: A postmodern suggestion is that the word ‘truth’ is at best a placeholder for an impossible and unknowable objective perspective, and at worst, nothing more than a singular perspective, hubristically inflated to the point of globalising theory. The scientist claims that their views are universally true just as the radicalised bigot does. The modern word “Reason” asserts a particular method of logical deduction which can and should be universally applied by anyone in search of ‘truth’. A postmodern response might be to point out the undeniable existence of a multitude of different types of ‘reason’ and favour the tension and differences between perspectives over the tyrannical grip of a singular definition. Furthermore, a hegemonic concept of reason creates, some postmodernists would argue, a hierarchical power structure in which one’s ability to utilise the singular and agreed upon reason defines the limits of one’s ability to participate in discourse, thereby excluding those who are not ‘learned’ (or perhaps indoctrinated); a factor which can often have more to do with privilege, position and power, than it does with ‘work ethic’ or ‘merit’.
Truth vs ‘truth’, Telos vs Chaos, ‘Normal’ vs Real
It follows from this basic discussion of concepts that postmodernism would seek to undermine the validity of organisations, institutions and systems whose authority arises from claims of truth and reason giving rise to universalising theories. Many different examples of systems which are vulnerable to this critique spring immediately to mind, but for our context let us first focus on the medical systems and the nature of the theories on which they are founded. It is here that we will receive our first piece of aid from our unlikely guide. In “The Undiscovered Self” Jung outlines a view which clearly foreshadows the postmodernist position:
“For the more a theory lays claim to universal validity, the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts. Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them with an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid, though it need not occur in reality. Despite this, it figures in the theory as an unassailable fundamental fact … If, for instance, I determine the weight of each stone in a bed of pebbles and get an average weight of five ounces, this tells me very little about the real nature of the pebbles. Anyone who thought, on the basis of these findings that he could pick up a pebble of five ounces at the first try would be in for a serious disappointment. Indeed, it might well happen that … he would not find a single pebble weighing five ounces.”
He later continues
“The doctor, above all, should be aware of this contradiction. On the one hand, he is equipped with the statistical truths of his scientific training, and on the other, he is faced with the task of treating a sick person who … requires individual understanding … This illustration from the realm of medicine is only a special instance of the problem of education and training in general. Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore paints an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or ‘normal’ man to whom the scientific statements refer.”
(C.G.Jung 1957 [italics his])
It is clear for anybody who wishes to look that Jung’s views share with the postmodernists a recognition of the limitations of modern science and rationality. One could reframe the penultimate sentence of the quotation in the language of postmodernism without any real change in meaning:
‘science’ is based (in the main) on universalising ‘truth’ and ‘theory’ and therefore paints an unrealistic, ‘rational’ picture of the world in which plurality is impoverished in favour of a dominant, narrow and false hegemony.
I am careful here to note the acknowledgement within Jung’s view of the ‘validity’ of the scientific knowledge in stating that the “mean is quite valid”. I emphasise this in the hope that we might avoid the childish escalation which can occur within the lower reaches of postmodern theorising wherein notions of things like ‘scientific knowledge’ can be undermined to the point of petty derision. I put ‘science’ in quotation marks simply because, left unchecked, words like it and ‘rationality’ tend to claim an air of unassailability which I wish to challenge. I do not mean to decry or belittle, only to indicate a general preference for a lack of finality. A mature postmodernism should recognise that plurality of perspective must by definition include modernist perspectives on the simple basis that they exist phenomenologically within ourselves and billions of other people. Postmodernism is, in this sense, not a revolutionary reaction against modernism (in this sense). Deconstruction does not straightforwardly equal destruction. In the same spirit, let us also recognise that plurality does not necessarily imply a strict relativism with regards to the usefulness or relevance of a particular perspective in any given situation. Rather let us simply notice that different types of epistemology exist, and that postmodernity demands that we learn to appropriately differentiate, rather than equivocate between them. Let us read the invoked irony of postmodernism as the self aware musings of a wizened adult as opposed to the infantile mockery of children.
