Jordan Peterson is not Jungian
Part One: The Archetypal Worldview — A Myriad of Misapprehension
“No language exists that cannot be misused. It is hard to realise how badly we are fooled by the abuse of ideas. … Every interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.”
C.G. Jung — Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933
Introduction
When Jung wrote this, he was actually speaking directly about the difficulties of interpreting dreams, comparing the task to that of reading an unfamiliar text. But what is uncovered by this metaphor (as is utterly characteristic of his writing in general) is also the truth of the inverse proposition: that reading an unfamiliar text is as difficult as understanding the irrational imagery of a dream. Both tasks are of interpretation and our conclusions will be distorted by the preconceptions that we arrive at the task with. The relationships in a piece of text between the different words and grammar actually represent a complexity that is ultimately not (in its fullness) consciously knowable, even to its author, let alone to us lowly readers.
When we approach a text, we have to simplify the task, and so the machinery of cognitive biases and heuristics that we use for such endeavours will run riot, as they are designed to do. Or to put that in something closer to Jung’s terminology, we cannot help but project our unconscious contents into whatever materials we are trying to analyse. That part of us which lives below the threshold of conscious awareness will show up in the idiosyncrasies of our unique interpretation, and being unaware of that part of ourselves, we will assume its effect to be innate, objective or simply “plainly obvious”, regardless of its questionable heuristic value or actual proximity to objective reality.
Jung would have known very well that his own work would not be immune to this perennial problem. He fought against misreadings on multiple fronts during his life and would have been aware of many of the abuses his work would suffer after his death. So we have to start this piece by acknowledging that nobody (myself included) can be assumed to be above this. But don’t worry, Peterson fans, this isn’t the eradication of all “hierarchies of competence”. In fact, what we are here to do is examine the different perspectives on Jung that exist, question their relative value and the competence of their creators and adherents. The point being, not all interpretations of Jung’s words are created equal. The interpretations that I will present here to contrast with Peterson’s are inescapably my own, which is to say that not all Jungians and Post-Jungians would agree with all of my conclusions. But I think it is fair to say that almost none of them would wholeheartedly endorse very many of Peterson’s at all.
Peterson generally talks about Jung as if there is a consensus among Jungians, which he is privy to and in alignment with. Unfortunately this is not the case. Jungians come in all shapes and sizes, they disagree about interpretation and emphasis often, and they take differing approaches to analysis. There are, at this point in time, at least three distinct schools of Jungian analysis, as well as a diverse field of scholarship that exists outside the confines of the treatment room. I cannot, without writing a whole book about it, cover each subject of this discussion with an exhaustive overview of each perspective. But I will at least here acknowledge the plurality of opinion that exists within the diverse field of Jungian expertise, which really is more than Peterson ever does.
Another point that presents itself immediately is that most contemporary interpreters begin by noting the biases, confusions and imperfections of Jung both as an individual and as a writer. There simply is no avoiding the fact that Jung lived in a time when culture was organised according to values which we have long since come to see as oppressive and unjust. There is no simple way to exonerate Jung’s attitudes towards women, people of non-heteronormative sexual orientations, various different races. Often his use of language that was merely technical in his own time can seem frankly abusive according to our current values and standards, and the well informed reader can make allowances for this. But even so, if we are to apply Jungian theory in the current social landscape with any degree of efficacy, we cannot shirk the ethical responsibility to adequately factor for the prejudices present in his work that were arising from his now outdated cultural situation. For the sake of brevity, I will not fill this essay with correctives and apologies, but will prefer instead to try and offer a version of the Jungian concepts that is not itself regressive. Again, this will serve as an example to the reader of what a responsible treatment of Jung’s work looks like in contrast to what Peterson tends to offer.
Peterson’s version of the Jungian story has a particular emphasis on the hero myth, on the development of a healthy relationship to aggression, and on the “proper relationship between male and female”. Those who would seek an understanding of Jung should know that whilst these are facets of Jung’s psychology and subjects that he dealt with in some detail and depth, the singular and simple way in which they are typically presented by Peterson is most often inadequate and can be misleading. This essay will seek to justify that claim and to describe and make viable a more nuanced and complete version of the relevant Jungian concepts. Some of Peterson’s ideas about Jung will have to be challenged outright, whereas for others it will be possible to simply re-situate them within a more appropriately encompassing frame. Peterson’s and Jung’s ideas cannot always get along. When they can, I will endeavour to make it so. When they can’t, I will endeavour to be fair and precise in describing why not.
