How Erich Fromm Can Help Address the Jordan Peterson Problem in Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT

The current political climate is marked by polarization, which presents new difficulties for psychoanalysis. Erich Fromm, as a Freudian theorist and clinician, is uniquely positioned to address these issues. Fromm is a politically radical thinker who can help psychoanalysis think about society and social injustice beyond the clinical context while avoiding the dangers of excessively orthodox left-wing thinking that risks taking the field away from its core mission. Fromm can help psychoanalysis avoid what we are calling the “Peterson problem,” which is partly the result of provocative and extreme ideas in institutions and psychoanalytic publications that create reputational problems for the field. The “Peterson problem” brings new attention to the political bias of left-liberal authoritarians inside the profession, who focus on changing society rather than healing individuals and neglect audiences outside the liberal university and highly educated classes and thus create space for polarizing figures like psychologist Jordan Peterson to fill the gap. Peterson’s fame and influence serves as a lightning rod for the wider critique of left leaning political and cultural currents in psychoanalysis. Fromm can act as a role model as well as provide the intellectual resources for responding to these challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Jordan Peterson
• Erich Fromm
• critical theory
• psychoanalysis
• viewpoint diversity
• political polarization

Psychoanalytically oriented thinkers and clinicians can try to ignore Jordan Peterson, but this is a failing strategy given the reach of his enormous popularity and attendant celebrity status (McLaughlin, 2021b). Peterson is one of the most famous and influential public-facing intellectuals in the world today, popularizing his own version of Jungian depth psychology alongside a sometimes implied but often brutally explicit critique of the left-liberal orthodoxies that are embedded in much of clinical theory and practice today. Previously a relatively successful but obscure University of Toronto psychology professor and Jungian-influenced clinician until his dramatic rise to global fame in 2016–2017, Peterson’s two best-selling “rules for life” self-help books (Peterson, 2018, 2021), global speaking tours, and massive YouTube and Twitter presence are a lightning rod for contemporary debates about politics, culture, and therapy.

Despite the profession’s reluctance to discuss it, psychoanalysis, and clinical psychotherapy are grappling with a “Jordan Peterson problem.” Before stimulating various political controversies, Peterson was a practicing clinical psychologist, a role he has continued in his public life by reaching millions of young people, bringing them into the orbit of depth psychology while offering serious challenges to established mainstream theories and institutions. The issue of Peterson’s bringing psychoanalytic ideas (including those of Freud as well as Jung, Frankl, and others) to a mainstream lay audience via mass communication platforms requires serious engagement with a set of issues rather than outright dismissal of Peterson as a crank, as has tended to be the case with many of his critics.

This challenge that Peterson poses to clinical psychotherapy is now 6 or 7 years old, and Peterson’s ongoing influence reflects broader issues that are not going away, exemplifying controversies that are likely to get more severe before reaching a resolution. Peterson came to fame in the period of 2016–2017 during the early years of the Trump Presidency largely because of three viral YouTube videos that created a storm of publicity, debate, and protest. One was arguing against the Canadian bill C-16, a new legal provision that offered human rights protection for “gender identity and expression,” a second argued against mandatory staff anti-racist training at the University of Toronto, and a final video encouraged students to stand up against what he then was calling “political correctness” (now often referred to as “wokeness”). Peterson followed up this political intervention shortly after with a self-help book called 12 Rules for Life (2018) that put his philosophy of “cleaning your room” before attempting to change the world at the center of a firestorm of debate about gender, race, religion, and the political implications of therapeutic and self-help advice.¹

Much has happened in the world, and to Peterson personally, since this explosion of interest in his controversial ideas in 2016–2017. There was a personal health crisis in 2019 that saw Peterson take a couple of years off, a good part of it spent in Moscow, to recover from extreme anxiety and related benzodiazepine drug dependency. By the time, he emerged from his personal crisis, Peterson had consolidated worldwide fame despite (or partly because of) left-liberal attempts to de-platform him and present him as a dangerous far-right radical. The political context that awaited following his recovery was different from when he first emerged on the political scene. Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 election, lockdowns, and restrictions in Canada associated with the Covid pandemic pushed him into more open opposition to the liberal Trudeau government in his homeland of Canada, and he was arguably forced out of his academic position and clinical practice through attempts to marginalize him on the part of his critics. By the spring of 2022, he emerged as a more explicitly conservative political thinker through a new partnership with American conservative activist and commentator Ben Shapiro’s media outlet The Daily Wire.

Peterson’s fame is largely that of a controversial political figure, and he does, in fact, play the role of right-wing provocateur in our culture, but he is also a public academic psychologist, an internet celebrity, a spiritual leader, a social media innovator, an entrepreneur, and, most importantly for our purposes here, a father figure, and therapist (McLaughlin, 2021c). Peterson’s fame came out of the combination of these various roles during a particularly salient moment of political polarization around the politics of Trumpism, issues of trans rights, climate change, religion, race, the politics of family, gender, and sexuality, and, most recently, pandemic lockdown and vaccine issues – and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Peterson, 2022a). Striking controversial positions on these matters, Peterson has gained millions of supporters as well as militant detractors whose attempts to silence him have only made him more popular. This presents a problem for psychoanalysis and depth psychology coming as it does at a time when the political conflict that is tearing societies apart has also cropped up into psychoanalytic institutions and publications, something that may be in a relationship of mutual reinforcement with Peterson’s ideas and fame.

The Peterson problem and the Frommian solution

What exactly is the Peterson problem? For many on the liberal-left the Jorden Peterson problem is one of the racism, sexism, transphobia, and the rise of Trumpism and the far-right. From this perspective, the Peterson phenomenon can be understood as nothing more than a right-wing reaction, his followers and readership representing a slumbering vein of toxic whiteness and masculinity (Burgis & McManus, 2020). Framing the issue this way, however, suggests a foregone conclusion that is difficult to get out of; clinicians may want to get clients and their loved ones and friends away from Peterson’s influence, as like in the culture, an interest in Peterson is defined as the problem itself rather than a representative symptom of something more. Such a view is misguided and will create clinical issues for psychoanalysis and therapists.