Medical Systems, Modern Magic Beans, Mirror Images and Memetic Modesty
‘Consensus’ established, Let us turn this critique of modernity, modernism and its values on our current situation and see how it fares. In 2020, our relationship to medicine and healthcare is one of dependency upon highly globalised systems, whose ‘authority’ is granted by scientific knowledge which is based, just as Jung describes, upon statistical averages and universalising theories. The pharmaceutical industry epitomises modern values and rationality by its seeking for solutions to a vast array of different symptomatic problems, by a singular type of enquiry; the synthesising of compounds, the chemical and subsequently biological testing of these compounds, resulting eventually in a pill. Obviously the industry creates a number of different substances, but symbolically, the pill itself is a poignant metaphor for the over-reaching tendencies of modernity. We want a magic (specific, universally effective) pill to fix our (general, distinct and diverse) problems. Industrialised medicine also reflects in its approach another fundamental axiom of modernity, namely the separation of mind and body as formalised by Descartes at the dawn of the modern period. Illness is most often perceived as a physical affliction, to be dealt with at the biological level, within individuals, reduced, in this case, to units whose status is to be understood based on deviations from physical ‘norms’, and treated with medicine with the goal of a return to ‘normal’ status. It is indicative of the messy and overlapping nature of late modernism and postmodernism that this very modern idea has really only risen to dominance in the last 50–100 years. It is also telling that the term “holistic medicine” is, in western cultures, generally received with skepticism and contempt, evoking associations with regressive magical thinking. As if conceiving of people as whole is a ridiculous and farcical idea.
All this gives us something to reflect upon: The reductive and dualistic notions of modernity are baked in, embedded in our psyches and systems and everything in between. The ‘scientific’ way medicines are created, the globalised structure of the pharmaceutical industry, the way we measure health and even the way we conceive and speak about illness/wellness; the cultural grammar that structures our views: — all these aspects can and should be opened up to whatever valid criticism Postmodernism has to offer. In addition, according at least to Lyotard “there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics” (1979). Science, he suggests, importantly underpins and validates the philosophical project of modernism, so ethics, politics and science, are able to stand as a tripod because they mutually support one another, the validity of any one being used to validate the other two. So if we question the reductionism of science, we are simultaneously also questioning the philosophical, the political and the ethical aspects of modernity.
I don’t want to claim that modernist values are having a purely deleterious effect on our ability to cope with C-19 or the meta-crisis which it exemplifies. In it’s defence, one might point out that our globalised, reductive, dualistic, scientific systems, organisations and institutions have provided us with the greatest responsive capabilities that the world has known. Mass production, a hallmark of the modern, gives us the possibility of an end in sight, medically at least, in the form of a vaccine being successfully developed, which seems a ‘certainty’. Indeed, certainty is modernism’s modus operandi, its stock in trade, its bread and butter, and it often appears to deliver. I will pose a more postmodern counter-argument to this, but first I want to again invoke Jung:
“The repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible. The conscious mind is on top, the shadow underneath, and just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is doomed to stagnation, congestion, and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites.” [C.G. Jung 1949 CW 7, par. 78.]
Again, the quote seems to me perfectly in step with broad postmodern concerns. There is a profound psychic inclusivity being invoked here which can be fairly extrapolated and applied to broad social matters. Jung himself often performed such generalisations, extrapolating bottom up from the individual to society and vice-versa. He is stating here that the very elements of ourselves which are the polar opposite of that which we have chosen to be, are themselves the vital ingredients for “movement” or indeed for “life”. There’s a sense that the tension between opposites within the psyche is equivalent to the difference in charge which allows for electricity to flow. The energy might flow in a specific direction through the circuit, but what it gives rise to is as yet undirected potential, like the building up of a towering storm cloud, the difference in charge creating the potential for lightning to strike. If we accept this metaphor and apply its logic across groups as well as individuals, across externalities as well as internal experience, in recognising the tension between opposing viewpoints as a source of energising vitality to power movement without a presupposed direction, we are again finding in Jung a way to grasp the postmodern concerns.
If we take the earlier defence of modernism and its ability to respond to C-19 as the first of two opposing poles in some kind of dialectic, then what is the second- the opposite? Well there is one, and it’s a big one: Our vulnerability to pandemics of this nature is also baked in, encoded within our psyches and systems. In Jungian terms, these fragilities constitute the “shadow” of modernity’s triumphs. Whilst it is fair to say that mass production, standardisation and statistical theorising are absolutely vital to our grappling with C-19, we must simultaneously recognise that our interconnected web of global systems (which are mostly optimised for efficiency using statistical approaches) is what has rendered us fragile and vulnerable in the first place.
The systems in question are organised such that they protect their embedded modern values. Industry of all kinds still orients around mass production, which colours the modernist landscape within the private and public sector. Even nationalised services are run as for-profit-businesses, which in turn necessitates that they become highly efficient. This might not sound like such a bad thing, but there is a problem: Efficiency works in a trade off relationship with adaptivity. For example, a supermarket maximises profit by having precisely the amount of toilet paper that is needed on the shelf for ‘normal’ circumstances on any given day, meaning that as long as ‘normal’ circumstances prevail, efficiency and therefore profits are maximised. As a result, the supply chain’s adaptive capacity is extremely minimal; it cannot cope well with ‘abnormal’ circumstances, and so even a 10% uptick in toilet paper purchases means empty shelves 90% of the time. This may seem like a facile example, but consider that the same dynamic is occurring within our healthcare systems. Most healthcare systems are optimised similarly so that they have precisely the amount of ICU capacity and supplies of ventilators that they need for any ‘normal’ day. The issue is that once the unreality of the supposed normality is exposed, the system becomes overwhelmed, and many people needlessly die. The modernist myth of the ‘normal’ seems culpable in this. The sociocultural tacit acceptance of a stable, singular narrative, (deviations from which are mere aberrations, anomalies which fail to warrant consideration) seems to be at the root of some of our fragilities.
