Carl Schmitt once said that Spinoza was the first liberal Jew, a remark which combines the insightful and the creepy in about the proportions you'd expect from Schmitt.
For my opinion is worth, and I really don't know that much about this subject, I think that Jung was obviously on to something in seeing the categories of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hypostatization, a doctrine of human nature in general that was clearly in fact based on the psychoanalysis of the haute bourgeoise of Vienna. So up to the 50s and even the 60s hysteria was one of the main neuroses analysts used to diagnose, whereas today it has almost totally vanished (obviously what was once called hysteria has been absorbed into mania on the one hand and various psychoses on the other, but also our society has changed and so have its typical mental disorders). Freud grasped this on some level, but his response was inadequate. My guru Gauchet likes to say that his work on religion began with reading of Moses and Monotheism as a convinced Freudian, and having the reaction: "I don't know what happened but whatever it was it wasn't that."
I think (again for what little my opinion is worth) that for all his eccentricities the thinker who really addressed this limit of Freud wasn't Jung but Kojève's devoted disciple Jacques Lacan. The limit of Freud is that Freud posits an irrational basis for the *mind*, or for our sense of self. But Freud doesn't really posit an irrational or ungraspable basis for *thought* or rationality as such. In Freud, my basic desires and my sense of who I am have their basis in drives and experiences that don't know and can can't master or can only master with difficulty. In Lacan my belief that 1 + 1 = 2, and *all* the categories with which I make sense of the world, have their basis in something irrational or rather not graspable by scientific reason. The unconscious thus becomes something similar to what Heidegger meant by Being, and Freud is freed from residual positivism, his insights put on the right theoretical level. Lacan developed these insights in a rather perverse direction. (Or several! And the most interesting one, the mirror stage hypothesis, is just Kojève's Hegel transposed into the key of developmental psychology. The child realizes that the image in the mirror is him/herself, but who or what the portion of reality that is cordoned off as the self amounts to is determined by conflict. Almost superfluously, it has been established over and over that this has no empirical connection to how kids interact with mirrors.)
Still, you don't get the same radical questioning of rationality as such in Jung, which IMO makes Jung's work resemble Mr. Casaubon's key to all mythologies.
Thank you for your as ever insightful comment! I like the comparison to Casaubon, there is definitely something of that to Jung, although I think Jung criticism does sometimes miss that it’s not exactly like Freud and Lecon were hard-edged empiricists, although Freud seemed to think he was! That’s interesting about Lacan, I find him mostly impenetrable but so much depends on interpretations of him that I’ll probably go back one of these days. I hadn’t read Kojéve the last time I tried!
You're completely right to defend Jung vs. Freud on this point. Freud is maybe the heir to the Enlightenment Peter Gay saw him as because of Freud's belief that psychoanalysis would help us move past what Freud saw as the illusion of religion, but the idea that Freudian psychoanalysis is a science has aged poorly. I think that Jung sort of domesticates the Freudian insight into the non-rational or mysterious basis of our Weltanschauungen, so he winds up suggesting that there's one archetypical Weltanschauung which is the paradigm for the others. Often this paradigm winds up being Christianity, as I think i is for Peterson or (in a much more interesting way) Girard.
Thank you for this. i just skipped ahead to the part about Sally Rooney. I read Conversations with Friends because I saw a cute college girl reading it on the subway and I liked the cover. I thought it was mid in every way. And now Rooney is a huge star. Go figure. And I do remember her character in Conversations announcing "I am a Marxist." I laughed out loud but then i noticed that this statement was supposed to be taken seriously. That made the book seem different. I didn't trust it after that.
Great post and thanks for the mention! Could you please expand a bit more on why you say that Jung is “ultimately a failure where earlier romantics were more successful”?
Thanks! I think it’s less my position than Rieff’s in terms of “failure.” I think he finds Jung sort of neither flesh nor fish, and ultimately a reversion to a pre-Freudian style of romantic rebellion (there are some very interesting passages where he compares Jung’s subterranean God to the devil, or when he argues that Jung is a deeply Protestant thinker) who wasn’t up to the Freudian task of establishing some sort of minimal nomos for ordinary unhappiness etc. That being said, I don’t think Rieff has a very high view of the romantic tradition to begin with, so maybe a clumsy wording on my part.
Thanks for the clarification: I should get to reading Rieff at some point! The Protestant critique seems fair: there does seem to be an inherent instability in Protestant thought springing from the ability of people to read the Old and New Testaments in their own language, without an overlay of Talmudic, Augustinian or Neoplatonic interpretations. And it is understandable why a Jewish intellectual might be less than thrilled by the prospect of a revival in German romanticism, although as John Pistelli has suggested, it is perhaps the role of the American artist to Americanise and thereby universalise this potent but dangerous force.
Carl Schmitt once said that Spinoza was the first liberal Jew, a remark which combines the insightful and the creepy in about the proportions you'd expect from Schmitt.