There are, of course, legitimate and important critiques to be made of Peterson’s ideas, politics, and clinical/self-help practice. Peterson’s rather idiosyncratic version of Jungian theory is not without its problems and limitations (Burston, 2020). There is no doubt, furthermore, that he has engaged in political rhetoric and practice, especially on social media, that deserves serious scrutiny and critique, and that his clinical interventions and advice on living is connected to a traditional, conservative worldview that many will strongly disagree with (Foiles, 2018). Furthermore, Peterson is getting more extreme, and even unhinged – especially on Twitter.²

The Peterson problem that is relevant to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists lies in the question: what kind of challenges does he offer to traditional ways of doing therapy in the context of the cultural and political polarization we are living through today? Peterson has brought therapeutic thinking and a version of psychoanalytic theory (predominantly based on a Jungian perspective) to millions of people outside the intellectual and social elite that have traditionally been able to access this world of ideas. Freudian theory and practice have long been part of upper-middle-class popular culture, especially in major urban centers, and has deep influence in literary circles, art, and cultural critique and among professionals and intellectuals (Hale, 1995). Popular Freudian concepts have seeped into popular culture more broadly, of course, and students learn the basics through liberal arts programs – yet Freudianism arguably has its strongest influence among the cultural elite. Peterson has done much to bring psychoanalytic ideas into discussions outside the circles of those who read The New York Times, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, read literary criticism in the Paris Review, or watch the films of David Lynch. Listeners to Peterson’s podcasts, YouTube, and the readers of his best-selling self-help books represent a mid-brow audience, not a cultural elite, and it is among this broad demographic that Peterson has found fame, wealth, and influence, changing the lives of many people in the process – whether this is for good or ill is another question.

For our purposes here, however, we will be concerned with what problems Peterson’s massive influence in popular culture is potentially causing for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. The four major challenges Peterson has created for psychoanalysis broadly defined are as follows: 1) reinforcing and sharpening the widespread attacks from the right on “woke” ideology, or in more academic terms, critical theories; 2) challenging the left-liberal political bias that exists within the psychoanalytic profession and the relative inattention to what Erich Fromm analyzed as left-wing and liberal authoritarianism (Burston, 1991; Costello et al., 2022; Durkin, 2014); 3) raising questions about the inability of psychoanalysts to reach potential clients and readers among the working and lower-middle classes – especially those without university degrees and who live outside of urban areas; and 4) highlighting the analytic tension that exists between focusing on structures, materialism, and history, acting to change the world, and encouraging people toward healing themselves and talking responsibility for their actions. Managing the Peterson problem centrally involves finding the right balance between these concerns on the part of therapists.

In moving toward possible solutions, we will ask how might we look to the once highly influential ideas of Erich Fromm to help us respond to the challenge Peterson poses to left-liberal psychotherapy today (McLaughlin, 2021b). Fromm was a major public psychoanalyst in the 40s, 50s, and 60s as the author of numerous best-selling works of social science – though was controversial among Freudians for his revisions and critiques of Freud’s work (Burston, 1991; Durkin, 2014; Friedman & Schreiber, 2013; Fromm, 1941, 1947, 1955, 1961a, 1961b, 1964, 1973, 1976; McLaughlin, 1998a, 1998b, 2021a). He is best known among the mass public for his best-selling Marxist self-help book, The Art of Loving (Fromm, 1956; Philipson, 2017), which could reasonably be called a left-wing alternative to Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life (2018) (McLaughlin, 2021b, 2021c).

Erich Fromm’s work is relevant for thinking about the Peterson phenomena despite a generational divide between the 1950s and 1960s, when Fromm was at the height of his influence, and the 2020s, when a reaction to this period of social change is being reflected 70 years down the road. We can see echoes of old issues in the controversy over Peterson’s views about gender, sex, race, inequality, and liberty and his related ideas about how people should strive to live a good life. Fromm’s public intellectual work helped to create the 1960s, and Peterson, in ways, can be read as a backlash (Burgis et al., 2020), or at the very least a correction, depending on one’s political views.

While Fromm and Peterson are politically very different, they are sociologically similar (McLaughlin, 2021b). This can be seen in how they combined clinical work, social science theorizing, and research, political engagement (albeit from different perspectives), and the writing of best-selling self-help books that made them both famous and controversial (McLaughlin, 2021a). The similarities and the differences between Fromm and Peterson provide analytic leverage for thinking about contemporary debates within psychoanalysis and clinical work from a historical-comparative perspective.

The timing is right for this kind of analysis as we are witnessing a revival of interest in the psychoanalytic work of Erich Fromm (Buechler, 2013; Chancer, 2017; Cortina, 2015; Frie, 2022) that is connected to many of the controversies swirling around Peterson. Fromm combined radical politics with his clinical work but managed to avoid some of the problems that can be created when politics replaces healing and radicalism and liberal orthodoxy becomes dogma, an issue that critiques of Peterson expose today even if often in unproductive and unhealthy ways (Lynskey, 2018). Fromm provides us with a framework to rethink these issues in ways that can help us to avoid some of the potentially damaging controversies facing clinicians today.

In what follows, we will focus first on the four problems Peterson is creating for psychoanalysis followed by a discussion of the lessons we can draw from Fromm’s example. We will conclude with some of the limitations of Fromm’s framework for addressing these issues, seeing this as a conversation starter rather than a blueprint for particular action. We will start with an analysis of the politics of therapy today by looking at right-wing attacks on clinicians and theorists who offer radical critiques of whiteness, although it is broadly relevant to versions of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, feminist, and queer psychoanalytic perspectives that can be targeted for public critique, especially when, as we will see through particular cases, there is somewhat more than a grain of truth behind the attacks (Burston, 2022).