I know that many people have strong feelings one way or another about Jordan Peterson. I’m not going to label him a bigot or paint him as a simple charlatan. These types of attacks are reductive and more importantly, they don’t actually speak to anyone who admires Peterson. For my part there was a time in my life when I found his message both compelling and useful. But no intellectual should be elevated beyond critique, and to many of his followers, Peterson has attained and been allowed to retain this guru like status (whether or not he seeks or desires it). There are many reasons for this: his considerable rhetorical power; his ability to shrug off hostile interviewers and make them look frankly stupid for challenging him; the fact that he speaks to our brokenness, our resentment, our fallibility; the unusual and brutally honest evaluation of the human condition that he articulates so persuasively and with evident real emotion; the opportunity for the transformation of suffering through catharsis into responsibility and incremental improvement that he offers.
Peterson’s deepest motivations are, I believe, well encapsulated within this segment of a talk he gave in 2017.
His willingness to stare into the void and confront humanity’s dark side, as well as affording a genuine opportunity for personal growth, also makes his arguments resistant to any critique which takes a more naively optimistic or one sided view of the human, as he always appears to have the argument of: you have not seen the darkness as I have, you lack the strength to acknowledge the true potential for mayhem that lurks in every human, you have not integrated your shadow and your arguments therefore represent projection rather than reality. These arguments appear in part to stem from Peterson’s understanding, such as it is, of Jung. But whether or not Jung would wholeheartedly endorse very many of Peterson’s broader claims is (at least) debatable and (to my mind) highly doubtful.
I hope it’s clear already that I’m not here simply to make another misguided attempt to tear down the reputation of Jordan Peterson. But neither am I going to let him off the hook by taking his words about Jung at face value. Peterson’s reading of Jung is inadequate for those seeking a proper understanding of Jung’s work. Rather than explaining or even describing Jungian ideas in appropriate depth or detail, Peterson rather borrows partial fragments from Jung in order to justify the moral, ontological and metaphysical claims that he himself wishes to make for his own reasons.
Untangling one from the other is not an easy task, because both Jung and Peterson present themselves as both scientists and spiritual guides. Both attempt to navigate the tension between rational and irrational, between the phenomenology of religion and the empiricism of science, between the world of facts and realm of the archetypal. Both are prone to moments of intense clarity set against (particularly in Jung’s case) a backdrop of dense obscurity. Both are wounded healers, tortured by inner conflict and troubling religious or spiritual experience, which ultimately forms the basis of their vocational motivation, and a large part of their appeal. But here the similarities more or less end, because the precise way in which the two of them go about their work differs in apparently subtle but ultimately fundamental and often irreconcilable ways.
This will be a four part series of essays. In this first part I will begin by examining (1) the misconstrual of Jung’s archetypal worldview as causally deterministic, which leads Peterson to mistakenly view Jung as making an essentially biological argument. Then in part two we will examine (2) Peterson’s thoughts on sex, gender and gender archetypes and their consistency with his misapprehensions about archetypes (and thus their inconsistency with related Jungian ideas) outlined in the previous essay. Thirdly we will listen to (3) what Peterson has to say about shadow integration and note his constant and singular focus on aggression and why this is an incomplete picture. Last of all we will examine (4) the misreading of the hero myth as a straightforward template for Jungian individuation, through which Peterson unwittingly mirrors the mistakes of interpretation perpetuated by the New Age and spiritual but not religious (SBNR) “movements”.
Note: It would also be good to examine Peterson’s obsession with discrediting Postmodern philosophers such as Jaques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and discuss ways in which Jung can actually be seen as an important node in a network of precursors to postmodern philosophy, rather than the simple champion of late Modernism that Peterson casually paints him to be. I can wholeheartedly recommend Christopher Hauke’s book, Jung and the Postmodern and if it seems that there is a demand, I will happily write another article in the future examining the relationships between Peterson, Jung and postmodernism more specifically.
Whilst my task here is, in part, to clear up confusion around Jungian ideas that I see Peterson as partly causing, I’m really not here primarily to construct a critique of Peterson. Rather I hope that these first four parts will give the reader a thoughtful and considered grounding in Jung that is not only more accurate than the one offered by Peterson, but also more flexible and apt to serve the reader who wants to know what Jung genuinely has to offer those who would examine the present moment and look forward through a Jungian lens, or those who would appreciate perhaps a more open-ended, “metamodern” (if you like that word) presentation of Jungian ideas which might otherwise be hard to come across. There will be times when I lay out a direct critique of Peterson’s approach, but in general I hope that these four parts will be of an educational and mind-opening nature, and the vast majority of my critique will be delivered implicitly, or as a byproduct of a genuine attempt to grapple more deeply with Jung.
