By : Most by now will have heard the name Jordan Peterson, who has become quite the internet sensation as he tackles the excesses of postmodern philosophy and it’s negative impact on society. His fight against the deconstruction of traditional cultural forms, along with the existential vertigo and nihilism that inevitably follow it are commendable. However there is a question mark over what Peterson deems to replace that postmodernism with, which I’ll get to in a moment.
Peterson works largely, though not exclusively, with Jungian terminology – especially with what Jungians term the ‘archetypal patters’ of human behaviour. Carl Jung was among the first to document universal patterns of behavior among humans which he called archetypal patterns, which he later gave discreet titles such as the child archetype, father archetype, mother archetype, and so on. Jung identified literally hundreds of such archetypes and discovered that classical mythologies also tended to record these archetypal themes in story form.
Jung believed that all people perceive the world through archetypal filters of one kind or another, and are often unconscious of the fact they are perceiving the world through a limited archetypal lens.
With that brief description of archetypes I come back to the question of what Jordan Peterson wants to replace postmodernism with.
Does he want to replace it with what was there before it, a wide variety of archetypal forms? The answer to that appears to be no, he has a much more simplistic prescription to fill the void: that men become heroes and women become mothers.
After all the good of cautioning against the excesses of postmodernism, Peterson would unwind it by advocating an equally excessive cult of motherhood as the necessary and only alternative. He is caught by the spell of what Jungians refer to as the Great Mother Archetype, and doesn’t realize he’s caught.
Peter Wright has been an advocate for men and boys for over 30 years and is the creator and publisher of gynocentrism.com
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Peterson works largely, though not exclusively, with Jungian terminology – especially with what Jungians term the ‘archetypal patters’ of human behaviour. Carl Jung was among the first to document universal patterns of behavior among humans which he called archetypal patterns, which he later gave discreet titles such as the child archetype, father archetype, mother archetype, and so on. Jung identified literally hundreds of such archetypes and discovered that classical mythologies also tended to record these archetypal themes in story form.Jung believed that all people perceive the world through archetypal filters of one kind or another, and are often unconscious of the fact they are perceiving the world through a limited archetypal lens.
With that brief description of archetypes I come back to the question of what Jordan Peterson wants to replace postmodernism with.
Does he want to replace it with what was there before it, a wide variety of archetypal forms? The answer to that appears to be no, he has a much more simplistic prescription to fill the void: that men become heroes and women become mothers.
After all the good of cautioning against the excesses of postmodernism, Peterson would unwind it by advocating an equally excessive cult of motherhood as the necessary and only alternative. He is caught by the spell of what Jungians refer to as the Great Mother Archetype, and doesn’t realize he’s caught.
In the early pioneering days of Freud and Jung there occurred a huge fad of interest in parental figures, especially the mother. Theory has since moved on from mothers and the mother archetype, but classical Jungians and also Peterson are still trapped there in that fad. This is the Achilles heel of Peterson and it deserves unpacking.
The first thing we need to know about the Mother Archetype is that it is linked to her archetypal son – The Hero. In myths and stories around the world we read of Mamma’s hero-son moving through the world slaying dragons, a theme Peterson also specializes in discussing.
The possession of Peterson’s mind by the theme of the Great Mother and her son The Hero compels him to ask young men to lift heavy weights, and ask young women to be mothers – great mothers. Anyone with a strong understanding of archetypal psychology will see immediate problems in this proposal.
Here’s an excerpt from post-Jungian James Hillman which I think captures the issue well:
Asking all young men to be worldly heroes, to lift heavy weights to compliment the maternal principle, and asking young women to be mothers – great mothers – when they may not be suited to motherhood at all, limits the possibilities dramatically and may fly in the face of a person’s calling to be something else entirely.
In order to get past this mother-monotheism we need to lift the Madonna Church skirt to allow all the many archetypal forms – the congregation – to walk out and stand independently on their own two feet. By relativizing the Mother Archetype, by removing that word “Great” that appears before it, we allow it to be just one archetype among many, no more or less important than the rest.