An approach to constructing a more postmodern medical system might be to recognise this myth of normality and optimise for adaptivity, rather than efficiency, in the face of an honest engagement with the uncertainties of the world. I’ll admit that I don’t know what a decentralized medical system looks like, or how to achieve a distributed network of care, but as things stand, the “unreal ideal” of ‘normal’ cognitively underpins our worldview and gives rise to the false and unwarranted certainty that simultaneously characterises everything up to the behaviour of huge corporations and institutions, and down, to so many social media posts and our personal relationship to the unknown; most often one of anxiety, which generally collapses either into fear and panic, or false certainty and hubris.
It is worth noting that there are today many examples of approaches to understanding healing and medicine which try to address these criticisms, and we might hope that they become more widely adopted as their findings are established.
The Loss of Victory
Stepping back from the debate itself for a second, let us notice this moment. For many people, this moment appears as a fork in the road. Whether your initial urge was to defend the modern or to critique it, and depending on how convincing you found the opposite argument to your starting position, you will typically now go through one of two processes. Either you found the counter argument compelling and you make a qualitative swing to its position, or you didn’t, in which case you double down on your commitment to your original view. Both Jung and the postmodernists would have us seek a third option. Just because we are looking at the problem through a Modernism vs postmodernism lens, does not mean that one will triumphantly squash the other out of existence. The ‘fact’ that Modernist type approaches give us our best way out of immediate danger must be held in tension with the ‘fact’ that those same types of approaches have created the very crisis which we are attempting to escape from.
It is here that, for me, the presence of Jung really begins to resonate: This tension has to be held systemically and institutionally, yes, but also; psychologically, internally. Indeed, for most people, this is the only level at which it can be held, at least in the present moment. We live in a surreal juxtaposition of the modern and postmodern and have been thus enculturated not by one or the other, but by the conflict between the two. We have internalised this conflict, this tension, and to collapse into one side of it (to return to our electrical metaphor), would be equivalent to deciding not to connect the circuit at all. It’s a denial of our own potential for development; the archetypal refusal to heed the call to adventure.
“The united personality will never quite lose the painful sense of innate discord. Complete redemption from the sufferings of this world is and must remain an illusion.”
[C.G. Jung, 1946 CW 16, par. 400.]
(Meta-)Narratives, (Social)Media and Moving Targets
Now let us turn to another arena in which the multitudinous perspectives on C-19 are clearly visible; social media reaction. The social media platforms which currently dominate public life provide an interesting study of the conflict between modern and postmodern concerns in and of themselves, which I will not delve into here, except to point out that they demonstrate very well the interpenetration and overlapping of the two. On the one hand, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (and others) have radically decentralised access to broadcast bandwidth, giving voice to plurality, circumventing hierarchy, foregrounding irony, and the often narcissistic obsession with image and self representation. Some would say (with ironic simplicity) that these attributes constitute the ‘essence’ of the postmodern. However, all is not as it seems on the surface. In addition to their apparent and explicit ‘purposes’ each of the platforms is performing various covert or implicit functions, which may or may not align with the optimistic postmodern values which they appear to represent. Facebook is a tool used by the powerful to manipulate elections and sell products. Instagram is not much more than a terrifyingly efficient mediator of social pressure and breeding ground of narcissism. Twitter creates a forum to house plurality, unfortunately though, that forum turns out to be a prison “of never ending adolescence” with a currency of crude one liners and ‘beef’. This new frontier of the postmodern, at times, seems to give rise to nothing but pornography: Outrage porn, confirmation porn, and just regular old porn.
I know that in criticising social media, I’m just taking easy potshots at the lowest hanging fruit available, but in doing so I wish to demonstrably convey why some have (simplistically) suggested that postmodernism is limited by its inability to scratch beneath the surface. This critique often appears in such sarcastic and vitriolic terms as to render its legitimacy questionable. Nevertheless there is a value in paying close attention to it, because it applies both to social media, and to postmodernism in general, and I believe we can state it with sufficient nuance to satisfy even the pedants: Both (postmodernism and social media) have the potential to evoke (and perhaps even contain structures which incentivise) a shallow narcissism, and when this goes unnoticed, both can be co-opted as the smiling postmodern face of the very modern power structures which postmodernism seeks to deconstruct and undermine. A prerequisite of under-mining is an ability to get under a thing in the first place. Perhaps this qualifies as another good reason to employ a depth psychologist to help us in our endeavours.