Clinical work as social critique: Right wing provocations and the political targeting of therapists

The most immediate challenge Peterson poses to psychoanalytic practice is the broad right-wing critique he articulates against contemporary radical perspectives that he views as dominating therapeutic culture. Peterson’s account of these issues is an exaggeration, but many find it plausible due to widely publicized individual incidents of irresponsible writing and talks (Burston, 2022). Peterson argues that the moral and political crisis we face today is, to a significant extent, rooted in versions of a Marxist-influenced postmodernism that he views as having taken over Western universities before being taken up in the broader culture. While Peterson was active as a clinician for years and is deeply influenced by the Jungian tradition, his sharpest polemics have been largely reserved for other academics or the broader political world without too much emphasis on the particularities of the politics of therapy. His academic critiques often find him particularly indignant, and at times dismissive, of psychiatry, social psychology, and sociology. Peterson offers a challenge to ideas and research emerging from these disciplines through a view of them as extremist, having spread to the educated professional classes – including via the practices of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis.

Because of the fame Peterson has attained, his anti-left and anti-Marxist polemics contribute to recruiting young people to the right and mobilizing and amplifying critiques of left therapeutic ideas in the broader culture. Peterson is not, to be sure, a member of the alt-right or far-right. However, his complicated and sometimes ambivalent alliances with conservative activists, politicians, and intellectuals, including some truly distasteful characters in Canada, the United States, and globally, create a political problem for the psychoanalytic left. This is because he has taken right-wing adjacent ideas and translated them into a clinical perspective and brought that into mainstream culture, indirectly affecting the operational environment of clinical professions.

In our social media-saturated world, this challenge to psychoanalytic clinical work cannot be ignored, especially when individual practitioners give provocative talks or publish controversial articles that are easily, and at times reasonably, attacked by conservative and far-right outlets in addition to moderates and liberals (Burston, 2022). Peterson is more traditional conservative than far-right intellectual, and he does have personal connections to figures like Ben Shapiro (Peterson is now involved with Shapiro’s aforementioned Daily Wire), and libertarian-conservative (and now DeSantis supporter and election conspiracist) Dave Rubin, who accompanied Peterson on his 12 Rules for Life tour. Peterson’s own perspective used to be that of a moderate center-right Canadian conservative, this even though he also offers rather extreme critiques of what he calls “postmodern Neo-Marxism” that verge on red-baiting and paranoid conspiracy theories. However, given the influence of Lacan, post-structuralism, academic feminism, critical race theory, and various radical philosophies on contemporary clinical training and practice (Fitzsimons, 2019; Karson, 2022; Pruitt-Young, 2021), there are real issues to be discussed here about political bias and unconstructive rhetoric.

Most right-wing critiques of contemporary psychoanalysis are exaggerated moral panics echoing conservative fears of the popular psychoanalysis of the 1960s, but there are times when it is unwise, and even impossible, to ignore the issues Peterson puts on the table, a point well made by historian of psychology Daniel Burston in a provocative piece in the journal Free Associations (Burston, 2022). From Burston’s perspective, there is much value in something like critical race theory, but he rightly emphasizes the intellectual problems that exist in such examples as Dr. Donald Moss’s “On Having Whiteness,” published in The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (Moss, 2021), and Dr. Aruna Khilanani’s Yale Grand Round talk, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind” (Khilanani, 2021). Burston makes a compelling case that new tendencies toward new postmodernist influenced psychoanalytic critical race and critical theories, exemplified by these two thinkers, lack analytic rigor and empirical-clinical grounding. As such, this kind of work risks over-politicizing psychoanalysis in ways that will damage its credibility and success as a healing art.

Burston does not, however, support the banning of critical race theory as it is being attempted by various Republicans in the United States, and there is, of course, no excuse for death threats and abuse directed at clinicians with controversial ideas (Burston, 2022). Such incidents often involve a form of political polarization that takes complex clinical ideas out of context to score political points – usually in bad faith. At the same time, however, there is a compelling argument to be made that talking about whiteness as a mental illness or excessively vivid expressions of racially based violent emotions from left-liberal clinicians is part of the problem of political polarization problem needing to be addressed.

The attacks on liberal therapeutic views do not primarily come from Peterson, of course. There is a much longer and more aggressive tradition of right-wing attacks on leftists and intellectuals from earlier moments in American history that has only continued with the rise of Breibart and the partisanship of Fox News (Brown, 2020). Extreme ideas like suggesting that “whiteness” (to the degree this can even be meaningfully conceptualized) is a mental illness expressed by clinicians, offers inevitable fodder for use by bad faith actors. Thus, it is the responsibility of editors of journals and organizers of events to gatekeep so that responsible work dominates the profession’s public facing profile and dogmatism is avoided as much as possible. Scholars, teachers, and clinicians should be doing as much as they can to challenge ideas that lack clinical evidence, are framed in excessively polemical ways and which do not respect the humanity of everyone, including white individuals, males, and those with various forms of economic and cultural privilege – or even those without it who do not subscribe to left-liberal points of view (we are all “in it together” after all). The internet makes this much harder, of course, because one intemperate lecture, a single sloppily framed theoretical article, or an angry outburst on Twitter, by radical and irresponsible clinicians can easily be used to smear and attack the psychoanalytic profession as a whole. It is precisely here that the work of Erich Fromm can be useful.

Fromm was a Marxist humanist who offered a radical critique of the injustices of capitalism and patriarchy, the alienation of modernity, and the violence of colonialism and racial hatred while also being openly critical of Stalinism, the shortcomings of Marxism in application, and Freudian orthodoxy (Durkin, 2014; Fromm, 1955; McLaughlin, 2021b). Fromm did not sit on the sidelines and theorize, but rather engaged in radical political work and was also deeply committed to clinical work and the tradition of psychoanalysis, despite his differences with orthodox perspectives and the traditionalist institutions (Burston, 1991; Fromm, 1958, 1959, 1970; Funk, 1982, 2009, 2019; Funk & McLaughlin, 2015; Philipson, 2017). Scholars in the Frommian tradition, however, would never write or positively review articles like the Moss piece, as Frommian humanism is universalistic and rejects any notion of racial essentialism or medicalizing racism as an in-built mental illness as Moss does. Burston understands the utility and moral value of using metaphor to describe racism as a crime or disease infecting America or the world, but as a clinical category, he suggests following Fromm in calling racism a “socially patterned defect” (1941) and a “pathology of normalcy” (Fromm, 1955) (Burston, 2022, p. 23). Fromm also understood the moral legitimacy of revolution and violence as resistance to injustice, but the Frommian tradition leads to a rejection of invoking violence through racial resentment of the oppressed as a clinically helpful practice or a entirely useful avenue for social change.