Many men want to be heroes, and women mothers. However there’s a danger resulting from what Peterson leaves out of that picture. The omission of other archetypal styles and perspectives likely leads people away from things they might be better suited to. For example some men are not called to be worldly heroes and don’t want to be – they might be spontaneous Peter Pan’s, introverts, gay men, Zeta males, bachelors…. or alternatively women might not be first and foremost identified with their wombs and kitchens – they might have a strong desire to be childless and perhaps to pursue some other life calling – to study, to have a career, help the homeless, or whatever.
It’s insufficient to argue that “mothering has its basis in biology” and thus the Mother Archetype is the most important archetype to push. All archetypes have their basis in biology, that’s Jungianism 101 and therein lies the problem: Peterson talks only about mothering as biologically based but does not grant the same for the other archetypal patterns women might enact.
The mother Goddess Demeter is not the only Goddess…. there are others like Artemis (a freewheeling virgin huntress); Athena (a virgin Goddess focused on civic responsibility – Athens was named after her); Aphrodite the Goddess of beauty, sexual pleasure and love; Hestia the virgin Goddess of the hearth; or Hera the Goddess of social power and status just to mention a few. Many of these archetypal figures were not primarily mothers, but nonetheless the biological impulses that give rise to their patternings are equally as valid as those underpinning mothering.
To underline the point more starkly we can say that even the destructive spectacle of feminism that Peterson rightly rails against is a biologically-based archetypal pattern.
To summarize, the great danger in Peterson’s advice is that it narrows the possibilities far too much, and too forcefully in favor of Mother and her Hero son. Moreover, many men are tired of the onerous demands placed on them by traditional gender roles, and who can blame them. Traditional gender roles were sometimes workable when held in balance, with careful reciprocity guiding the arrangement. In modern society however the contractual emphasis on reciprocity has gone by the wayside in favor of extracting all you can from the other person and from the relationship. That makes traditional relationships dangerous places of potential exploitation.
Wanting to return to better models of the past doesn’t guarantee we’ll get one, and so many don’t. What they get instead are onerous expectations and demands with little payoff – or worse asset loss, parental alienation, false accusations and public shaming, not to mention the psychological sequelae that comes with it.
For men, all mother-serving heroics serve to further an already lopsided gynocentric culture, one asking men to put themselves into the service of marriage and womankind in an environment that is unlikely to provide much if any reciprocal payoff — for women long ago cast off their roles of mother and dutiful wife, and men are now seeing fit to do the same.
Sources:
Videos by Jordan Peterson. Analysis of Sleeping Beauty Is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world? The Oedipal Mother in a South Park Episode The Positive Mother Gives Birth to the Hero The Failed Hero Story vs The Successful (Freud vs Jung) The overprotective mother or ‘how not to raise a child’
Reference:
[1] Hillman, J. Abandoning the Child, in Mythic Figures, Vol 6. Uniform Edition
The first thing we need to know about the Mother Archetype is that it is linked to her archetypal son – The Hero. In myths and stories around the world we read of Mamma’s hero-son moving through the world slaying dragons, a theme Peterson also specializes in discussing.
The possession of Peterson’s mind by the theme of the Great Mother and her son The Hero compels him to ask young men to lift heavy weights, and ask young women to be mothers – great mothers. Anyone with a strong understanding of archetypal psychology will see immediate problems in this proposal.
Here’s an excerpt from post-Jungian James Hillman which I think captures the issue well:In their early discoveries, Freudian and Jungian psychologies both were dominated by parental archetypes, especially the mother, so that behavior and imagery were mainly interpreted through this maternal perspective: the oedipal mother, the positive and negative mother, the castrating and devouring mother, the battle with the mother and the incestuous return. The unconscious and the realm of “The Mothers” were often an identity. Through this one archetypal hermeneutic, female figures and receptive passive objects were indiscriminately made into mother symbols. What was not mother! Mountains, trees, oceans, animals, the body and time cycles, receptacles and containers, wisdom and love, cities and fields, witches and death – and a great deal more lost specificity during this period of psychology so devoted to the Great Mother and her son, the Hero. Jung took us a step forward by elaborating other archetypal feminine forms, e.g., the anima, and I have tried to continue in Jung’s direction by remembering that breasts, and even milk, do not belong only to mothers, that other divine figures besides Maria, Demeter, and Kybele have equally important things to say to the psyche and that the women attendant on Dionysus were not turned into mothers but nurses. Like those frescoes of the madonna Church which conceals a congregation under her billowed blue skirts, the Great Mother has hidden a pantheon of other feminine modes for enacting life.1With his monotheism of the Mother, Peterson is single-minded about the possible life options for young men and women. According to Jung the archetypal possibilities for a human life are multiple and varied, therefore living out the Mother and Hero archetypes – Peterson’s template obsessively pushed – reduces that variety to singular options.
