Jung’s Archetypes and Jordan Peterson’s Use of Them
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7 responses to “Jung’s Archetypes and Jordan Peterson’s Use of Them”
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where do you find Jung saying that archetypes evolve and do you deny that Jung thought that they had political/sociological implications writ large and that his patient’s personal teloi were set (Hillman picked up on this directly in one of his pop books) to some degree?
might help these discussions if you could refer to his texts.-
The idea that archetypes are evolutionary inheritances seems soaked through all his writing on the subject, but I’ll have to revisit the CW (“Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious” will be my first stop) to find specific passages. I am also thinking of “Answer to Job,” where Jung suggests that the God archetype evolves as it finds it necessary to adapt to the growing moral consciousness of human beings.
I certainly don’t deny that Jung often read archetypes into his political ideals, and vice versa. But I think he was more careful than the likes of Peterson to at least try to avoid using his psychology to justify his politics.
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Jung wasn’t careful about politics he said some highly suspect things (to be generous) and if you read his case studies (not to mention his relations with his family) you’ll see that he was quite conservative about gender, class, etc. He was wrong to think that we could inherit Volk characteristics but even in his later more cosmological (less carefully Kantian) moods he keeps the spirit (the realm if you will of the archetypes) apart from the biological,
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ps if Peterson wasn’t a twit he might sound more like Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig
who people should check out, also Susan Rowland’s work on the topic should be required reading. -
Perfect. Bull’s eye. A laser acupuncture intervention. Thank you.
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The book on Job is an interesting case that Jung didn’t extend into his other work that I’m aware of and is that (or the Self) really just an archetype at work or God, hard to say but Jung had a kind of gnostic/aristotelian sense that there was a direction (and even a purpose) to our lives that led towards some kind of spiritual fulfilment and peace from the chthonic/daemonic tensions of human-animal life.
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to say correctly that at least in his earlier Freudian period he shared the idea of the unconscious as a kind of “archaic” genetic inheritance is not to find him saying that the archetypes evolve (and what does it mean to say they are in an environment?), see what you make of:
http://www.jungnewyork.com/myth_function.shtml
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?