Sometime between 1922 and 1939, James Joyce wrote the following cryptic passage in his equally cryptic book,
Finnegan’s Wake:
Be who, farther potential? and so wider but we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bit on ’alices, when they were yung and easily freudened, in the penumbra of the procuring room and what oracular comepression we have had apply to them!
What on earth did Joyce mean?
Most scholars are in agreement that this passage is aimed at psychoanalysts. Joyce calls them “Sykos,” the Greek term for “fig” that makes up half of the term “sycophant,” which means, literally, “revealer of figs.” Sycophants were litigants in ancient Greece that brought unjustified prosecutions to the court. They were, in short, false accusers. Joyce seems to be saying that psychoanalysts are seedy, “grisly old” men who use false testimony against young women when they are “yung and easily freudened” in order to lure them into their “procuring room.” Say what you will of the literary and moral merits of James Joyce, he certainly seems to have understood psychoanalysis.
Joyce formed his conception of psychoanalysis rather early on, before the movement had become properly institutionalized. He was ahead of his time in this regard.
When Joyce was writing, psychoanalysis was identified as a radical movement that sought to demolish bourgeois moral norms. This is, in fact, precisely what it was. Take, for example, Freud’s 1908 essay “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” where he writes:
Civilized sexual morality has still worse effects, for, by glorifying monogamy, it cripples the factor of selection by virility—the factor whose influence alone can bring about an improvement of the individual’s innate constitution, since in civilized peoples selection by vitality has been reduced to a minimum by humanity and hygiene [emphasis in the original].
. Why then did Joyce, also a cultural radical, attack these doctrines? The answer seems to be that Joyce sensed in Freudianism a new form of authority that he was afraid would replace the throne and altar of yesteryear, and he wanted to head it off before it gained institutional traction.
After the Second World War, psychoanalysis certainly did gain institutional traction.
Psychoanalysts, in a very real way, became the moral policemen of Western society. The more radical elements of Freudian doctrine were hidden from view—either in the dry “ego psychology” of Freud’s daughter or beneath layers of New Age mythologizing in the work of Freud’s would-be heir Carl Jung. But at bottom the doctrine still contained the worship and “liberation” of the instincts sold to the buyer under the aegis of “self-actualization.”
The cultural radicals of the postwar era saw the new institutionalized and partly sanitized psychoanalysis as something that needed to be overturned. Yet they also saw in psychoanalytic doctrine radical ideas that could be appropriated. Jacques Derrida, in an early essay entitled “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” borrows from Freud’s essay on the mystic writing pad to form the basis for his own radical attack on Western philosophy. In their work
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri appropriated Freudian psychoanalysis—mainly in its then-fashionable Lacanian transformation—
to form a theoretical basis to attack traditional society through a process that they called “schizoanalysis.” Schizoanalysis was basically a means of encouraging people to totally ignore any conscientious scruples they had about their behavior and fully “actualize” their basest desires. In Britain, R. D. Laing appropriated psychoanalysis in his Sanity, Madness and the Family to argue that the family as an institution had to be dissolved.
What is my overarching point? Simply that psychoanalysis is a radical doctrine. The doctrine forms the basis of many of the theories that today are referred to as “postmodernism.” Even some of the activist language heard today on college campuses is a direct outgrowth of radicalized psychoanalytic ideas. The idea of “microaggressions,” for example, grows directly out of Deleuze and Guatteri’s notion of “micropolitics,” the idea that everyday cultural interactions should be politicized to further radical cultural goals. “Micropolitics” is grounded in the psychoanalytic idea—an idea that can be found in the original psychoanalytic writings—that society imposes “repressive” moral and cultural norms that damage the individual and do not allow him or her to “actualize” their innermost desires.
This is where we come to Jordan Peterson. Peterson has recently achieved surprising popularity precisely by attacking these postmodern ideas. At one level, Peterson appears to be rallying disaffected and intellectually unmoored young men under a culturally reactionary flag. But this is a misreading. In fact, Peterson is pushing “soft” radical psychoanalytical ideas that seem tame when confronted with the violent “hard” radical ideas of the so-called postmodernists. This is probably what makes Peterson so popular. He is telling his audience that they can embrace modern, late-capitalist, hyper-individualized consumer culture, with its vitalistic quasi-Darwinian “will” ideology, while rejecting the same ideology pushed to its logical end point—that is, pushed to the actual violence that inevitably occurs when one will meets another with no mediation. Peterson, on this reading, is not a conservative; rather he is a pre-1960s cultural radical who is trying to channel the anger of his audience into the moral and economic jungle of a late capitalism that is falling apart under the weight of its own contradictions.