There has been (as you would expect) a plethora of reactions and interpretations to C-19 on and through social media; thoughtful commentary of impressive depth and accuracy along with conspiracy theories ranging from the ridiculous to the absurd. Spontaneous outpourings of community spirit and mutual aid side by side with people publicly demonising their fellow citizens for daring to sit on a blanket outside. There are those who claim that C-19 will be the catalyst for progressive reform that the world desperately needs, and those who live in terror of a wave of authoritarianism sweeping the globe and locking us all down forever. Governments the world over are rolling out unprecedented financial support packages whilst at the same time predatory and opportunistic stock market trading practices are rapidly (further) accelerating the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the 1%.
In this new world, people’s reactions are not drawn along the fault lines that usually serve to categorise people on social media. For example, it has been interesting (in the UK) to watch as many ‘left wing people’ on social media (and journalists in the mainstream media) rush to criticise the ‘right wing’ government for not imposing its authoritarianism harshly enough. The very same people who were not so very long ago calling for a complete opening of all borders, (and vilifying those who favoured restrictions on immigration) can now be observed attacking the powers that be for not closing all borders completely and quickly enough. In the US, sales of guns have skyrocketed, as millions of people rush to arm themselves in the face of a rapid unspooling of the social fabric. Most are “first-time gun owners” and one cannot help but wonder what side of the gun control debate many of these millions would have come down on, just four or five weeks ago. At the same time, the streets of some US cities are lined with ‘right wing’ ‘pro-life’ ‘republicans’ sporting placards stating “my body, my choice”, demanding to be allowed to return to work, or even demanding “the right to catch the virus”. If irony is a feature of the postmodern, surely even the most ardent defender of modern values will have to admit that the postmodern has truly arrived. Many fronts that were previously very active conflict zones in the culture war have seemingly been abandoned and new ones have opened up. Many things that seemed important for decades have become more or less instantly meaningless. What should we make of all this?
The first thing, it seems to me that we might do, is try to observe a practice of stepping back and looking at. We might start by simply noticing the seminal postmodern moment that is occurring. Just listen to the many voices and notice the character of the cacophony. Notice the way narratives cannot help but engage in warfare with one another. Notice how hard it is to engage in attempts to make sense of the world without finding yourself in disagreement and competition with other viewpoints. The transitory nature of ideological positions and simplistic narratives has been thoroughly exposed for all to see, as many people find themselves abandoning the posts that they have been defending for a lifetime, and yet, the narrative warfare rages on. It’s almost as if the content and even the character of narrative are not the real source of the conflict. What if we’re arguing simply because we are stuck in the habit of it? Or to put it another way, what if narrative warfare is a baked in (embedded) feature of our cultural and cognitive grammar? What if the very way we think about things; the ‘logic’ and ‘rationality’ that we think and speak in terms of, (an enduring product of modernism which we carry inside ourselves) simply results in this conflict, so that no matter the topic of discussion, conversation tends to take the form of competition? Perhaps our hunger for certainty has us locked in the rhetorical equivalent of fighting over the last toilet paper in the shop, panic buying our own dogma as if it’s going to run out at any moment.
Notice internally also, how these battles rage on. One moment great hopes for the future and appreciation of this chance for change fill the mind, and then one reads an article filled with dire predictions which seem certain to come true, and suddenly the mind reverts into bunker-building, tinned-food-hoarding gun-toting prepper mode. One minute you’re awash in gratitude and relief at the unexpected slowing of the pace of life, but then something makes you miss distant loved ones, and you feel suddenly like a caged animal, snarling your demands for freedom. Maybe you’re stood in the kitchen making pasta and just for a moment, you forget that anything out of the ordinary is happening, until you realise you’ve run out of tomato puree and remember the anxiety inducing odyssey that now constitutes a trip to the supermarket.
There is a parallel which is worth tuning into here, as it shows up also in the relationship between Jung and the postmodern. Just as postmodernism seeks to undermine (as in, to get at what is beneath and thereby re-contextualise the surface) the unity of modernism’s values, narratives and structures, so analytical psychology seeks to discover what is underneath consciousness, bringing to the surface many voices. In postmodernism the ‘aim’ is to incorporate voices of many different individuals into a celebration of the complexity and plurality of existence at the sociocultural level. In analysis, the aim is similarly to re-situate the ego amongst of a plurality of psychic aspects or sub-personalities, to re-contextualise it as part of an ongoing process, rather than an all encompassing totality. In both cases, we can say that what is hoped for is the emergence of a dynamic system which favours the raw power of the tension of opposites to the laser focused ‘certainty’ of a unified vision.
