April of this year. The very first few weeks of my time in Iceland. A lot of new challenges, such as looking for a job, trying to get to know the reality of the new state, looking for housing, facing Icelandic prices and... many more. While surfing some corner of the Internet related to Jordan Peterson, the word "Iceland" passed somewhere in front of my eyes. My heart skipped a beat! Not more than a few seconds later I discovered that two of his lectures scheduled for June and will have place in Reykjavík!
The event was to take place in the most prestigious event venue in Iceland, Harpa, which you can see above. The number of tickets for the first lecture has been completely sold out, but on the second day there were still some free seats left. The tickets were not cheap for someone who is just starting work in Iceland, but still I decided to go to a meeting with Peterson dated June 5th. This event made me reflect a lot about Jordan Peterson, his relation to science, how supporters and opponents perceive him, and my own attitude to this person. I would like to verbalize these reflections somehow, at least to structure a bit my thoughts
I am not going to portray Jordan Peterson in a specific way, as most of the articles around do. Everything has already been written about this Canadian psychologist - that he is the most important living intellectual, racist, philosopher, sexist, brilliant psychologist, pseudo-scientist, left-wing devastator, right-wing extremist, Occident defender, maniac, agnostic, Christian apologist, manipulator, coach, messiah, compassionate archetype father or a dangerous, aggressive figure. Which of these terms better reflect reality - I leave you to judge. Hundreds of videos with Jordan Peterson can be found on the Internet, and I don't want it to be another text that tries to tell the reader who he this polarizing the whole world Canadian professor is.
Two Stories About Psychology
I first came across Jordan Peterson in spring 2017. At that time I worked intensively on my Master's thesis1, about which I have to elaborate a little bit for the context. My thesis was quite untypical because it was a theoretical one, while the majority of Master's thesis in psychology is empirical, preceded by research conducted and designed by the students. I took an entirely different path. I had some experience in empirical psychological research, but I wanted to go deeper into a topic that has been bothering me since the beginning of my studies and which is at the same time a scientific and intellectual dispute, or rather a discussion that has been reviving in different ways since the very beginning of psychology as science2. It is a dichotomy of the qualitative approach (individual, personal, focusing on what distinguishes man and his subjective experiences, trying to describe him thoroughly, but not quantitatively) and quantitative (quantifiable, trying to capture human psychology in numbers and statistics and general theorems that strive to have high accuracy in terms of empirical evidence). Both of these foundations derive from different philosophical and scientific traditions. Most psychologists simply "advocate" one of them more or less, some openly deny the rationale and value of one of them, others try to reconcile them and use various approaches, or at least respect the other approaches to psychology. Contemporary scientific academic psychology is definitely dominated by empirical psychology based on quantitative methods, which does not mean that qualitative methods are not used and developed. nowadays. My master's thesis concerned analytical psychology, whose initiator was Carl Gustav Jung, in the context of mainstream modern empirical psychology.
Even before I became a psychology student, I was fascinated by the figure of Carl Gustav Jung. His psychology definitely represented a qualitative approach. Thus, at the beginning of my studies, with a dose of doubt and reductionism on my lips I approached all digits and graphs trying to frame the phenomenon of the human psyche. I did not like the idea you can grasp such a complicated phenomena in such a "dry and cold" way. Over time, however, having become familiar with how tests are constructed, how empirical research is conducted and verified, with what caution psychologists put and verify hypotheses, and how much they are aware of the difficulties in connection with what their object of research is (invisible, immeasurable, difficult to grasp psyche) I became respectful to statistical methods and developed greater dose of scepticism and rationalism. But the fascination with the figure of Jung and this "second" kind of psychology did not evaporate. I concluded that both ways are valuable in their own way and can expand our knowledge about man, despite their own limitations.