1. The Archetypal Worldview
The first step in this process will be to understand what goes wrong when people, including (but definitely not limited to) Peterson encounter Jungian ideas. A good start will be to keep in mind this telling observation from prominent post-Jungian, Andrew Samuels:
“Language affects understanding and understanding underpins language. The main problem with the language of Jung … is that one is tempted to reify it — that is to render as concrete, literal and actual that which is shifting, fluid and experiential, for example, the unconscious.”
Andrew Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985 (emphasis his)
Perhaps the most commonly misapprehended and most fundamental aspect of Jungian psychology is Jung’s theory of archetypes. My suggestion is that Peterson’s reading of Jung is both symptomatic and emblematic of this error. But before we arrive directly at any more detailed comments about Peterson, we need to build up a picture of the broader landscape of problematic bullshit that the world of popular Jungianism is flooded with.
I’ll include this image below to show exactly the kind of problem that we face:
Contrary to the types of approaches exemplified above, Jung’s concept of archetypes can and should be very challenging to understand. The matter is indeed not helped by the fact that there are a dazzling array of poor interpretations that are readily and far more cheaply (cognitively speaking) available than Jung’s own. That is to say, it requires much less work to find and assimilate a simplistic conception of Jung’s archetypes than it does to wade through the murky swamp of Jung’s own writing and triangulate what he actually means after painstakingly attempting to understand the different angles of approach that he himself takes.
Before we even begin to say anything about what archetypes are or what they are like, please take this in: Archetypes are not the names we give to them. They are not the mythological characters we associate with them. They are fundamentally irrepresentable, and so the first thing we must do is cast out the lazy notion that we can create a deck of cards with their names, pictures and lists of their attributes printed on them. Such things may well have some applications in the realms of Jung-adjacent personal development. But an archetype is not something you can buy, nor own, nor have in any way. What we have are partially conscious complexes that are formed as a result of dynamic interplay between the archetypal form, our own agency and will, and the sociocultural context that we inhabit. In this sense archetypes are not really encounterable or discoverable, but rather only inferable through the observation of correlation between multiple phenomenological accounts of psychosomatic experience of different kinds. This, specifically, is what is meant by empiricism within the field of Jungian Analytical Psychology.
Neither is an archetype is something one should aspire to be, to identify with, or to embody. They are not resources. To the extent that they can be said to be “found”, they are “located” in the unconscious, which is “a negative entity, a ‘not-something’, an absence, a lack, and not the rather concretised entity that depth psychology is always referring to as if it were a something” (C. Hauke, Jung and the Postmodern, 2000). We’re supposing the existence of archetypes “within” a non-domain which is fundamentally not “there” in any material sense. So let’s not jump the gun and think that we know too much about them, even if we have been shown a cognitively misleading graphic like this one before:
An archetype is an “unknowable nucleus that ‘never was conscious and never will be’” (Samuels, 1985 Quoting C.G. Jung CW 9i para 266). Obviously we are human beings with human psyches, and we like to anthropomorphise (or brand) things so that we can [a] attempt to understand them and [b] feel comfortable thinking about them. But the presence of anthropomorphic descriptions like “wise old man” are really only useful insofar as reification is conscientiously avoided. That is a rather specific way of saying that metaphors and heuristics become less useful the more we perceive them to be literal. The literalisation of metaphors, the mistaking of maps for territory, the confusion between our understanding of a thing and the thing itself, the concretisation of the relational and amorphous into the static and final, this is what is meant by reification and we all need to watch out for ourselves doing it. When it comes to Jung it is all too easy to pick up on the aspects of his work that speak to the universal and eternal, and miss the equally important aspects of fluidity and constant potential for metamorphosis. It is not one or the other, but the tension between the two that points us towards a good comprehension of the archetypal system.