So how can we apply this? What does it mean to “hold the tension of opposites”? This will feel different to each individual, and it’s not my intention to try to capture it fully within a few propositions, but we can try to tease out our own experience of it by expanding the meaning of the phrase. It may seem that I’m suggesting that we reframe nihilism as a kind of vague agnosticism and just settle into it. Such an approach might not be such a bad idea as a simplistic analgesic for sufferers of existential dread, but that is not what I am advocating. This is not “that’s just…like..your opinion, man”. Holding the tension of opposites cannot be done, in either the postmodern or the Jungian sense unless one deeply engages with the opposite of one’s natural starting position, (be it in a psychological frame or a social one) to give it full credence, and know how it feels and what it means to embody it. Crucially though, this does not mean that one is won over to the side of the opposite, just that one gains a felt sense, lived experience, participatory understanding of it, so that it can be held in genuine good faith, and in tension.
All this talk of pairs of opposites is beginning to sound a little too dualistic for my taste, so let us expand our sense of what is meant by “this tension of opposites” by recognising it for the metaphor that it is. Firstly let me point out that dualisms seem to often have the characteristic of actually being triads, where the third is invisible or less than obvious. The Taoist Yin and Yang symbol, for example, is constituted of a pair of opposites yes, but also of a line which snakes through the middle, and encircles the whole. One wonders, for example, what our conception of mind/body dualism might look like if modified in this way. I would also like to point out that though I’ve been speaking about holding tension between opposites, nowhere do I mean to imply simple dichotomies of thought or choice or simplistic polarities between aspects of psyche or society. Let me give an example that might not clarify the point, but might serve at least to demonstrate the character of its obscurity:
A chess game, to begin with, is a perfectly symmetrical battle between black, and its opposite; white. Between experienced players, the opening five or so moves are generally predictable, as both participants know a variety of opening sequences and how to counter them, but entropy is gradually introduced into the system, and as the game goes on, the potential for difference from the norms increases. The game is still a battle of opposites, but within that frame, there is an ever increasing potential for asymmetry and novelty. So an encounter with an opposing perspective, (or in Jungian terms: an encounter with a projection of shadow) because of the deep dualism of our cultural grammar, generally appears to us as a dualistic problem, ‘a’ vs ‘b’. There is a certain power in this; the tension; the difference; the potential. If we can prevent either side from fully prevailing and crushing out the other, then tension can be held, which produces a kind of surplus in energy, and the apparent duality then complexifies along all available axes and becomes multidimensional in the extreme. We might also note that within the context of a chess game, a myopic focus on one’s own plans leads inevitably to one’s demise; a great deal of care and attention must be paid to understanding the other in order to avoid collapse.
Metaphysical pedants adequately perplexed, let us, for the sake of those who have no taste for such abstruse and abstract wonderings, get back to ‘reality’: In times of crisis such as this one, what do we have to gain by grasping at this? What is the benefit of having a more Jungian concept of Self, or a more postmodern view of the world? I’ve argued that a postmodern/Jungian mindset should not be one of simple ambivalent, agnostic nihilism, rather one of active engagement of and with the other, a spirit of inclusivity of the uncomfortable, and a willingness to develop a relationship to uncertainty and the unknown which transcends the anxious or nihilistic responses which appear to be the current default settings. This moment is a call for an expansion of the tension we are able to hold across the board; both personally and collectively. The basic requirement here is know thyself. In that moment when we feel ourselves becoming swept up in narrative, we need a cognitive faculty which prevents the collapse into false certainty, which can only be gained by ongoing self examination. Left unexplored and untended, the garden of our prejudices and cognitive biases can grow with such voracity that it becomes a tangled, thorny and dreadful place which we fear to go. But we need to get in there and untangle the mess that grows outside the carefully maintained borders of our awareness, tame it insofar as we honestly can, and become comfortable to sit there.
To put it more directly, let me give some examples; for every threat of an authoritarian dystopia, there is a possibility of the blossoming of a new paradigm, and the fact that both can be imagined, means that neither will exist without interference by the potentialities (and actualities) of the other. For every curtain twitching busybody who informs on their neighbours, there is a good samaritan building strong links in the local community, but the story of coronavirus is the story of both, and if we lean unduly towards one, we deceive ourselves and estrange ourselves from reality. If one hopes that neoliberalism will finally collapse and make way for an economic system which is not built upon a veritable haunted burial ground of nonsense assumptions (for example) then that hope must be held in tension with the despair that it is casting shadow over; that things might actually get worse, not better, that the wealth gap might get wider, not narrower, and that any significant changes to economic systems will necessarily only come about in the wake of a great deal of trauma which we are not yet prepared to face. If we hope or fear that any particular thing will come to pass, then we should be careful to watch ourselves, lest that hope or fear become a belief to be held onto dogmatically. Dogma is both a magnet for and a generator of bullshit and we would do well to recognise the subtlety with which it operates as an ordinary function of our cognition, not requiring the interference of the overarching structures which are typically associated with it; organised religion and political ideology.