The Frommian tradition furthermore insisted that psychoanalysis was a clinical enterprise first and foremost, and Fromm’s theories (like Freud and even Jung) came from careful observation of individual patients not abstract radical theorizing seen in, for example, Marcuse (Fromm, 1973), or many contemporary Lacanians (McLaughlin, 2018). Fromm’s insights push us toward care, evidence, and balance in the publications and lectures of radical psychoanalysts – something that would give less fuel to the increasingly violent attacks on the left and liberalism coming from a resurgent right, and which may even offer an opportunity for integration and healing.

An additional example of both the problems created by irresponsible action and ideas promoted by psychoanalysts and Fromm’s value as a way forward, can be seen with the recent resignation of Kerry Sulkowitz as President of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA) (Sulkowitz, 2023) in the wake of the controversy involving Lara Sheehi at George Washington University. The competing claims of racism and anti-Semitism both at George Washington University and in the APA are far too complex to outline, let alone adjudicate, here. It is clear, however, that it is necessary both to work on diversity and equity issues within psychoanalysis, as well as avoid excessively politicizing clinical practice, institute training, and conferences with attempts to mobilize political action on such complex issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Fromm openly opposed fascism, racism, and was a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights, while also avoiding some of the extremist politics on the left we saw in the late 1960s and see again in the digital activist sphere that Dr, Sheehi and other young radical psychoanalysts use to support Palestinian rights. Sheehi’s academic freedom, however, must be protected against right-wing pro-Israeli mobilizations, Fromm, gives us a political framework to help avoid turning psychoanalytic institutes into political battle grounds through a humanistic democratic left perspective.

Political bias and liberal and left-wing authoritarianism in the clinical world and beyond

It is not simply individual examples of immoderate rhetoric or questioning theoretical frameworks that are at issue in recent conservative attacks on the psychoanalytic left but also a general divide that has opened between the political views of teachers, writers, and practitioners in the clinical arts (who are largely societal elites), and the general population (Haidt, 2012). It is true, of course, that there is a long history of psychologists, psychoanalysts, and clinicians creating ideas that reinforce hierarchies and injustices based on class, race, religion, gender, and sexuality. It was far more likely in the past that the clinical professions were compromised by direct connections to, and sponsorship by, elite consensus than they are by the kind of revolutionary extremes that many in the right-wing media claim.

At the same time, however, when clinicians are overly influenced by ideas rooted in modern critical theory that is created by academics and social movement activists, there is a danger of psychoanalysts becoming too close to politics and social movements and too far away from healing. Peterson repeatedly makes the case that both contemporary social psychology, and clinical practices today are more steeped in a social justice orientation than is optimal. Peterson’s Jungian influenced writings, popular self-help books, public lectures, and YouTube presentations on mental health-related issues are intended as an alternative to the current state of the clinical work, and the social sciences more broadly. Clinicians will rightly be critical of much of Peterson’s ideas and approach – but this is somewhat a different discussion.

Peterson has hit a nerve with so many millions today to a large extent because he has taped into a psychological crisis that is particularly salient in modern societies involving a deep personal sense of alienation and desire for meaning (Fromm, 1955). The crisis of meaning is strong, especially among the young, where confusion and conflict over sex and gender roles can bring about both positive social change but also anxiety, uncertainty, and what sociologists call “anomie” (Marks, 1974). Even more political conflict and psychological uncertainty is flowing from contested questions in response to the social changes of the post-1960s period. Our societies are being torn apart, especially in the United States, by intense debates about individualism, collectivism, the roles of the market and the state as well as questions of race, sex, and gender, and America’s place in the world. Since the fall of 2016, Peterson’s public role as a political provocateur and social media celebrity brought his center-right perspective on these issues to millions around the world, using a clinical backdrop to demonstrate expertise and imbue it with legitimacy. The psychological aspects he presents have major implications for how clinicians and psychoanalytic theorists function in our current moment.

The context for all this is the massive intellectual and political challenges to the status quo represented by the emergence of global Trumpism and an even nastier neo-fascist resurgence that is taking place, particularly in Europe, and elsewhere (Blyth, 2016). Even in the middle of North American cultural politics, there is confusion and anxiety about the issues that Peterson is tapping into. What is the proper place for difference alongside equality between men and women? How do longstanding notions of masculinity and femininity as well as traditional religious beliefs engage with new concepts and cultural norms associated with, for instance, gay, transgender, and feminist rights movements? How does one move toward a more just society that confronts the brutality of the West’s past without burning everything down and throwing out what worked, destroying societal trust through polarizing “cancel culture” and extreme politics of identity? More contentiously, how do we deal with the tensions and conflicts between the rights of transgender people to be free of discrimination, violence, and stigma, with access to health care and societal support, with the rights of women for safe, sex-based spaces and parents’ rights to make medical decisions for minors (Barnes, 2023). Young people who are not fully committed to current liberal orthodoxies on elements of these issues are often drawn to Jordan Peterson even if nuance is not his strength – to put things politely.

Confronting these issues cannot be effectively done by simply dismissing Peterson through pointing to his politics or his own obvious psychological distresses in the wake of his dramatic rise to fame. It is true that Peterson’s dependency on benzodiazepines and life-threatening treatment in a Moscow hospital both took him out of circulation for nearly 2 years and left him a changed man who now behaves more than a little erratically. Peterson’s deal with the conservative American outlet The Daily Wire, his strong support of the trucker Freedom Convoy in Canada with its many troubling, anti-democratic elements, the trashing of Justin Trudeau as a dictator, and writing a “Conservative Manifesto” demonstrate he has moved further toward the right. But wholesale dismissal of either Peterson, or conservative views generally, even those that lean to the fringes on these issues, betrays a political bias that will not serve psychoanalysis and other clinically oriented practices well.