In fairness to us bamboozled readers, Jung doesn’t exactly make understanding what he means by archetypes all that easy, because he says lots of different things about them without ever providing a systematic overview, an intelligible description of their precise location, or a neat and tidy explanation of their origins. Because of this, many people, including Peterson as well as a great many Jungians, adopt a de-facto Freudian/Darwinian position wherein the archetypes are explainable through evolutionary theory, and are located, as it were, in the genes. As Freud would put it, dream images and fantasies, insofar as they correlate across many different cases, should be approached and thought of as a “phylogenetic endowment”. This is one way of thinking of Jung’s archetypes, and you can certainly find plenty of phrases strewn around his collected works that make a similar implication. But we need to entertain the very real possibility that Jung was at pains to point out similarities between biology and psychology, not because they were all that important to his work, but because he was constantly fighting against being confined to the margins of the field of psychology by those in the vast majority who had adopted the Dominant Freudian/Darwinian mindset.
It is, shall we say, interesting, that such a substantial percentage of Jung’s readership pick up on the occasions where he alludes to similarities with biological behaviour patterns and start out on a brave search for the location of the archetypes, apparently able to ignore the hundreds and hundreds of statements that he makes which would seem to classify this endeavour as inappropriate, pointless and impossible.
Let us take one final metaphor that I believe will aid us in our understanding: the formation of snowflakes. We can imagine that the archetype of a snowflake is the precursor to all snowflakes. It is the underlying pattern of crystallisation that determines the possible character of every snowflake, without exception. The archetype clearly has immense power over the individual snowflake, but within the ineradicable boundaries of this power, there is an effectively infinite variety of meaningfully different forms that the snowflake can take. The common aspects shared by all manifestations of individual snowflakes will be determined by the crystallisation pattern, but the unique individuality of each one will be determined by context. Minute differences in air temperature, wind speed, humidity, altitude (and so on) interact with the crystallisation pattern to produce an unthinkable number of totally unique snowflakes. The commonality and individuality do not in any way negate one another. The archetype does not dictate the particularity of the snowflake just as the idiosyncrasy of the snowflake never invalidates the universality of the crystallisation pattern.
When we then seek to apply this metaphor, we must take into account that psyche is not quite so two-dimensional as a snowflake and in fact has untold degrees and modes of complexity to it that make it rather more tricky. But we can nonetheless talk about archetypes as if they are crystallisation patterns and complexes as if they are individual snowflakes.
A Non-Causal Determinism
At the end of his life, Jung published a paper called “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. The paper, along with a published series of letters between himself and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, really constitute the beginning of a project that is still yet to come to fruition. Perhaps it is for this reason that Peterson, along with many Jungians and post-Jungians don’t directly or thoroughly incorporate it into their reading of Jungian literature. But it is nonetheless a vital and clarifying aspect of his work, which is discernible in much of his previous writing once one knows what to look for.
“If causality is axiomatic, i.e., absolute, there can be no freedom. But if it is only a statistical truth, as is in fact the case, then the possibility of freedom exists.” ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 102.
The short version is this: When it comes to things in existence being connected, causality, though a valid and useful principle, is simply not the only game in town. Traceable chains of cause and effect stretching back through time certainly and obviously exist. Synchronicity though, as the name of Jung’s paper implies, is the idea that events can be meaningfully connected without there being any causal relationship connecting them.
“Synchronicity states that a certain psychic event is paralleled by some external non-psychic event and that there is no causal connection between them. It is a parallelism of meaning.”
C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 387
For the purposes of this essay and the task of comparing Jung and Peterson, the important aspect of Jung’s unfinished labours on synchronicity is this: Similarities between what might be considered “archetypal” in different fields such as psychology, biology, physics and philosophy, though they were often alluded to by Jung, are not best interpreted as indicative of causal connections, but rather synchronistic connections; parallelisms of meaning, arising everywhere and everywhen and in different fields of research not because one thing necessarily leads to another with some sort of materialistic and mechanical inevitability, but because everything that exists inexorably does so in meaningful relationship to the unreachable, irrepresentable archetypal forms.
Jung’s psychology is perhaps then best thought about as archetypally deterministic. That is to say, the psyche is characterised by a-priori modes of human experience, but those archetypes, being properly understood (in the manner of a crystallisation pattern) as forms without content, leave room for an effectively infinite amount of individual difference to arise within their boundaries. Richard Tarnas puts it very well when he says that
“It seems to be specifically the multivalent potentiality that is intrinsic to the(…) archetypes — their dynamic indeterminacy — that opens up ontological space for human being’s full co-creative participation in the unfolding of individual life, history, and the cosmic process. It is just this combination of archetypal multivalence and an autonomous participatory self that engenders the possibility of a genuinely open universe.
Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 2006
Where It Goes Wrong
If we want an archetypal system that is flexible and open-ended enough to be useful in a post/metamodern sociocultural landscape, then a good way to go about it might be to build it upon the presupposition that whilst it is true that events must have causes, it should not be assumed that all correlations must be explainable in terms of causation, even though it is perfectly obvious that most of them are. This is, I believe, more than adequately aligned with Jung’s own work. Obviously this has huge implications for the question of free will: Namely that yes there is a computational, causally deterministic aspect to reality, and yes this is a valid way to approach the world. But this aspect of reality is encompassed within (or otherwise in some kind of meaningful partnership with) an archetypal backdrop which, though it discernibly colours and characterises our relationship to meaning, leaves a great deal of room for choice on the part of the individual, and for the obvious influence of sociocultural factors.
Peterson’s reading of Jung starts to go wrong when he seeks to understand the origin and location of archetypes, without properly making the distinction between the synchronistic and the causal. Look. It may well be that archetypes are somehow transmitted into our psychological experience via the genes, but the point is that we will never find them there. They will not be discovered because they are, by definition undiscoverable. It’s interesting that despite Peterson’s criticisms of materialists and atheists like Sam Harris, he nonetheless seems to believe that archetypes are something to be discovered and that matter is the appropriate place to look for them.
“Science can only establish the existence of (…) psychic factors and attempt a rationalistic explanation by offering a hypothesis as to their source. This, however, only thrusts the problem a stage further back without solving the riddle. We thus come to those ultimate questions: Where does consciousness come from? What is the psyche? At this point science ends.”
(C.G. Jung CW11 p533)
Thus, if we want to do good psychology, especially Jungian psychology, then we must acknowledge that feeling ourselves to be in possession of too a purely physicalist, biological theory will only blind us to realities that exist in spite of it. If, as Peterson does, we follow this trail of theoretical suppositions to its logical end point, we end up concluding that the validity of phenomenological experience is to be judged according to how well it matches up to our theories about the psyche. Then we are just a hop, a skip and a jump away from dragging our concretised archetypes into the political arena, demanding that the social world reflect them, precisely as Peterson does. Some may find this ironic, given Peterson’s constant bemoaning of those who think they can remake the world. But it is, in fact, to be expected, as will be elaborated when we come to talk about shadow in part three of this series.
“Theories in psychology are the very devil. It is true that we need certain points of view for their orienting and heuristic value: but they should always be regarded as mere auxiliary concepts that can be laid aside at any time.”
C.G. Jung, CW v17 para. 7
The Problem of Archetypes as Political Ammunition
It’s important to draw this distinction between causal and archetypal determinism because it immediately clears up a critique that is often levelled (wrongly) at Jung and (fairly) at Peterson and thus gives us a concrete basis upon which to begin to draw a distinction.
Jung’s archetypal system, because it is often wrongly construed as causally deterministic, can be very unpopular with people of a socially progressive mindset. Those who would seek to improve the lot of humanity through social reform would often prefer it if nothing too significant about human beings were predetermined. If humans are born blank slates (or close to it), then suffering must arise from context (i.e. culture and society) and we can therefore reduce suffering by altering that context. Because the majority of people have not the capacity for discernment that allows for a distinction between causal determinism and archetypal determinism, any mention of a-priori, predetermined aspects of the psyche are often immediately seen as an ideological rallying cry for conservatism.
Peterson, conversely, sees this progressive, blank-slate type argument argument very simply as the basis for a descent into authoritarianism and he has picked his battle here. Many followers of Peterson may have been led to believe that Jung stands beside him ready to do battle in the war against “postmodern neo-marxists”. But despite Peterson’s self proclaimed vendetta against ideologies in general, his position here does, in fact, represent an implicitly ideological argument. Peterson basically argues for neo-liberal, growth-based economy with minimal government interference and conservative approach to social policy and values. This does not constitute an absence of ideology. When Peterson argues against ideology, he’s arguing against what John Vervaeke has called Pseudo-Religious Ideologies like Stalinist or Maoist Communism or Nazism.
Jung would certainly share Peterson’s distaste for these pseudo religious ideologies of the 20th century, but even as early as 1954 he also declared his concern for the state of the great American “West” in a moment of typically grim prophecy. Describing what he saw as the “utterly inhuman form of American life” (Conversations with C.G. Jung p35) he noted an obvious faustian hunger for mechanical prowess and an “overvaluation of ‘scientifically’ attested views” leading to a cultural situation in which the individual “loses all capacity for introspection” and “looks to the State for salvation” despite all proud declarations of a fierce and untameable individualism (R. Main, The Rupture of Time, 2004).