This thesis was therefore an attempt to confront two worlds that were not entirely philosophically and scientifically compatible with each other - the world of Jung's psychology, which approaches statistical research with scepticism, and which according to modern standards in psychology does not meet the conditions to be called science, with the world of this mainstream, neo-positivistic psychology, which tries to develop a rigorous methodology and strict definitions. My work consisted in searching for traces of Jung's concepts such as archetypes or complexes in other, nowadays recognized theories with empirical background, but also in searching for and presenting a few empirical studies directly verifying Jung's hypotheses.
And here we return to Peterson. For the first time, I came across him by chance while watching one of several videos presenting his disputes during student protests related to the confusion over the introduction of the controversial C-16act in Canada. I curiously visited Jordan's YouTube profile and quickly realized that the political content is a drop in the ocean of what can be found there. In fact, it was the least interesting drop. I started to discover these fascinating lectures on personality psychology, psychological interpretations of biblical stories, a lot of religious psychology, "45 minutes on a single paragraph of Nietzsche's", or a whole series on how people construct meaning, which is discussed in the context of 20th century totalitarianism (among others).
What shocked most of all though, was that Jordan freely and rationally connects Jung with modern empirical psychology, statistics, Big Five personality theory, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. In his lectures and books he does something very similar that I tried to do in my thesis - he clashes two seemingly incompatible worlds, which speak the same, but with a completely different language and with different methods. It was a shock to me especially because there are VERY few Jungian oriented psychologists interested in empirical research (I have the impression that I mentioned all the existing ones in my master). Among modern analytical (Jungian) psychologists, the qualitative pole still dominates very prominently, and the quantitative approach, or even the attempt to bite the Jungian constructs from the side of cognitive science, is rather avant-garde, sometimes even perceived as inappropriate. Analytical psychology tends to "stick together", more likely to "romance" with anthropologists, religious studies scholars or other social sciences than with academic psychology. Jordan Peterson is, however, a true exception. Moreover, he is a psychologist and therapist trained in behavioural-cognitive psychotherapy. A Jungian trained in the behavioural-cognitive paradigm, using qualitative methods, but at the same time being a fervent advocate of empirical psychology is a very rare specimen!
Jung Reincarnated
Jordan Peterson is often accused of being unscientific, thereby throwing him into a large bag of pseudoscience. This is usually backed up by some questionable statement or hypothesis put forth by Peterson during one of his lectures or media appearances. Nonetheless, I have an irresistible impression that both Peterson's defenders and his fierce opponents judge his competences too hastily and easily. As I mentioned above, Peterson is not an average academic psychologist. He combines social psychology, psychology of personality and human development with cognitive and biological sciences and a qualitative tradition of analytical psychology. Such an eclectic approach is quite rare and thus it is very difficult for psychologists and academics to assess unequivocally. The problem is not entirely new and actually concerns Carl Gustav Jung himself3. In my opinion, this problem has arisen around Peterson precisely because he takes a handful of Jung's views of the world and the Jung's way of thinking is simply slightly different from the model of science that has "won" in the development of psychology. I'd say that 70% of what Peterson says is simply analytical psychology in a slightly newer, updated edition, supported by other widely recognized theories such as the Big Five theory, Jean Piaget's discoveries or Jaak Panksepp's "affective neuroscience". Peterson has probably done more to promote the idea of Jung than all his successors put together! After all he's on the most famous psychologist in the world at the moment!
Unlike Jung, Jordan Peterson is much more extraverted, likes cameras, enjoys contact with the audience and is on fire with an attractive charisma both on stage and in media appearances. He is well acquainted with the scientifically recognized part of psychology and he skillfully smuggles into these realities the concept of archetypes and other Jungian concepts. So is he pseudoscientific? I am by no means an authority in this field, but I believe that the answer is extremely complex. Apart from the highly rigorous empirical research and diagnostic tools, of which Peterson is a co-author and which have been published in numerous scientific journals, the value of which is also hard to question, Peterson in his rhetoric uses a rather controversial inductive combination of distant facts, distant theories, and quite freely and intuitively links certain relationships between psyche, culture, religion and politics. He does it in exactly the same way as Jung did in his time. This type of methodology is nowadays not considered too valuable in academic psychology. However, this has not always been the case and it does not mean that this type of intellectual work is inherently unscientific. Surely it has completely different philosophical roots, reaching back to other scientific traditions derived from German empiricism and phenomenology (such as Alexander von Humboldt or Goethe's scientific work)4.