All the above are examples of narratives which seem to want to tell the whole story, but in these uncertain times, are actually better thought of as fragmented realities and potentialities, which just have a tendency to inflate themselves into all consuming totalities when left to their own devices, delivering us into the waiting arms of false certainty. The problem with false certainty, other than the obvious fact that it removes us from reality, is that it cannot remain unchallenged and intact for very long and is generally replaced (via something akin to the Kubler-Ross 5 stages of grief) with yet more uncertainty. Being convinced by bullshit is not even a good strategy for avoiding uncertainty as it always leads back to more uncertainty, and this can become a self reinforcing loop which moves people gradually towards the world of conspiracy and delusion. When our modernist sensibilities define our relationship to uncertainty as one of profound anxiety, we become entrapped in a landscape of limited possibility, and get stuck in cycles of psychological avoidance, forced to spend life ever on the lookout for the next false certainty, like a frog that is just slightly too heavy for the lily pads in its pond, hopping from one to the next just before it sinks into the water. Like this absurd and overweight frog though, we can seem to forget that we know how to swim, and sinking below the surface might actually be quite invigorating.
The Perils of Mass-Mindedness, and the Postmodern Man in Search of a Soul
“Under the influence of scientific assumptions, not only the psyche but the individual … all individual events whatsoever suffer a levelling down and a process of blurring … Instead of the concrete individual you have the names of organizations and, at the highest point, the abstract idea of the State as the principle of political reality … Apart from the agglomeration of huge masses in which the individual disappears anyway, one of the chief factors responsible for psychological mass-mindedness is scientific rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity.”
(C.G. Jung 1957 CW 10 par499/501)
The next parallel I want to draw is between Lyotard’s notion of “meta-narratives” and Jung’s description of “mass-mindedness”. The aspects that they share can be illuminated by first recognising a shared motivation on the part of the writers, namely the disastrous events which characterised the first half of the twentieth century. I do not want to claim the sole motivation of either to have been purely a reactionary urge to provide a cautionary tale in the face of the horrors of their period, and nor do I want to spend our time ringing the totalitarian alarm bell just for the sake of it. But though much has been written and spoken about the dangers of authoritarianism in relation to C-19, most tends to focus on the external view of the systems and institutions; an approach which is somewhat out of step with the Jungian/postmodern ‘values’ and practices that have been articulated here so far, which have also demanded personal and psychological bases. Obviously the former type of analysis is valuable and necessary, I merely suggest that without an individual, psychological and grass-roots-social level understanding to accompany it, it remains unbalanced. In times of rapid (socio)cultural/(geo)political change, the individual psyche can easily become vulnerable to infringements on its sovereignty. As national identity is evoked through declarations of ‘wartime mentality’, and ‘we’re all in this together’, there is a danger that the individual can become deprioritised, and gradually sink into the collective, as the needs of the collective become of greater and greater importance. Such a process is described both by Lyotard and Jung, each with their own contrasting angle:
“Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. Everything has become relative and therefore doubtful. And while man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates a world that is distracted by treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, with democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and bolshevism his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty”
(C.G. Jung 1933 CW 10 par177 [italics mine])
“The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.”
(J.F. Lyotard 1982 “What is Postmodernism?”)
These two quotes, despite all that occurred in the 49 years that separate them, both issue a similar warning to us today. In 1933 Jung cautions against a yearning for certainty. He notices that “modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his medieval brother” and believed our adoption of “material welfare, security and humanitarianism” to be inadequate replacements, suggesting that “every step forward in material ‘progress’ steadily increases the threat of a still more stupendous catastrophe”. (C.G. Jung 1933 CW 10 par 163) Lyotard offers a similar message, noting the coming to fruition of what Jung seemed to dread; “we have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole”. By 1982 the world looked quite different, less was by then left to the imagination, and we can see Lyotard articulating the beginnings of an approach which was not available to Jung: “Let us wage war on totality”. I dislike Lyotard’s invocation of the war metaphor, as I think it risks implying a new meta-narrative of its own, (one in which the postmodern era is ‘defined’ by a great battle against modernism’s ‘ideals’) but in general I like the framing of the problem within a call to action. If we allow Lyotard some poetic licence, we can tap into the power of his metaphor. We might interpret this as an attempt to reframe uncertainty, such that instead of anxiously seeking its collapse into singular and false narratives, we reinterpret it as a liminal, somatic and emotional indicator of being in right relationship to the world and learn to live with it.