Suffice it here to say that it is not at all clear that Jung would share Peterson’s vision of “the West” given his pre-emptive and prophetic appraisal of its psychological state in the mid-twentieth century, and everything that has come to pass in the 70 or so years since. Speculation aside, the fact would remain that an appropriately open ended and contemporarily relevant reading of Jung must seriously grapple with the many problematic elements of Western culture and politics; must integrate the insights of postmodernism; must speak to the fragmentation of social fabric; must exist meaningfully in this cultural moment, and have the capacity to move with us forwards into an increasingly uncertain future, not look back longingly at a past that we had no choice but to leave behind.
If, as Peterson does, we wrongly interpret archetypes to be causally deterministic; as inexorably causing human psychology and behaviour to have certain predictable characteristics, then it becomes very easy for critics to dismiss the archetypal system as little more than a regressive psychological basis of conservative and right wing political positions. There are those who would see Jung as a dangerous thinker, providing (as he apparently does) a psycho-spiritual framework that reinforces traditional gender roles, outdated views on race, sexuality and so on. In fairness to these critics, Jung, was a white, Western man living in early 20th century Switzerland, and he did often exhibit the typical prejudices of that time and place. It is fair to criticise Jung himself on this basis and we do need to be skilled in factoring for his own biases if we are to read him well in our own time.
But it would be foolish to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because the archetypal system that he developed simply does not support the position of causally deterministic essentialism. And furthermore, its very basis is in plurality; in the validation, celebration and search for deep understanding and inclusion of cultural, spiritual, mythic and psychological themes that by definition transcend borders. A psychology that rests upon an archetypal system is not a ball and chain that says everybody must be more or less the same fundamentally speaking — because archetypes are not concrete. To assume that they are is like assuming that all cups contain coffee or, to return to our earlier example, that all snowflakes are identical.
In not grasping this, many left leaning critics may already mistakenly think that contemporary Jungians would seek to usher in a dogmatic return to the moral code of the Enlightenment. Where in reality the larger percentage of the Jungian community is quite willing to accept that postmodernism/metamodernism was/is/are not ideological movements so much as an unavoidable cultural paradigms and adapt themselves, their work, and their interpretations of Jung to the current time. After all
“The bonds of social conditioning have weakened considerably since Jung’s death in 1961, and since then we have seen a series of social revolutions that have shown that what looked like fixed reality is now viewed as social conditioning.”
(David Tacey, How to Read Jung, 2006)
If Jung is to be useful to us in navigating the world that we find ourselves in today, we will have to take up a pluralistic and integrative approach to interpreting him. If we can do this, then simple critiques of Jung as a regressive chauvinist can be righteously circumvented. But Peterson instead reinforces this issue drastically by doing precisely what these progressive critics of Jung would (misguidedly) predict. When labelled a “biological essentialist”, Peterson basically laughs off the critique on the basis that biological phenomena are real and that it would be utterly foolish to not assume a causal connection between them and psychological or social phenomena (this will be particularly relevant and further explicated when we talk about sex, gender and the gender archetypes).
Peterson’s Archetypal/Biological Morality
To Peterson, the causal connections between different domains (archetypal, biological, psychological, sociocultural) are essentially presupposed. That is to say that even when evidence is sketchy or absent, his thought is guided by their apparent probability and he finds ways to make connections based on what seems to him like common sense. “Assume continuity” he says, on very many occasions “unless there is evidence to the contrary”. This might be a fine Jungian statement, if Peterson grasped the distinction between the causal and the archetypal, and put statements like this in the appropriate context. Assume synchronistic continuity. Assume that it is best to pay attention to parallelisms of meaning. But he doesn’t. He conflates continuity with causality, and here is where the differences begin. In encountering Jung’s theory of archetypes, Peterson then thinks he is discovering evidence of a chain of cause and effect which then forms the basis of an absolute morality that plays itself out in nature and culture with a grinding mechanical certitude. The logic goes something like this:
If the world intrinsically rewards certain patterns of behaviour, and those patterns have been refined through causal chains of adaptation stretching endlessly back into the past, then by examining the apparent teleology of development as such, we can discover how we best ought to act, as that which is apparently built into the fabric of reality must be accorded proper respect. The pernicious behaviour of those whose actions are not in accord with these moral absolutes are doomed to move existence as a whole in the direction of depravity; towards hell.