The core issue for psychoanalysts and clinicians should be what is happening in our societies that is creating new levels of anxiety and distress, especially among the young. The post 1960s cultural wars around feminism, gay rights, and the politics of race, colonialism, and the legacy of white supremacy are connected to both the anxiety many young people today feel as well as the appeal of Peterson. Most psychoanalysts, clinicians, and social scientists share a left-liberal worldview that sees the cultural and legal social changes that swept through North America since the 1960s as positive forms of progress.³ At the ideological level, the history of slavery and colonialism in the West was re-thought and critiqued from a new lens that highlighted what Michael Mann called the “dark side of democracy” (Mann, 2004). All this is to the good from our perspective, and mostly likely, we would posit, that of the majority of readers of this journal and practitioners in the psychoanalytic field. But we fear that this is precisely part of the problem. Psychoanalysis cannot effectively heal people if they do not have a comprehensive framework for thinking about society outside of the conceits brought to the clinical setting, especially if their clients are, for example, libertarians, conservatives, or traditionally religious. A dogmatic liberal-left perspective that does not examine its own biases and assumptions opens the door wide for Peterson’s critique, some of it valid even if it is presented in an overly dogmatic way.

Viewpoint diversity is required in clinical settings just as much as in the contemporary university (Lukiannoff & Haidt, 2018). The left-wing inclination of professors, therapists, and psychoanalysts should be understood in a broader context whereby conservatives in the United States are attempting to ban critical race theory and Marxism as part of a new McCarthyist enterprise. Many liberals, left-wing thinkers and activists themselves are using similar tactics to limit the spread of ideas they find distasteful, even if these lie in more traditionally conservative territory than that of far-right reaction. Left-wing de-platforming of conservative, centrist, or dissident left-wing feminist views using hate speech laws, big tech censorship policies, and social media mobbing has created a new problem for psychoanalysts who will find themselves pressured into embracing dogmas on these issues rather than aiming for balance and, most importantly, clinical exploration. Peterson did not create, of course, the longstanding practice of the American right targeting professors and the mental health professions as part of their efforts to defend and consolidate a puritan-influenced version of a white Christian nation or a right-leaning multiracial democracy that focuses on traditional gender norms and free markets at the expense of economic equality and protections for workers. Peterson’s fame was partly built atop polemics against “postmodern neo-Marxists” that have highlighted new issues, such as the transgender debate, climate change debates, and the contemporary crisis of masculinity in ways that has informed and inflamed these longstanding political debates and cultural battles.

When students and faculty at universities attempted to stop Peterson from speaking because of his views on pronouns and new laws protecting gender identity and expression in 2016–2017, he became a lightning rod for issues that psychoanalysts must deal with directly and differently than the latter community has thus far. Since Peterson’s de-platforming at McMaster University in the spring of 2017, controversies about free speech and academic freedom have accelerated and become increasingly polarized. Questions of transgender women in female sports, in woman’s spaces such as prisons, changing rooms, and domestic violence shelters, and, most crucially for psychoanalysts, serious debate about the proper clinical approach needed for those, particularly youth, who are dealing with gender dysphoria have become viciously contested. In the United Kingdom, there has emerged a series of controversies including the driving of “gender critical” feminist Kathleen Stock out of her philosophy position at the University of Sussex, legal cases involving gender critical feminists alleging discrimination based on their political and philosophical views, and a major investigation of the health outcomes and implications in gender affirming care provided by the Tavistock clinic in London.⁴

Within psychoanalytic institutions, newly contentious debates have emerged around biases on questions of gender identity, sex, and race both classical theoretical traditions and clinical practices. All this is creating just the kind of “politically correct” or “woke” (a contested and clumsy term, to be sure) climate that Peterson warned against in 2016. There are many scholars who reject much of the substance and tone of Peterson’s views on trans issues, for example, but agree there needs to be space for open discussion and debate.

Erich Fromm’s work can be helpful for dealing with free speech and academic freedom issues on our campuses and in clinical training institutes. Unlike most social-psychological perspectives, the Frommian orientation leaves ample room for the concept of left-wing authoritarianism (Shils, 1954) without engaging in anti-left and anti-progressive polemics that Peterson and many of his followers promote. It is not yet widely known among psychoanalysts just how central Fromm’s research on authoritarianism among workers and the lower-middle class in Weimar Germany was theoretically and methodologically influential to the development of the “F” scale and the study of authoritarian personality traits (Afary & Friedland, 2018; Brunner, 1994; Burston, 1991; Fromm, 1984; Kellner, 2016; McLaughlin, 2021a; Wheatland, 2009) associated today with Theodor Adorno and a team of Berkeley social psychologists (Adorno et al., 1950; Jay, 1973). The concept of the authoritarian personality is among the most influential contributions of social psychology in the 20^th century, and it is resurfacing in new psychological studies of the phenomenon across the political spectrum (Costello et al., 2022). Recent global political events are bringing attention back to theories and research on authoritarianism for obvious reasons.

One of the least emphasized problems in the psychoanalytic tradition and elsewhere, however, is the tendency of authoritarian personality research to focus almost exclusively on right-wing populist or traditional conservative versions of authoritarianism (Altemeyer & Altemeyer, 1981) to the exclusion of left-wing tendencies for domination and control, and in its most poisonous Stalinist versions, to kill and destroy – often on mass scales (Christie & Jahoda, 1954; Fromm, 1973). Fromm’s work helps us see authoritarianism in its multiple forms, allowing for a more nuanced response to Peterson’s attacks on “postmodern Neo-Marxism.”

The history of this research matters. Fromm was an early central figure in the German Frankfurt School tradition, a history that has partly been forgotten for a variety of complex reasons. Fromm undertook a qualitative “interpretive questionnaire” in the early 1930s under the direction of Max Horkheimer that attempted to get at the unconscious motivations of German workers on the left who ideologically were opposed to Nazism but whose authoritarian character weakened their ability and willingness to reject or resist fascism (Brunner, 1994). The study was not published until 1984, 4 years after Fromm’s death (Fromm, 1984). However, the issues it raised were taken up with more scholarly resources (and success) by a research team at the University of California in the late 1940s led by Theodor Adorno, a scholar who had replaced Fromm in the Frankfurt School network in the late 1930s when they were all exiled to the United States due to the rise of Nazism (Adorno et al., 1950).

