Firstly, if you’re in Glasgow on June 25-26 please come to a conference I’m organizing at the University of Strathclyde called Political Pathologies: Psychic Life Between Resistance and Restraint. Description, schedule and list of speakers is available here. Joelle Abi-Rached will deliver the keynote 'Trauma without Aftermath: Gaza, Lebanon, and the Psychic Life of Injustice'.

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I have done quite a bit co-writing recently. Writing can be so solitary so I appreciate what happens when I write and think with other people.

Sam Dolbear and I co-wrote an essay responding to Egon Erwin Kisch’s Karl Marx in Karlsbad published by Rab-Rab press (about Karl and Eleanor Marx visiting a spa town in what is now Czechia, which Daisy Lafarge later wrote a great essay about visiting). I co-wrote this article with Hussein Mitha and Christopher Law on ‘Innocence’ for a special issue organized around concepts in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ for diacritics. And an article called '“Dream book for existing otherwise”: Anticolonial histories of sleep” that I co-wrote with M. Ty has just been published in Radical History Review. I have also co-written an article based on interviews with members of the 1970s collective Red Therapy with Benjamin Morgan for a pamphlet that’s being published by MayDay Rooms that we hope will come out later this year. If you’d like to read any of the first three pieces and can’t access them just reply to this email and I can send.

The piece I wrote with M ended up being too long so we cut some stuff in it about Carl Jung. We were writing about dreaming collectively and so had initially wanted to explain why we were rejecting a Jungian definition of the ‘collective unconscious’. I am sharing some paragraphs on Jung below. I first discovered my deep loathing for Jung when writing this article discussing his influence on Jordan Peterson that Owen Hatherley commissioned me to write for Tribune years ago (more of which if you scroll to the end).

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Reclaiming the collective unconscious

For anyone drawn to both psychoanalysis and Marxism, the term “collective unconscious” might sound appealing. Taken in isolation, the term could suggest that psychological experiences are not simply individual but shaped by material conditions and social relations; that is, by the experiences of inhabiting a world filled with other people. Why should psychic life be conceptualized as something personal rather than interpersonal?

To speak of a collective is not to speak of a homogenous undifferentiated blob; a collective might refer to people whose relations to one another are uneven yet enmeshed, it might also refer to a group of people who unite against a common oppressor (as in the case of “collective bargaining”). A collective implies relations of interdependence, commonality, and mutuality rather than domination. The notion of an unconscious that has a collective dimension seems to gesture towards forms of shared historical experience that draw people together across time and space. Is the collective unconscious only shaped by the past or can a dreaming collective also imagine a future? Can divisions, ruptures, and fissures within the collective unconscious be mapped? Is there one collective unconscious or many? Can such collectives act to transform the world without becoming conscious of their desires? How does a collective dream?

The term “collective unconscious” appears frequently in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, where he seems to (mis)read Carl Jung’s concept in a slightly wishful manner. The concept appears in a small number of scattered passages musing on the relationship between the primal and the new that are otherwise dominated by Marxist terminology. For Benjamin, primal history is connected to a vision of a classless society; despite being located in the past it can help to spur movement into a future yet to come. The distant past for the dreaming collective has a utopian dimension that rejects the recent past and the immediate present, and is instead oriented toward the future. Primal history is an alternative to the stifling dust of capitalist modernity. By reaching beyond current conditions back into primal history, the collective unconscious is paradoxically able to apprehend the new and so extend itself toward something outside capitalism that cannot be subsumed by the commodity form. The primal thus has a revolutionary charge.

The term “collective unconscious” also appears in The Arcades Project in a fragment that quotes Jung directly. Here, the difference between Benjamin’s interpretation of the concept and Jung’s definition is apparent:

Because the collective unconscious is… a deposit of world-processes embedded in the structure of the brain and the sympathetic nervous system, it constitutes… a sort of timeless and eternal world-image which counterbalances our conscious, momentary picture of the world.

Biological, static, unchanging, permanent – for Jung, the collective unconscious has no connection to a liberated classless future. And in his work, the “world-image” and the “world-processes” sedimented in the ancient soil of the mind have particular (white, Christian, Western) characteristics. Freudian dreams tend to include mundane details or “residues” from everyday life, whereas Jungian dreams are more likely to involve mist-enveloped ancient lands; swooping dragons, shining goddesses, magicians encountering mysterious figures at the top of waterfalls. For Jung, people’s dreams aren’t littered with motifs from myths and fairy tales because they have encountered such narratives within a particular culture; archetypes are inherited and innate.

You don’t have to read much Jung to discover that his work is politically troubling. Right at the beginning of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious he’s already saying things like this:

We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage. We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness.

“We” and “our” are obviously not inclusive terms here. Jung’s trove of archetypes is culturally specific rather than universal. Benjamin was not oblivious to the disturbing implications of Jung’s vision of the unconscious, observing in a 1937 letter to Gershom Scholem that “Jung recently leaped to the rescue of the Aryan soul with a therapy reserved for it alone.” Jung had explicitly stated in a 1934 paper that “The ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish,” but after the Second World War he persistently denied accusations of Nazism (while continuing to express fears in his published works of a “rootless consciousness”).