Or in Peterson’s own words:
“I discovered that beliefs make the world, in a very real way — that beliefs are the world, in a more than metaphysical sense. This “discovery” has not turned me into a moral relativist, however: quite the contrary. I have become convinced that the world-that-is-belief is orderly: that there are universal moral absolutes (although these are structured such that a diverse range of human opinion remains both possible and beneficial). I believe that individuals and societies who flout these absolutes — in ignorance or in willful [sic] opposition — are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution.”
J.B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning, preface
Hopefully it is clear why this really is not in alignment with a thoughtful interpretation of Jung. After all, archetypes are not best approached as causal determinants. Archetypes colour and characterise, they don’t cause and define. Existence is bounded and delimited by them, not built by or constructed from them. The idea that they exist to provide an intelligible teleology or to indicate a moral preference is Petersonian, not Jungian. Many more specific differences (which I am resisting the temptation to refer to simply as errors) arise from this point, and which we will encounter in subsequent parts. For now we can simply look to Jung’s memoirs to discover the difference with Peterson’s sentiments:
“We must beware of thinking of good and evil as absolute opposites. The criterion of ethical action can no longer consist in the simple view that good has the force of a categorical imperative, while so-called evil can resolutely be shunned. Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole. (…) the contents of judgment are subject to the differing conditions of time and place and, therefore, take correspondingly different forms. For moral evaluation is always founded upon the apparent certitudes of a moral code which pretends to know precisely what is good and what evil. But once we know how uncertain the foundation is, ethical decision becomes a subjective, creative act.”
C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (emphasis added)
It would appear that Jung’s relationship to morality is rather more complicated than Peterson might choose to indicate. Furthermore, we can see here that, at least by the end of his life, Jung seems very open to the relativisation of morality that Peterson so heartily and consistently rejects.
Differences Rippling Outwards
Jung’s own emphasis on and obsession with everything mythological and religious; with the gnostic and alchemical traditions; with the various lineages of prophetic and mystical thought and practice — all unrestricted by a focus on a particular time in history or a particular cultural or geographic location — all this (as well as his lifelong commitment to his own introspective practice and investigation) can be seen (as James Hillman put it) as a training in service to the development of a particularly keen “archetypal eye”. Such an education was the necessary prerequisite for his psychology, because archetypes cannot be discerned using only a rational mind. Archetypes “speak” most often in the seemingly irrational language of symbols and coming to know anything about them thus requires a capacity for symbolic discernment. The inclusion of the non-rational into the meaning and sensemaking equation here is not an invitation to throw out precision, but a call to become skilled in another modality of it.
As will be detailed much more thoroughly in part two of this series, Peterson’s grounding is fundamentally and irreconcilably different than Jung’s own. He is preoccupied with statistical analyses of data sets gathered through self and peer report questionnaires, and with the biological origins of the behaviours and traits that those methodologies seek to measure. Like Jung, he is fascinated by religious and mythological modes of thinking and knowing, but unlike him, he seeks a causal (and thus explanatory) continuity between all these different sources of information.
“The so-called “scientific view of the world” … can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.” (C.G. Jung CW v8 pa821)
Peterson credits Jung with bringing about a “rapprochement between the intellect and the underlying religious archetypal substructure” but misunderstands the precise nature of the reconciliation. He is grateful to Jung for bringing “the religious domain and the factual domain were brought back together” but misapprehends Jung inasmuch as he sees him as finding space within the materialistic paradigm for religious experience to reside. Rather, Jung seeks to provide a deep challenge to that paradigm by expanding the boundaries of empiricism to include the non-material. Whereas Peterson takes the statistical models of personality to be the most reliable scientific understanding that we have and begins there, and his rapprochement involves attempts to synthesise the scientific and the mythic without significantly altering what insights the questionnaires have given us. There is a profound difference between these two approaches. Peterson seeks to discover a place within the science where the archetypes can be located, where Jung discovered evidence of the archetypes and demanded that our notion of science be flexible enough to admit their existence. Peterson wants to connect the dots, where Jung would prefer colour outside the lines.
