Was Jung Woke? Individuation as Psychological Political Activism
Dr Dwight Turner; Activist, Psychotherapist, and Author; www.dwightturnercounselling.co.uk
War on Wokeness
In December 2022, Ron DeSantis, one of the front runners for the Republican nomination as the next President of the United States of America, and the current Governor of the State of Florida, made clear his platform pitch to the right wing of his own party when he declared that, ‘we fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die’ (Harriot, 2022, p. 1). This American articulation of anti-woke mentality though was not just limited to those across the Atlantic. Even here in the United Kingdom, Kemi Badenoch, who was recently seen as a front runner to replace Boris Johnson as the Leader of the Conservative Party, was herself called the Darling of the Anti-Woke Establishment by the far right of her party (BBC News Online 2022). These two perspectives, though, speak to a larger kickback against ‘wokeness’ happening across the Global North and this blog explores the psychological implications of such a reaction to something which under the surface informs much of our work as psychologists and psychotherapists.
The origins of ‘wokeness’ are widely debated. One avenue of thought is that ‘woke’ is actually from the Bible. Paul the Apostle said more than two millennia ago, ‘Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed (Romans 13:11)’. This clear reference to the idea of waking from a kind of psychological sleep, rolling out from under the cruel auspices of the Romans, speaks some two thousand years ago of what it needs to shake off the shackles of oppression. But this statement is not just about the external; this bible verse being read as much as a metaphor as of historical reality, a call to arms for the people to rise up from under the oppressive yolk of the Romans.
The origins of the term ‘woke’ also sit strongly within the Civil Rights movements of the last century. For example DuBois (1903) weighed the responsibility of wokeness, in his call to arms to Persons of Colour that they wake up from the sleep of oppression during slavery. Later on Baldwin (2017) took an opposing position when recognising that to be ‘woke’ would mean, for many persons of colour, that they would awaken to the anger of their oppression and their treatment at the hands of systemic racial violence.
‘Woke’ though is a word which the political Right has sought to distort away from its original meaning, a tactic often used in the fights against oppression as attempts are made to maintain the political status quo. This struggle can also be seen from a feminist perspective, where they have also had words stolen and distorted by the politics of oppression, but from a differing angle. The perfect example of this is the writings of Hall (1994) who recognised that ‘political correctness’—actually a term used by feminists to self-define, away from the restrictive confines of patriarchal ideas of what it is to be a woman—had become distorted and ridiculed by the political Right to be some kind of left-wing middle-class hippie-fest, whereby anything can be said, and anything goes.
Where wokeness has led to some ongoing successes is in the broadening of gender identities and the use of pronouns from within the LGBTQ+ communities, who have strived, successfully, to self-identify outside of the heteronormative boxes placed around sexual identity (singular) (Few-Demo et al., 2016). Yet, in this instance, although there has been a kind of political shaming of this approach, of the continued use of pronouns for example, the resistance shown by so many at all levels, allies and activists alike, shows that this approach has been instrumental in providing the kinds of safeties in environments that minorities crave and deserve.
The minimisation of the Other, their words, terminologies, and meanings is actually ultimately a means for the systems of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism to reconstitute their controls over the others they need in order to maintain their position at the pinnacles of power. The attacks on ‘wokeness’ are therefore as much an attack, this time, upon blackness, as the attacks on ‘political correctness’ and the rights to self-identify for the LGBTQ+ communities, have been on other minorities. These attacks have their roots as much within the prejudices and racism of the Global North as anything else.
Yet psychologically, I will argue, here this has to occur. This fight against the Other, this systemic superiority against the coming psychological shadow storm, is no different to the resistances and defences displayed by the egoic sense of self against the Stranger Within (Lacan, 2003). So whilst presented often as a fight of culture and the external, ‘wokeness’, especially in the current post George Floyd climate, is an internal fight that we all have to undergo in order to resist the psychological strictures of racism and oppression.
Individuation and the Psychology of Wokeness
A Dream: Scene where I am fighting a white man and trying to get away from him. I can’t initially, but I eventually manage to become like water, at which point he can’t fight me. We seem to be in some kind of warehouse disused as we fight though. I evolve even more and eventually become a single drop of water. This frustrates the man even more and he starts to realise that he can't fight me properly, so he eventually gives up.