The authoritarian personality “F” scale was very similar to Fromm’s early authoritarian character work but with a few significant differences. The Adorno study was more explicitly informed by orthodox Freudian theory than Fromm’s revisionist work that rejected libido theory in favor of a more diverse set of motivations (Fromm, 1955). Adorno’s team consisted of more established social psychologists with better training in quantitative methods than Fromm possessed, and the Adorno study focused more on anti-Semitism than the Weimar working class as a group that was central to Fromm’s version project. Most importantly for our purposes, however, The Authoritarian Personality (1950) was largely about right-wing authoritarianism, while Fromm insisted, both theoretically and politically, on the need to also address left-wing authoritarianism as well. In fact, Horkheimer and Adorno rejected the working class in Weimar study for publication in part because of Fromm’s focus on left-wing authoritarianism (McLaughlin, 2021a).

This tendency to reject the existence of left-wing authoritarianism continues to this day in social psychology and elsewhere, something Peterson has objected to vigorously and not without justification. The rise of global Trumpism and the far-right in Brazil, and large parts of Europe have created a new scholarly interested in research on right-wing authoritarianism, to be sure, but as part of a picture of polarization there are additional dynamics at play. Peterson has had a long-term interest in studying the social psychology of Nazism and the right and is no fascist sympathizer despite claims to the contrary. Peterson’s ideas lack the nuance that Fromm’s approach can offer in thinking about both the dangers of the populist, racist, and patriarchal religious right in today's polarized world. This raises questions about the authoritarianism we have plainly seen coming from the left as well (Lukiannoff & Haidt, 2018).

Psychoanalytic institutes as well as the broader therapeutic community deal with these issues through a focus on clinical training and proper clinical practice. Fromm’s framework for thinking about authoritarianism of both the left and the right is an invaluable resource for psychoanalysts dealing with attempts to limit legitimate debate and discussion within clinical fields to narrow orthodoxies. Fromm insists that authoritarianism has a social psychological logic that is not an exclusive property on any side of the political spectrum. Rather, his work reminds us that Stalinist lies and violence was a terrible blight on the 20^th century alongside other horrors committed by Marxist-Leninist inspired regimes. Theoretical work in psychoanalysis that draws on Marxist work needs to both highlight the historical materialist themes that illuminate structural inequalities and the psyche-shaping hidden injuries of class while acknowledging the inbuilt potential for pathology that can easily become a part of political and sociological thinking. Fromm does so while avoiding both dogmatic radicalism and the anti-left polemics that made Peterson famous, and which are, in comparison to Fromm, simplistic, and unhelpful.

These contain important implications for psychoanalysis today. As the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon enters the psychoanalytic literature in ways that help clinicians address the psychic damage of racism, psychoanalysts should be reminded that there was authoritarianism aplenty in the communist tradition and the revolutionary Third Worldism these thinkers were rooted in, respectively (Fanon, 1967; Morris, 2015). Additionally, psychoanalysts drawing on Edward Said’s critique of “orientalism” and other forms of othering would do well to remember Fromm’s warnings about the authoritarian implications of thinking about Freudian theory as a philosophical system that can be imposed on people as a political project, as opposed to highlighting the very concrete trial and error processes that is central to clinical work (McLaughlin, 2018).

Fromm’s version of critical theory is indispensable for avoiding left-authoritarianism in psychoanalysis. Marcuse’s notion of “repressive tolerance” whereby activists, scholars, and revolutionaries as encouraged to reject liberal tolerance of reactionary ideas offers a template for what we see today in universities and on social media platforms as ideas that go against the liberal orthodoxy of the day are “canceled” (Lukiannoff & Haidt, 2018; Marcuse, 1965), actions which predictably invite a similar response from the radical right. There is little empirical research evidence on this topic to date that can be cited, but it seems likely that a similar shutting down of open debate and discourse we have seen in universities and on Twitter would also be occurring in psychoanalytic institutes when complex questions about race, gender, and sexuality and colonialism intersect with traditional psychoanalytic theories and texts. The psychoanalytic community, after all, is not immune to institutional pathologies that appear to have exploded in the wider socio-political-culture throughout Western societies in recent years. Any students and faculty in psychoanalytic institutes who follow Marcuse’s repressive tolerance ideas and allow the banning of conservative writings will not provide quality clinical training for a diverse set of patients who, beyond the specificities of their identity, may have very different ways of looking at the world.

Fromm, despite his shared roots in Hegelian Marxism, was a strong and clear critic of Marcuse’s politics, viewing his vision as nihilistic and his implicit support for shutting down conservative voices as authoritarian (McLaughlin, 2018). Students and teachers at psychoanalytic institutes, especially the politically radical voices, could benefit from reading more Fromm and less Marcuse.

Communicating to new publics during a crisis of meaning

The Peterson problem in psychoanalysis involves more than what is read and discussed in clinically oriented institutions. There is a broader cultural debate about the role of emotions and the unconscious in politics and social life that is spread on YouTube, in best-selling books, and in packed lecture halls. We are living through a global mental health crisis that has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but which has roots that go far deeper. America and Canada in particular, are in the throes of a deep social, psychological, and, by proxy, political crisis as mental health problems have exploded, alcohol/drug addictions and related deaths of despair have skyrocketed, crises that are rooted in increased feelings of loneliness and isolation. Decent job prospects are grim as employment becomes more insecure and wages do not keep pace with the cost of living and global pandemic-related inflation. Family and community bonds have grown increasingly frayed – indeed, many are not having families at all – and levels of institutional and societal trust are rapidly decreasing (Haidt, 2022). This is all happening against a backdrop threat of catastrophic climate change, and more recently, nuclear war. The related psychological dynamics are being exacerbated by the chaos and anxiety that are fed by social media and, of course, the nearly 3-year-long global pandemic, all taking place in the context of a steep decline of local community (West, 1991).

