Great review! I read an Edmundson book about a hundred years ago—it was called Why Read?—and observed most of the same issues you point out. I think academics writing for a popular audience try to dumb it down way too much, or are ordered to do so. I agree with you that, if we're going to use psychoanalysis for this task, Jung's psychic model explains the internet better than Freud's, from shadow projection for the cancellation and purity spirals on both left and right to anima/animus-possession for some of the Tumblr-gender phenomena. (I love Signy Leid, by the way.)
I agree with your earlier Tumblr posts that Jung is unfairly maligned for his “unscientific” thinking. The continued popularity of Jungian ideas in neopagan (and even some Christian) circles demonstrate that they resonate on an intuitive level with how people think about their own lives.
My biggest gripe with Jung’s legacy is that his central concept of individuation fits so neatly within the broader trends towards social atomisation and spiritual narcissism, especially online, where so many platforms are designed on the template of the video game and/or the multiple level marketing scheme, incorporating elements of the hero’s journey and encouraging us to think of ourselves primarily (or exclusively) as the main characters in our lives.
Yes, it's ironic considering his other most famous idea is the collective unconscious, which should imply that individuation and the collective are mutually interactive forces. (That argument could be made in the other direction against his critics on the left who find the "collective unconscious" idea fascist-adjacent.) There's a good version of seeing ourselves as the main character in our lives (taking responsibility for the agency we do have), but Jung's mythicization of the self probably can lend itself to the bad version (selfishness, narcissism, etc.), as Freud's more disenchanted psychology may not.
Given Jung’s remarks about German vs Jewish psychology, I think we’re stuck with the fascist-adjacent label (then again, we’re still reading Heidegger!) Personally, I prefer to view the culturally specific as the thin top layer of a collective unconscious that stretches all the way past the baser instincts of our animal kin (which I guess makes me gay and not queer according to your typology). Not that such a perspective is any more acceptable to those who wish to start with a blank slate: look how mercilessly Professor Individual Responsibility himself was mocked for pointing out our affinity with lobsters!
Freud (for all his wacky ideas) still represents a model of expert-mediated soul management. Jung points towards something more illegible and therefore more dangerous. But since it takes a certain amount of stoicism to be content with Freud’s promise of ordinary unhappiness, we continue to look elsewhere to find our bliss.
I'm a student of modernism, so "fascist-adjacent" is not a deal-breaker for me! I certainly agree with you on the thinness of cultural specificity. And speaking of the S-word, I'm still reading Colin Wilson's The Occult: A History—since I finished writing Major Arcana, I figured I should finish researching it too—and came across this passage on Jung and the individual, specifically the individual as a thin fiction covering a more chaotic and deeper reality, just yesterday:
"A 'spiritualist' who accepts that there is an after-life, a spirit world, a realm in which everything will be explained, is only scratching the surface. He still accepts himself as a kind of unity, a Leibnitzian monad, an ultimate unit. Jung emphasises that our sense of 'individuality' (meaning literally something which is indivisible) may be an illusion. We have to grasp that one of the basic principles of our psychic life is a kind of 'as if...' I am working for an exam and I concentrate on my book as if it were the most important thing in the world. It isn't and I know it isn't. The more I can concentrate, while still knowing it isn't, the healthier I am. If I begin to forget I am only playing an 'as if' game, if I begin to believe that this is really a matter of life and death, I become overtense and neurotic and my whole psychic balance is disturbed. But then, what I call my personality, my individuality, is actually a series of 'as if' acts of concentration."
Love Signy Lied, and yeah it’s weird not to bring up Jung in a book like this. Since you brought him up in a footnote I’ll say that this point-“One doesn’t have to agree with Freud on this point, but if one disagrees, it seems a bit odd to devote a whole book to employing his cynical theories as a way to scrutinise modern culture only to dismiss them at the end.” -got me thinking about how Rieff eventually sours *so*much on modernity and on Freud himself that one finds it strange reading those late works that he was ever as invested in the man as he was at the start!
Thank you! I only know of Rieff through Lasch and others. I’ve wanted to read his Triumph of the Therapeutic, but it seems to be out of print, which is a shame given how prophetic it’s turned out to be.
His first book (written with and possibly by Sontag) is great as well, and is still in print. It's a shame yeah. He seemed to have got quite strange at the end of his life and released this trilogy of odd books about how modernity was doomed by the focus on the self and the end of the psychological world of Abrahamic monotheism and Freud is deathwork and the like (this is doing some violence to those books, but I'm also not sure I understood them!)
Signy Leid!!!!