Throughout 2022 and into 2023, Prince Harry continued his campaign for better mental health for all, encouraging us to unlock our potential (Lankston, 2023). Alongside all of this, the Daily Mail, and other right-leaning media outlets, sought to ridicule the Prince for his use of everything from ongoing psychotherapy to undergoing EMDR, putting this down to ‘woke culture’ and blaming his supposedly odd behaviour on the trauma of his having lost his mother, Princess Diana, as a child.
Yet, in a way, Prince Harry was and is right. The journey into the self is though one of waking up to our potential. It involves a rediscovery and recognition of who we are, of our potential, and of how we have been moulded by said systems of oppression to conform to ways and means of performative being. When von Franz (1980) wrote about how, in order for peace to reign and for cultures to grow and move forward, they needed to ‘own’ their projections onto the cultural other, for myself this was the idea of the need for a collective waking up, placed within the cultural, and therefore the political sphere.
Wokeness for both sides of the racial divide, white and black, involves the recognition that we have been sleeping through our racialised existence. Let me write that again. Wokeness involves the realisation that we have been hypnotised into complicity, and that we have been used by the system of white supremacy to the gain of those at its centre, not necessarily to our own. And whilst we maybe have been complicit in this co-option, whilst our own ability to think and feel for ourselves might have been cauterized by said complicity, (something numerous philosophers have written about for generations), there comes a time within all of us where we fight to wake up—where that which recognises the psychological cost of such will full mendacity decides that enough is enough (de la Boetie, 2015; Rousseau, 1998).
Yet, to wake from this dream of ages, involves a struggle against the internalisations embedded from birth which keep us silent, performative, fawning persons within these political frameworks. The dream above speaks to some of this. The dream calls out the internalisation of the oppressions of my own blackness; for example, that internalised white supremacist who drives those of colour to whiten their skins with bleach; or the internalised homophobe which leads acts of hate against others of a sexual orientation whilst denying one’s own sexuality; or the unconscious sexist or patriarch who happily votes for the Trumps or the Johnsons of the world forgiving their gender-based abuses..
The beauty of the dream presented here, though, is that this fight holds so many echoes of the non-violent war raged by Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights, or the wisdom of Lao Tzu, where the best way to win a battle was to become the strongest element there is in African cultures: that of water (Drewal et al., 2008; Lao & Mitchell, 1999). The dream shows us a means to win by wearing down the internalised supremacist which seeks to manage and utilise our continued racialised compliance. It frees us up to be more than just what is needed of us, more than just people who shuck and jive in 1950s black and white movies, or who perform on the sports fields of now.
So, if to borrow from Jung (1990), the route towards individuation lies through our dreams, and if our dreams then challenge the political structures of whiteness within which we have become embedded, then yes: even Jung was woke.
References
Baldwin, J. (2017). I’m not your negro. Penguin Classics.
de la Boetie, E. (2015). The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Mises Institute.
Drewal, H. J., Nunley, J. W., & Salmons, J. (2008). Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and its Diasporas. Africa Arts, Summer, 60–83.
Du Bois, W. E. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. Amazon Classics.
Durant, S. (Ed.). (1994). The War of the Words: the political correctness debate. Virago.
Few-Demo, A. L., Humble, Á. M., Curran, M. A., & Lloyd, S. A. (2016). Queer theory, intersectionality, and LGBT-parent families: Transformative critical pedagogy in family theory. Journal of Family Theory and Review, 8(1), 74–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12127
Harriot, M. (2022). War on wokeness: the year the right rallied around a made-up menace. Guardian Online. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/20/anti-woke-race-america-history
Jung, C. G. (1990). The Undiscovered Self. Princeton University Press.
Lacan, J. (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (J.-M. Rabate (Ed.)). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521807441
Lankston, C. (2023). Prince Harry discusses importance of “building up resilience” to trauma and grief by “flexing your mind” to achieve “peak mental fitness” as he stars in woke campaign for $4.7BN mental health coaching start-up BetterUp. MailOnline. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11005905/Prince-Harry-promotes-mental-health-coaching-mental-fitness-new-short-film-BetterUp.html
Lao, T., & Mitchell, S. (Translator). (1999). Tao Te Ching: An illustrated journey. Francis Lincoln.
Rousseau, J.-J. (1998). The Social Contract. Wordsworth Editions Limited.
Unknown. (2022). Kemi Badenoch: Anti-woke “darling of the right.” BBC News Online. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62176280
von Franz, M.-L. (1980). Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology. Open Court Publications.