The under-mining of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ is, contrary to what many fans of enlightenment values seem to believe, an inexorable step in the development of the western mind, and is not best thought of as a simple proposition that the postmodernists are arguing for. Rather its a phenomenon that the postmodernists have noticed. A certain amount of moral and intellectual relativism is the result of the breakdown of modern ways of thinking and being in the face of an undeniable (blatantly obvious, even) presence of a pluralistic world, complex beyond imagining. This developmental process need not be as painful as it might be, that is, if our aim is to heal, grow and develop rather than to win. Just as the analyst creates a safe(ish) arena for the relativisation of the ego to occur, so that the client is able to redefine the ego as but one aspect of Self, so we as individuals have the potential to create the conditions for the safe and mature relativisation of the mighty (yet fragile) inheritance that modernity has given us, through decentralisation of knowledge, power, and care. This process would, I suggest, go easier if we find a way to undergo it with gratitude and an open heart, with the care and healing intention of the therapist also guiding our demeanour. The bedside manor of the postmodernist critiques of modernism’s ‘achievements’ and ‘possibilities’ all too often leaves a lot to be desired.
Lyotard’s call for a war on totality, though problematic, matches the urgency which C-19 is thrusting upon us, but Jung suggests that changes to the social structure are reflective of the psychic state of individuals in society, and invokes the gradual, developmental, organic metaphor of the trees which grow not down from the sky, “but upward, from the earth”. So we find that though there is a parallel here, there is not a unity. There is tension, and so the question becomes; how to hold it? Can you wage a war by growing as the trees?
It seems that now is the appropriate moment for another clarification of what is meant by this notion of “holding the tension”, which we can elaborate by naming some other things which it is not. It’s not Hegelian dialectic, and it’s not Integral Meta Theory. That is to say, it’s not always a matter of synthesis between opposed poles. A postmodern approach demands that we do not presuppose symmetry between knowledge and experience, between subject and object, or between competing ideas, which would serve to justify and permit an attempt to create a higher order integration between them. Roger Scruton aptly describes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as displaying a “rage for order”, and the extent to which we live in a neo-Kantian world is also (but not exclusively) the extent to which we have internalised this obsession with symmetry. I’m not saying that Kant, Hegel or Ken Wilbur were wrong, to do so would be even more absurd than to claim that they were ‘right’, and yet in a general sense, there is something which seems to me damaging and innately essentializing about this urge to unify and make whole disparate elements, demanding that the intelligible order be revealed to us; searching frantically for the place to stand from which the view of things is neat and tidy and without loose ends. Nature simply does not appear to be fundamentally like that.
The overarching teleology of modernity, its holy grail, is the “grand unifying theory”; the ultimate integration and definition of everything into a single graspable theoretical model. A place outside of the universe to stand, from which we can see it, in all its predictable, symmetrical simplicity; certainty, unity, totality. If you’re a hyper-cognitive intellectual type with an appetite for abstraction and systematisation, this is the ultimate high stakes game. The power of any genuine discovery or reliably predictive theory can be immense. But the outcome of dogmatically focusing on symmetry, synthesis, or integration is often a theory which withdraws from the world proportionally as it reveals it to us. Desire for a theory which describes all of experience results generally in an exclusion of that which refuses to fit the theory and an resultant unjustified impoverishment of it. Maybe the nature of confirmation bias is such that it manifests in forms that match the nuance and complexity of the theory that it distorts, and does not discriminate based on intelligence. Maybe the entropy of the universe is such that systematic explanations of its functionality just tell us less and less about its being the more accurate they become- who can say?
To get back down to earth: You can’t generate a higher order synthesis of hope and fear. You can’t integrate love and hate. Lao Tzu was not interested in a grand unification of Yin and Yang. The ground level of our being; the actual pre linguistic moment; the immediate lived experience of the now- cannot be reduced to a finite set of graspable patterns or encoded into a collection of propositions, and efforts to do so generally ‘succeed’ by redefining the borders of the sphere of importance, until what it centres around is something which can be described propositionally, yet does not include everything that is important. So how is what I’m doing here any different? Maybe it isn’t, but my hope is that I’ve avoided attempts to synthesise Modernism, postmodernism and analytical psychology, circumvented the temptation to become obsessive over definitions, and tried to keep grounding the ideas in the real experience (my real experience) of the current moment. So I will conclude on a personal note.