Peterson is not simply a conservative political commentator, although he is also that, but he is also visibility and effectively acting as a popular provider of therapeutic insights that address these issues for an Internet-mediated audience through his YouTube videos and his two best-selling self -help books 12 Rules for Life (2018) and Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (2021). As noted, he also functions as a kind of male role model/father figure for millions of young people at a time when they are looking for guidance against a landscape that people who do not share Peterson’s worldview also would likely describe as chaotic, and certainly confusing and anxiety producing.

Some of the appeal of Peterson can be explained by his political controversies and the general charisma he projects as a speaker (something that borders on messianism at moments, something that Fromm shares (Braune, 2014)), as well as appeals to popular prejudices, but the “market” for his message has ultimately been created by modern societies themselves. These technologically advanced societies have created what the conservative sociologist and Durkheimian scholar Robert Nisbet called “loose individuals” (Nisbet, 2012). Separated from supports by the powerful forces of modernity, the market, and the decline of community and family bonds while experiencing declining prospects relative to their parents, North America’s young people are in crisis. Peterson clearly speaks to millions with a message that resonates for those who buy his books, follow him on YouTube, and flock to his speaking tours.

Psychoanalysts can choose to ignore all this, instead remaining ensconced in an elite professional bubble with some occasional outreach work done via legacy newspapers, magazines, and in quality commercial presses on the part of a select group of the field’s public intellectuals. Fromm’s example and model for doing public psychoanalytic work, however, can help us think about some important issues that are raised by Peterson’s mass appeal that psychoanalysts do not appear to be engaging with enough. Alienation, loneliness, despair, cultural and personal confusion, and deep dread regarding the future are widespread in the cultural context in which Peterson’s ideas are spreading and influencing people. These are problems that cannot be adequately addressed by scapegoating conservatives or trying to eliminate any ideas that have fallen on the wrong side of new progressive orthodoxies. In fact, it is much more likely that such an approach points people toward more radical figures in order to feel “heard.” The framework Fromm outlined in Escape from Freedom (1941) and, particularly, The Sane Society (1955), which he developed over four decades of political, theoretical, and clinical work provides an alternative way of dealing with the very real issues to which contemporary psychoanalysts must address themselves.

Too much of the left today remains focused on economics, and even more so, dogmatic versions of liberal social programs without addressing psychosocial dynamics. The most important challenge to contemporary psychoanalysts, however, is the one that Peterson offers, which does not involve economic or social policy issues (as important as they remain) but concerns of culture and meaning that cut to the core of human identity. Peterson insists that young people today are suffering from a major crisis of meaning related to the secular nature of our societies, the decline of family and traditional forms of authority, and the polarizing shaming often directed at young men by social justice-oriented critics of capitalism and patriarchy. The use of drugs, alcohol, and application-mediated hedonistic sex that separates people from taking responsibility for others in addition to their own fate, is a barrier to the good life according to Peterson. Most contemporary psychoanalysts and clinicians, especially in urban areas outside the control of religious pastoral care, are themselves secular and thus share versions of the culturally liberal world view that Peterson defines as the problem. But we need not agree with Peterson on this point in order to insist that the issues he raises should be taken seriously.

The traditional Marxist-humanist, social democratic left-wing perspective on many of these issues would highlight questions of economics, social inequality, and the role of the state in creating alternatives in addition to encouraging a holistic and personal therapeutic approach. Peterson’s militantly pro-capitalist and libertarian perspective, in contrast, has found resonance among millions of right-leaning professionals and activists, as well as millions of young people who have lost faith in mainstream left-liberal orthodoxies. Less young people are in unions, especially in the United States, the gig economy is precarious, and influencer culture is toxically entrepreneurial, and while this is ripe material for a classic Marxist critique, Peterson offers personal advice on how to exist responsibly within these paradigms. Peterson highlights the positives of capitalist economies, emphasizing the need for people to take individual responsibility for their lives, overlapping in many places the worldview and philosophy of psychoanalysis and other similar therapies, even if the latter tends to be on the left-liberal side of political debates. Fromm’s audience was more left-wing, often rooted among creative workers in white collar jobs, many with university educations, when this was far less common, but also extended far beyond this type of audience.

As psychoanalyst and sociologist Ilene Philipson suggests, “Second only to Freud, Erich Fromm remains the most widely read psychoanalyst in history” (Philipson, 2017, p. 52). Fromm was world famous, and sold millions of books, dwarfing contemporary popularizing psychoanalysts like Stephen Mitchell (2003) and his Can Love Last, which sold over 20,000 books (Philipson, 2017, p. 3; Stepansky, 2009). Among contemporary thinkers that are rooted in depth psychology coming out of the psychoanalytic tradition, only Jordan Peterson speaks to anything like the size of Fromm’s audience, although Peterson’s influence it is amplified by social media and rooted in a much different kind of sensibility and political moment. Psychoanalysts ignore this kind of non-elite exposure to versions of their ideas at their peril. Fromm’s public intellectual presentation of psychoanalysis can respond to Peterson’s challenge: it was addressed to the masses rather than to elite, cosmopolitan audiences, and points the way toward new approaches for engaging mass publics while dealing with political and social issues from a psychodynamic perspective. However, none of this should distract us from addressing the core clinical questions that psychoanalysts must tackle in their practice. These questions lead us to the final components and tensions of the Peterson problem.

Changing the world versus healing individuals

The core of the Peterson problem for psychoanalysis is rooted in the inevitable tension between what Cornel West (1991) calls “conservative behaviourism” and “liberal structuralism” that is exposed in complicated ways through the practice of clinical work. Sociologists and political radicals all know that individuals cannot be held responsible for their problems to the degree that their behavior explains it all away, without also placing a focus on structural inequalities. Putting the blame solely on individuals for their unhappy fates is not what clinicians do. At the same time, a left-wing structuralism that denies the need for individual agency and accountability is also not credible. No one in the therapeutic world would believe in a purely structural perspective since it would render therapy and clinical practice irrelevant. Indeed, Peterson’s mass appeal partly comes from his mocking of a view he attributes to leftists, Marxists, and critical race theorists who blame the suffering of individuals on abstractions like capitalism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. Serious left-wing intellectuals do not hold such absurdly reductive and simplistic versions of critical theories of the kind that have spread into universities, social work, and the teaching professions, often in the form of belittling anti-oppression workshops and the toxic power plays we see on social media. Considering this, Peterson’s critique is compelling to many despite its obvious exaggerations and his own theoretical ignorance.