Great review! I read an Edmundson book about a hundred years ago—it was called Why Read?—and observed most of the same issues you point out. I think academics writing for a popular audience try to dumb it down way too much, or are ordered to do so. I agree with you that, if we're going to use psychoanalysis for this task, Jung's psychic model explains the internet better than Freud's, from shadow projection for the cancellation and purity spirals on both left and right to anima/animus-possession for some of the Tumblr-gender phenomena. (I love Signy Leid, by the way.)
Thank you!
Don't forget synchronicity 😉
I agree with your earlier Tumblr posts that Jung is unfairly maligned for his “unscientific” thinking. The continued popularity of Jungian ideas in neopagan (and even some Christian) circles demonstrate that they resonate on an intuitive level with how people think about their own lives.
My biggest gripe with Jung’s legacy is that his central concept of individuation fits so neatly within the broader trends towards social atomisation and spiritual narcissism, especially online, where so many platforms are designed on the template of the video game and/or the multiple level marketing scheme, incorporating elements of the hero’s journey and encouraging us to think of ourselves primarily (or exclusively) as the main characters in our lives.
Yes, it's ironic considering his other most famous idea is the collective unconscious, which should imply that individuation and the collective are mutually interactive forces. (That argument could be made in the other direction against his critics on the left who find the "collective unconscious" idea fascist-adjacent.) There's a good version of seeing ourselves as the main character in our lives (taking responsibility for the agency we do have), but Jung's mythicization of the self probably can lend itself to the bad version (selfishness, narcissism, etc.), as Freud's more disenchanted psychology may not.
Given Jung’s remarks about German vs Jewish psychology, I think we’re stuck with the fascist-adjacent label (then again, we’re still reading Heidegger!) Personally, I prefer to view the culturally specific as the thin top layer of a collective unconscious that stretches all the way past the baser instincts of our animal kin (which I guess makes me gay and not queer according to your typology). Not that such a perspective is any more acceptable to those who wish to start with a blank slate: look how mercilessly Professor Individual Responsibility himself was mocked for pointing out our affinity with lobsters!
Freud (for all his wacky ideas) still represents a model of expert-mediated soul management. Jung points towards something more illegible and therefore more dangerous. But since it takes a certain amount of stoicism to be content with Freud’s promise of ordinary unhappiness, we continue to look elsewhere to find our bliss.
I'm a student of modernism, so "fascist-adjacent" is not a deal-breaker for me! I certainly agree with you on the thinness of cultural specificity. And speaking of the S-word, I'm still reading Colin Wilson's The Occult: A History—since I finished writing Major Arcana, I figured I should finish researching it too—and came across this passage on Jung and the individual, specifically the individual as a thin fiction covering a more chaotic and deeper reality, just yesterday:
"A 'spiritualist' who accepts that there is an after-life, a spirit world, a realm in which everything will be explained, is only scratching the surface. He still accepts himself as a kind of unity, a Leibnitzian monad, an ultimate unit. Jung emphasises that our sense of 'individuality' (meaning literally something which is indivisible) may be an illusion. We have to grasp that one of the basic principles of our psychic life is a kind of 'as if...' I am working for an exam and I concentrate on my book as if it were the most important thing in the world. It isn't and I know it isn't. The more I can concentrate, while still knowing it isn't, the healthier I am. If I begin to forget I am only playing an 'as if' game, if I begin to believe that this is really a matter of life and death, I become overtense and neurotic and my whole psychic balance is disturbed. But then, what I call my personality, my individuality, is actually a series of 'as if' acts of concentration."
Love Signy Lied, and yeah it’s weird not to bring up Jung in a book like this. Since you brought him up in a footnote I’ll say that this point-“One doesn’t have to agree with Freud on this point, but if one disagrees, it seems a bit odd to devote a whole book to employing his cynical theories as a way to scrutinise modern culture only to dismiss them at the end.” -got me thinking about how Rieff eventually sours *so*much on modernity and on Freud himself that one finds it strange reading those late works that he was ever as invested in the man as he was at the start!
Thank you! I only know of Rieff through Lasch and others. I’ve wanted to read his Triumph of the Therapeutic, but it seems to be out of print, which is a shame given how prophetic it’s turned out to be.
His first book (written with and possibly by Sontag) is great as well, and is still in print. It's a shame yeah. He seemed to have got quite strange at the end of his life and released this trilogy of odd books about how modernity was doomed by the focus on the self and the end of the psychological world of Abrahamic monotheism and Freud is deathwork and the like (this is doing some violence to those books, but I'm also not sure I understood them!)