If you immerse yourself a little deeper in the subject of philosophy of science, it may suddenly turn out that part of what Jung or Peterson may qualify as science, but in a broader sense than the current ones, another part of their theories may not qualify at all, and yet another may meet all the standards set by today's academic psychology! So I don't think the answer is straightforward, and just as I couldn't answer the problem of Jung's science in my thesis with full confidence, I don't intend to give an unambiguous opinion about Peterson here. To answer this question one should define well what science is and what it is in the context of psychology, because both Jung and Peterson seem to represent certain boundary cases of this problematic. It is worth emphasizing here that Peterson puts these speculative, hardly verifiable hypotheses aside from publications and strictly scientific conferences. He is aware of a certain duality and incomplete compatibility of his scientific views (it's worth notion that the fact that lack of compatibility does not necessarily mean that he contradicts himself!).
Peterson & Guts
The above-mentioned thoughts accompanied me throughout the whole period of writing my master's thesis, as well as while discovering what Peterson has to say and how he supports that. I have also noticed something else, this time observing myself and my reactions to the whole event. In the end, it was a meeting of someone who (after all) inspired me strongly during the last year of my life. I guess I've been cheating myself a little bit so far that Peterson is for me only an intellectual "nutrient". Going to this event I didn't consider it much "bigger" than going to a scientific conference or a university lecture. But it's hard to keep such a thought, noticing a huge excitement, or even distress, in a word - a rather strong emotional affection. So I began to ask myself to what extent is Peterson a scientist for me, and to what extent is he a celebrity, authority or "academic super star"? I eventually concluded that he is a bit of everything I mentioned and that I can let myself be a "fanboy" even at this age :)
I am aware of Peterson's faults, that some of his hypotheses should be approached with caution and scepticism, especially those outside the field of psychology. I think that the self-awareness of "charm" that a character evokes in us allows us to distance ourselves from this charm and even to let us enjoy it in a more controllable sense. Fortunately, Peterson more and more often tries to emphasize what is pure speculation in his arguments, and what is solid empirical data. I suspect that for him, just like for me, these issues Iaid down above are not trivial and probably he experiments with the way in which he should conduct them. Peterson himself encourages us to take a critical look at his achievements and words, which is very important because, unfortunately, the cult that surrounds him is not always a healthy one, and many people seem to miss his message (especially the so-called "alt-right").
And the lecture itself? It was great, as always. Quite casual, full of digression, but still a meaningful journey through themes that always meet somewhere at a certain point. Themes were varied - individualism and collectivism, how to create meaning in a world filled with suffering, archetypal stories repeated throughout cultures. I didn't actually hear anything there that couldn't be found from his other lectures that land on his channel, or from a book that this lecture is a promotion of. These are by no means simple things, so assimilating them several times does not deplete their value at all, but each time it helps to assimilate some new observation or idea. It was also worth going to confront not who Jordan Peterson is objectively, but who he is for me personally.
After the lecture, I managed to shake his hand, exchange a few words and get an autograph. I handed Jordan literature from my thesis, considering that maybe it could be somehow useful for him in discovering some research or concepts which he did not know, but which are in his area of interest. I guess it would be a nice change for him, as he's rather used to receive letters of gratitude ;)
P.S. Clean your room!
Literature
1. O'Donohue, W., & Kitchener, R. F. (Eds.). (1996). The philosophy of psychology. Sage.
2. Szwedo, J. (2017). Współczesne próby weryfikacji empirycznej i reinterpretacji wybranych konstruktów teoretycznych psychologii analitycznej.
3. Jones, R. A. (Ed.). (2013). Jung and the Question of Science. Routledge.
4. Saban, M. (2013). Science friction: Jung, Goethe and scientific objectivity. In Jung and the Question of Science (pp. 38-57). Routledge.
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