In the first volume of The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch provides a more sustained critical engagement with Jung’s work than any Benjamin ever published. According to Bloch, “C. G. Jung, the psychoanalytic fascist,” – later referred to in an even more rhetorically satisfying phrase as the “fascistically frothing psychoanalyst” – “reduced the libido and its unconscious contents entirely to the primeval”; for Jung, “Libido becomes archaic; blood and soil.” The phylogenetic takes precedence over the ontogenetic, the “ancestral night” of the unconscious blocks out all rays of light that might enter from the daytime of consciousness. The social is eclipsed. All conscious experience along with all dream symbols point backwards into pre-history. Jung, Bloch intones, “sings the wildernesses of the elemental age of love, which to his misfortune man has emerged from; he seeks the nocturnal moon in the flesh, the unconscious sun in the blood.” The Jungian collective unconscious does not come just from the ancient past of human history but from an older and deeper geological strata common to all organic matter. Unlike in Freud’s work, and unlike in Benjamin’s re-imagining of the “collective unconscious,” Bloch argues that according to Jung, “everything new is ipso facto without value”; he is instead concerned solely with “fleeing the present, hating the future, searching for primeval time.”

For Jung, then, the past is everything but history is nothing. The “collective” in his “collective unconscious” is not comprised of actual people living under actual social conditions but refers to some undifferentiated prehistorical, perhaps even prehuman, strata – like Freud’s vision of death as the inorganic state which preceded all life, but without the dynamism introduced by the life instincts. Though Bloch is far less hostile to Freud than he is to Jung, he nevertheless points out that Freud also relegates the unconscious to the distant past. For both, the unconscious is always before, beneath, and below. The libido is never treated as “a variable of socio-economic conditions” shaped by current conditions. What about the psychological suffering that results from poverty, Bloch asks? What about hunger?

Could one elaborate a vision of the unconscious that grounds itself historically, or would that jettison the unconscious altogether (which at least, according to Freud, is timeless)? Would it be possible to theorize a “collective unconscious” that emerges from historical experience rather than being seated in some imagined vision of prehistory (which Benjamin’s concept also clings to, albeit for very different political ends)? Or would such a vision of the unconscious be better named the “collective conscious”?

Strong Dream, 1929 - Paul Klee

While digging around for Jung stuff I found these bits that I cut from the piece on Jung and Jordan Peterson that I mentioned above:

Jung declared that ‘the breath of eternity lies over everything that is really alive’ and Peterson also really likes old things:

‘The wisdom of the past was hard-earned’.

‘It is reasonable to do what other people have always done’

‘Every word we speak is a gift from our ancestors.’

‘Hierarchies…are incredibly ancient, evolutionarily speaking.’

‘There are ancient biological circuits, so to speak, that underlie defensive and predatory aggression’

Peterson famously likes lobsters who, he says, have been around for 350 million years and whose existence, he claims, demonstrates that ‘dominance hierarchies’ are also old, ‘older than trees’. Peterson knows that things change but he thinks things that stay the same are better. Big strong winner male lobsters triumph over slouchy loser male lobsters and soft vulnerable female lobsters only bat their lashes, sorry, shed their shells for the winners who also get ‘the prime real estate’. He says the gender binary is a billion years old and that the relation between parents and children is older than birds, which is really old and that means you shouldn’t fuck with these things. Longevity demands respect. Peterson’s lobsters serve to justify and naturalise the existence of inequalities between people but though he claims that archaic biological forces determine people’s relative position in society – because of the ‘primordial calculators’ lodged in their brains, keep up – if you stand up straight you can nonetheless individually overcome these forces to some extent (although not if you’re a woman obviously).

Another old thing Peterson likes is religion, but, although it’s not technically the oldest, he much prefers Christianity to all the others. He really likes The Lion King, which came out in 1994. He doesn’t like children very much who are too young to understand the long-established rules of their elders, but he likes old methods for disciplining them. He also really likes nation states – along with stable currencies, calendars, clocks, cops, credit cards and punctual trains – but seems to think these things are about as old as lobsters rather than slightly newer than science (which he kind of likes but thinks is a bit too new).

He does, however, confusingly dislike some extremely old things. For example: chaos. Chaos is bad. Chaos involves dark caves and dragons (there are lots of dragons). Chaos is the ‘eternal feminine’ (and the badness of the latter here outweighs the goodness of the former). Peterson insists that he doesn’t dislike women – men, he points out, invented tampons and birth control pills - he just thinks women are naturally inferior to men and that things have gone a bit too far that’s all.

The fact that Peterson likes old things and wants to restore them does not imply that humanity’s inherent goodness has been corrupted over time. That already happened way back in the Garden of Eden. People are bad. Life is suffering. Darkness ‘dwells forever in our souls’ (darkness, like chaos, is another old thing that is bad). You’re a loser. You sin, you lie, you can’t get a girlfriend, you don’t stand up properly and you’ll never be as good as Jesus. But don’t worry even Jordan Peterson has violent fantasies sometimes. Even Jordan Peterson was friends with some total losers at some point. Even Jordan Peterson had a vision of soaring like an omniscient presence above the glass pyramids in which humanity is stacked once. Oh wait.