Conclusions
Peterson can be seen to imply that Jung’s collected works constitute the basis of a universal and absolute theory that encompasses ontology and morality as well as psychology. But those who have the patience and capacity to read Jung’s works in depth soon find out that whilst universality and absolutism are unavoidably present, they do not simply constitute the foundations of a strict and unmovable theory. Jung’s collected works is rather strewn with individual case studies of human psychology; phenomenological reports analysed in great detail, following their own course to their own conclusions. Jung certainly was not free from preconceptions, and it is at this level that many of the apparent similarities between he and Peterson can be found. But Jung knew that if psychology were to become a science, its great obstacle would be to overcome the extreme subjectivity of all of its evidence. He sought to achieve this by putting to one side theoretical assumptions, including his own biases and prejudices. The generation of theoretical frameworks with broad and far reaching claims is simply not an appropriate goal for a science of the psyche (even if it is a somewhat inevitable byproduct of it).
“The psyche cannot leap beyond itself. It cannot set up any absolute truths, for its own polarity determines the relativity of its statements.”
(C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
Extrapolating such claims from other fields of inquiry (such as biology) is, for the same reason, not a properly Jungian strategy, but rather a Freudian one that is allowed, by virtue of its broad and deep cultural dissemination, to creep in by the back door. In this way Jung is domesticated, sanitised and thus granted a place at the margins of the rationalistic paradigm which his work, in reality, seeks to fundamentally undermine.
“Statements concerning possibility or impossibility are valid only in specialized fields; outside those fields they are merely arrogant presumptions.”
(ibid)
Where Peterson seeks to wield a grand theory that stacks psychology, physiology, biology, chemistry, physics, math and philosophy on top of each other in an impressive display of penetrative human insight, Jung would have us examine what is in front of our faces with as few preconceptions as we can manage. Theory, to Jung, is a kind of grim inevitability. It must and will be utilised, but is best approached with an attitude of reluctant skepticism, lest we in our overconfidence impoverish any and all realities which are not well described by it.
There is and can be no self knowledge based on theoretical assumptions, for the object of this knowledge is an individual — a relative exception and an irregular phenomenon.
C.G. Jung CW10 para. 494
A Personal Note
You may well be wondering, if all this is true, then why there aren’t any prominent Jungians out there in the world making these arguments? There are a few possible reasons. The simplest one is that many Jungian analysts are busy, and might only be vaguely aware of Peterson and what he says. It’s also easy enough to imagine that the divisive hot-potato that is Jordan Peterson is not a topic many Jungians are willing to go near, for fear of being dragged into the frightening and confusing arena of the under 40s and their bizarre online multipolar culture war. If one was feeling particularly cynical, one might imagine that the Jungian analyst community are quite happy for Peterson to be dragging his particular version of Jungian ideas into the spotlight. It’s hard to imagine that Peterson is bad for Jungian business.
More than anything though, it’s probably just that it is actually difficult. It’s difficult to work out what on Earth either of these men think they’re up to. It’s difficult to properly situate either one in today’s cultural milieu and in a way that is both fair to their intentions, imaginations and intellect whilst also holding their particular prejudices to account. Lots of Jungians have spent substantial cognitive energy throughout their lives doing this conscientious work, parsing the insightful and prophetic from the prejudicial and dogmatic; finding Jung’s blind spots and shining a variety of contemporary spotlights on them. Peterson is just so many steps behind people referenced in this essay like Andrew Samuels, Christopher Hauke, David Tacey, Roderick Main, Richard Tarnas and all the others who I have not been represented here (and those who I don’t even know about yet) that to wade into a conversation about Jung with him would be simply tiring.
There are common feelings of weariness and wariness among those who take the time to study Jung deeply. The way in which Peterson collapses Jung down into a comparatively two dimensional figure in order to further his own arguments is not unique, in fact it is the most common manner in which Jung is deployed within mainstream discourse. So in conversations about Jung, the task becomes one of education, which is made infuriatingly more difficult by the Dunning-Kruger effect — those who know less experience more certainty than those who know more, resulting in a need for slowness and patience that few people have to spare. It is hard to share knowledge in good faith if the intended recipient is showing up, swords drawn, ready to win a debate.
It is my sincere hope that this essay and the ones that will follow it constitute a reasonable contribution to this problem. If I’ve convinced any of Peterson’s admirers to think twice about his ideas, I hope to have done so by providing ideas that are actually more helpful or thought provoking, and not in a manner that is unnecessarily antagonistic or dismissive.
In the next part of this series, we will examine Jung and Peterson on the subject of sex, gender and their related stereotypes and archetypes. All that has been covered here will be expanded and applied in that context, and a detailed, good-faith analysis of Peterson’s relationship to more recent scientific and statistical literature will be included. This first part has necessarily been quite general in its nature. We will begin to get more into the details as the series progresses.
Thank you for reading.