For my opinion is worth, and I really don't know that much about this subject, I think that Jung was obviously on to something in seeing the categories of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hypostatization, a doctrine of human nature in general that was clearly in fact based on the psychoanalysis of the haute bourgeoise of Vienna. So up to the 50s and even the 60s hysteria was one of the main neuroses analysts used to diagnose, whereas today it has almost totally vanished (obviously what was once called hysteria has been absorbed into mania on the one hand and various psychoses on the other, but also our society has changed and so have its typical mental disorders). Freud grasped this on some level, but his response was inadequate. My guru Gauchet likes to say that his work on religion began with reading of Moses and Monotheism as a convinced Freudian, and having the reaction: "I don't know what happened but whatever it was it wasn't that."
I think (again for what little my opinion is worth) that for all his eccentricities the thinker who really addressed this limit of Freud wasn't Jung but Kojève's devoted disciple Jacques Lacan. The limit of Freud is that Freud posits an irrational basis for the *mind*, or for our sense of self. But Freud doesn't really posit an irrational or ungraspable basis for *thought* or rationality as such. In Freud, my basic desires and my sense of who I am have their basis in drives and experiences that don't know and can can't master or can only master with difficulty. In Lacan my belief that 1 + 1 = 2, and *all* the categories with which I make sense of the world, have their basis in something irrational or rather not graspable by scientific reason. The unconscious thus becomes something similar to what Heidegger meant by Being, and Freud is freed from residual positivism, his insights put on the right theoretical level. Lacan developed these insights in a rather perverse direction. (Or several! And the most interesting one, the mirror stage hypothesis, is just Kojève's Hegel transposed into the key of developmental psychology. The child realizes that the image in the mirror is him/herself, but who or what the portion of reality that is cordoned off as the self amounts to is determined by conflict. Almost superfluously, it has been established over and over that this has no empirical connection to how kids interact with mirrors.)
Still, you don't get the same radical questioning of rationality as such in Jung, which IMO makes Jung's work resemble Mr. Casaubon's key to all mythologies.
Thank you for your as ever insightful comment! I like the comparison to Casaubon, there is definitely something of that to Jung, although I think Jung criticism does sometimes miss that it’s not exactly like Freud and Lecon were hard-edged empiricists, although Freud seemed to think he was! That’s interesting about Lacan, I find him mostly impenetrable but so much depends on interpretations of him that I’ll probably go back one of these days. I hadn’t read Kojéve the last time I tried!
You're completely right to defend Jung vs. Freud on this point. Freud is maybe the heir to the Enlightenment Peter Gay saw him as because of Freud's belief that psychoanalysis would help us move past what Freud saw as the illusion of religion, but the idea that Freudian psychoanalysis is a science has aged poorly. I think that Jung sort of domesticates the Freudian insight into the non-rational or mysterious basis of our Weltanschauungen, so he winds up suggesting that there's one archetypical Weltanschauung which is the paradigm for the others. Often this paradigm winds up being Christianity, as I think i is for Peterson or (in a much more interesting way) Girard.
Lacan is basically unreadable but I do think other thinkers have channeled Lacan's insights in productive directions, e.g. this from Gauchet: https://sci-hub.st/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0725513602071011002?journalCode=thea
Thank you for this. i just skipped ahead to the part about Sally Rooney. I read Conversations with Friends because I saw a cute college girl reading it on the subway and I liked the cover. I thought it was mid in every way. And now Rooney is a huge star. Go figure. And I do remember her character in Conversations announcing "I am a Marxist." I laughed out loud but then i noticed that this statement was supposed to be taken seriously. That made the book seem different. I didn't trust it after that.
Great post and thanks for the mention! Could you please expand a bit more on why you say that Jung is “ultimately a failure where earlier romantics were more successful”?
Thanks! I think it’s less my position than Rieff’s in terms of “failure.” I think he finds Jung sort of neither flesh nor fish, and ultimately a reversion to a pre-Freudian style of romantic rebellion (there are some very interesting passages where he compares Jung’s subterranean God to the devil, or when he argues that Jung is a deeply Protestant thinker) who wasn’t up to the Freudian task of establishing some sort of minimal nomos for ordinary unhappiness etc. That being said, I don’t think Rieff has a very high view of the romantic tradition to begin with, so maybe a clumsy wording on my part.
Thanks for the clarification: I should get to reading Rieff at some point! The Protestant critique seems fair: there does seem to be an inherent instability in Protestant thought springing from the ability of people to read the Old and New Testaments in their own language, without an overlay of Talmudic, Augustinian or Neoplatonic interpretations. And it is understandable why a Jewish intellectual might be less than thrilled by the prospect of a revival in German romanticism, although as John Pistelli has suggested, it is perhaps the role of the American artist to Americanise and thereby universalise this potent but dangerous force.