Throughout this essay I’ve been resisting using words like “faith”, “spirit” and “soul”, because in my head, I’ve wanted this to be something of an academic exercise, something which I have not ever attempted before, and I have carried throughout, an unspoken fear of being exposed as someone with no academic background, no credentials, and no authority whatsoever. But look, at the end of the day my motivation for writing this has been deeply personal, and in that spirit, here’s what I’m saying:
I have felt the modern values inside me being called into doubt. I can sense the diminishment of my old ways of thinking and being. It has been painful. I’ve noticed my certainty break down again and again, and I’ve noticed how clinging to theory becomes like an addiction, gradually alienating me from the many other realties which also constitute the world. Inevitably, it has been much easier to see these flaws in others than it has in myself, which has made the process somewhat emotionally and socially testing, for me and, no doubt, for some of those around me. Nonetheless it has been necessary to leap from lily pad to lily pad like our friend the deluded frog, until at last none remain, no certainty is left intact, and the cool relief of surrender is allowed to enter in. At the same time I can witness these processes taking place externally, thrown now into stark relief by C-19. Modernity lurches about like a drunk old man on a sinking cruise ship, grasping for something solid to hold on to, but without the strength to grip anything tightly for very long, and instead of helping, many of the postmodern adolescents point, laugh, take selfies, criticise the outdated design of the boat, and the corrupted hierarchical power structure of its crew, as if not realising that they are on board the same vessel, and are going down along with everybody else.
There is an existential crisis ongoing externally, and so there will likely be one to match within our psyches. Crucially though, the sinking ship in the metaphor does not necessarily represent the fullness of civilisation itself. It represents the limitations of our current ways of life; the dynamic of competitive narrative spinning, our deluded search for certainty, and our strange quest to find the womb like embrace of complete unity. This is what is collapsing, both internally and externally, for me anyway. Civilisation grieves for the death of its illusion of stable objective knowledge, and on some level that grief is reflected in our conflicted psyches. Look around at the various cultural commentators and ask yourself: What stage of grief for lost certainty might they be in? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are all on show.
So there is a symmetry here, but, and this is important- it’s not a static, underlying eternal principle, it’s an equivalence of relationship. It’s an ongoing reciprocity with the world made possible by a willingness to swim in the oceans of uncertainty. It’s a kind of faith which which emerges as a result of the held tension between opposites, the current of energy which only flows when uninterrupted by ‘certainty’. The reason I’m convinced enough to write a 10,000 word article which few people will read about this faith, is that it is deeply grounding, at the level of being; to be fitted in this way to the world, unbearably complex and catastrophic as it might sometimes feel. As Jon Vervaeke has eloquently put it, faith is best conceived as “not a wilful assertion of a proposition, [but] a cultivated sense of having a participatory conformity with an ongoing transformative process in reality. It’s continuity of contact rather than closure into conclusion.”
I hope it’s clear that I’m not making an individualist argument; this is not just “clean your room” with little help from Dr Jung. No. It is true that I don’t know the right way to scale this up to a program of recommendations for society, but I have tried throughout to acknowledge that we have collective problems to solve and that they urgently require collective action such that a myopic focus on the individual is wholly inadequate in the face of imminent cascading systems failure and the obvious degradation of our modern institutions. Still I believe it to be a valid assertion that most people have a great deal more access to their own individual psyche and ‘spirit’ than they do the systems which govern the wider world. It might be true that waiting for a tree to grow up from the ground is not an adequately rapid strategy, yet it is perhaps more definitely true that they do not grow downwards from the sky. So it might be true that waiting for a new mature postmodernity to emerge gradually as individuals find ways to healthily internalise and embody it might not be a rapid enough strategy for bringing about the kind of systemic changes that we need. Yet it is perhaps more definitely true that expecting the gatekeepers of modernist power to relent in their efforts to protect the old ways will take even longer. Regardless of this dichotomy, I maintain (and hope to have shown) that we can find valuable insights by examining Jung and the postmodernists, using both as lenses to refocus and reframe the other.
I have probably tried to cover too much ground and yet also not enough, so I will simply conclude by thanking you very deeply for your patience and curiosity. Stay safe, be well, wash your hands, get to know your neighbours and make friends also with uncertainty. It’s the most reliable friend you could have, and Jung’s not a bad person to have around in times like this either.
“In speaking of the spiritual problem of [post]modern man we can at most frame a question, and we should perhaps frame it quite differently if we had but the faintest inkling of what answer the future will give. The question, moreover, seems rather vague; but the truth is that it has to do with something so universal that it exceeds the grasp of any single individual. We have reason enough, therefore, to approach such a problem in all modesty and with great caution. This open avowal of our limitations seems to me essential, because it is these problems more than any others which tempt us to the use of high-sounding and empty words”
(C.G. Jung, 1933 CW10 par 148 [bracketed text added])