Asking all young men to be worldly heroes, to lift heavy weights to compliment the maternal principle, and asking young women to be mothers – great mothers – when they may not be suited to motherhood at all, limits the possibilities dramatically and may fly in the face of a person’s calling to be something else entirely.
In order to get past this mother-monotheism we need to lift the Madonna Church skirt to allow all the many archetypal forms – the congregation – to walk out and stand independently on their own two feet. By relativizing the Mother Archetype, by removing that word “Great” that appears before it, we allow it to be just one archetype among many, no more or less important than the rest.
Many men want to be heroes, and women mothers. However there’s a danger resulting from what Peterson leaves out of that picture. The omission of other archetypal styles and perspectives likely leads people away from things they might be better suited to. For example some men are not called to be worldly heroes and don’t want to be – they might be spontaneous Peter Pan’s, introverts, gay men, Zeta males, bachelors…. or alternatively women might not be first and foremost identified with their wombs and kitchens – they might have a strong desire to be childless and perhaps to pursue some other life calling – to study, to have a career, help the homeless, or whatever.
It’s insufficient to argue that “mothering has its basis in biology” and thus the Mother Archetype is the most important archetype to push. All archetypes have their basis in biology, that’s Jungianism 101 and therein lies the problem: Peterson talks only about mothering as biologically based but does not grant the same for the other archetypal patterns women might enact.
The mother Goddess Demeter is not the only Goddess…. there are others like Artemis (a freewheeling virgin huntress); Athena (a virgin Goddess focused on civic responsibility – Athens was named after her); Aphrodite the Goddess of beauty, sexual pleasure and love; Hestia the virgin Goddess of the hearth; or Hera the Goddess of social power and status just to mention a few. Many of these archetypal figures were not primarily mothers, but nonetheless the biological impulses that give rise to their patternings are equally as valid as those underpinning mothering.
To underline the point more starkly we can say that even the destructive spectacle of feminism that Peterson rightly rails against is a biologically-based archetypal pattern.
To summarize, the great danger in Peterson’s advice is that it narrows the possibilities far too much, and too forcefully in favor of Mother and her Hero son. Moreover, many men are tired of the onerous demands placed on them by traditional gender roles, and who can blame them. Traditional gender roles were sometimes workable when held in balance, with careful reciprocity guiding the arrangement. In modern society however the contractual emphasis on reciprocity has gone by the wayside in favor of extracting all you can from the other person and from the relationship. That makes traditional relationships dangerous places of potential exploitation.
Wanting to return to better models of the past doesn’t guarantee we’ll get one, and so many don’t. What they get instead are onerous expectations and demands with little payoff – or worse asset loss, parental alienation, false accusations and public shaming, not to mention the psychological sequelae that comes with it.
For men, all mother-serving heroics serve to further an already lopsided gynocentric culture, one asking men to put themselves into the service of marriage and womankind in an environment that is unlikely to provide much if any reciprocal payoff — for women long ago cast off their roles of mother and dutiful wife, and men are now seeing fit to do the same.
Sources:
Videos by Jordan Peterson. Analysis of Sleeping Beauty Is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world? The Oedipal Mother in a South Park Episode The Positive Mother Gives Birth to the Hero The Failed Hero Story vs The Successful (Freud vs Jung) The overprotective mother or ‘how not to raise a child’
Reference:
[1] Hillman, J. Abandoning the Child, in Mythic Figures, Vol 6. Uniform Edition
About Peter Wright
Peter Wright has been an advocate for men and boys for over 30 years and is the creator and publisher of gynocentrism.comSource
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