Peterson’s message represents one pole in a dialectic whereby the political right puts an emphasis on either individual choice or the distribution of talent to explain inequality, while the left chiefly highlights structures and history – debates about these issues that have reached a tenor that is tearing societies apart. Due to digital social technology these older debates have become democratized which has contributed to their lightning-quick dissemination and reaction, leading to widespread polarization (Haidt, 2022). Fromm’s version of psychoanalysis offers the most important and serious challenge to such political polarization; his humanism points the way toward real, radical alternative ways of thinking about human suffering and the social arrangements that reinforce hopelessness and despair. True radicals like Fromm refuse to choose between the false alternatives offered by both Peterson and his critics.

Demonstrating his interest in existentialism (something Peterson shares), Fromm argued for what he dubbed “alternativism,” whereby history, structure, and the choices people have made in the past become internalized as habit and character. This places limits on the options people have in life, and, as such, requires refocusing on the choices people may still have available to them to find a different path forward. For Fromm, therapists and political radicals must encourage this mode of deliberation rather than dictate it. Never a simplistic feel-good theorist and thinker, Fromm understood how pre-capitalist and capitalist inequalities put serious limits on the options individuals have in life. The role of the therapist and the political activist are different, to be sure, but for Fromm they must both work to unleash creative energies and agency. Individual effort to clean up one’s room and emotional life, thus taking responsibility for one’s fate as Peterson suggests, is reflected in Fromm’s framework. Fromm acknowledges all this as any good therapist must, while also insisting that changing the world and challenging injustice and inequality is also essential. In fact, it may be as Roger Frie (2003) argued, that the most salient explanation for Fromm’s relative decline in influence among psychoanalysis was the fact that he insisted that psychoanalysts could not “exist as purely professional, that is, clinical discipline” (Frie, 2003, p. 865 cited in Philipson, 2017, p. 57).

Fromm did not always get this delicate balancing act right, but he was both aware of the dangers and committed to the therapeutic enterprise in conjunction with communicating psychoanalytic ideas to a mass audience and addressing himself to myriad left-wing political concerns. To the extent that the therapeutic profession moves too far away from its core mission of healing and creating self-awareness among clients to promoting a narrow and simplistic social justice-oriented form of activism and political posturing, there is a problem. Psychoanalysts who promote an overly ideological form of therapeutic practice and prescriptive sets of ideas as clinical solutions make the profession vulnerable to the charges of neo-Marxist, or even liberal, political bias.

This situation cuts the profession off from vast demographics of the potential clients who are deeply suffering from alienation, anxiety, loneliness, economic insecurity, and depression. Fromm was willing to engage these mass publics in his writings, and in doing so risked being dismissed by both the intellectual elites who wrote largely to their own field in newspapers and magazines, and the clinical establishment who put a priority on publishing in professional journals over clinically engaging with a larger public – often preemptively dismissing the latter as “duped” and so not worth the time. Like Fromm, Peterson has taken psychoanalytic ideas directly to this mass public.

Dismissing Peterson’s perspective on the basis of an issue with his audience is simply not good enough, and psychoanalysts could do worse than following Fromm’s path in combining a therapeutic and political-analytical perspective in a creative synthesis aimed at lay audiences. It is true that Peterson’s philosophy of life and the resulting advice he gives to young people is outside of mainstream therapeutic culture, and he draws from Freudian-Jungian theory and uses more behavioral modification techniques than many psychoanalysts, but there is an argument that something of what he is doing is working and reaching people. What distinguished his professional clinical practice alongside his self-help advice in books, public lectures, and YouTube missives, was a relatively culturally conservative stress on individual responsibility. He offers a critique of societal dynamics from that basis, emphasizing a closer adherence to traditional norms around sexuality, work ethic, respect for authority and a rejection of some of the most influential ideas about social justice that circulate among therapists today. “Clean your room and get your own act together before trying to change the world,” Peterson insists, a direct challenge to the perspectives of some left-wing psychoanalysts and many radical professors who cast responsibility and blame elsewhere, particularly toward structural abstractions.

Peterson, whatever one thinks of his ideas and politics, is speaking effectively to millions of people who are struggling with emotional issues and life problems – an audience to whom therapists should be reaching out and engaging with (Clarke, 2018). Perhaps even more centrally, the only way clinicians can respond effectively to Peterson’s reactionary, but often empowering message is with better political and narrative alternatives as well as real engagement with individual human suffering – of all types. Fromm’s approach has its limitations both in terms of political analysis and clinical insight. Starting with Fromm’s framework, however, provides the intellectual and moral leverage for responding to and engaging with Peterson’s reactionary psychoanalytic politics while transcending their limitations.

Conclusion: Moving beyond the Peterson debate

Erich Fromm can help to inspire a psychoanalytic response to the challenges Peterson poses to the profession and its role in society, but ultimately, we need to move beyond both Peterson’s reactionary Jungian populism and Fromm’s mid-20th-century critical theory and revisionist psychoanalysis. There is greatness as well as limitations in Fromm’s theories and clinical practice (Cortina, 2015), both in general and how his framework can be used to respond to Peterson. We will conclude here with some thoughts on the ways Fromm’s theories require being reformulated for the 21^st century, and with ideas about how a broader response to Peterson than a Frommian one is needed from within the psychoanalytic tradition and related institutions.

Fromm was a brilliant Marxist-humanist supporter of individual freedoms and rights who also opposed predatory mass capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, militarism, the destruction of the environment, and the alienation and anxiety inherent in the freedoms of modernity. Yet Fromm’s sociological ideas did not do enough to systematically theorize racism, sexism, antisemitism, and religious bigotries, especially after he became famous for writing Escape from Freedom (1941). Responses to Peterson’s politics will be aided by Fromm’s humanist sociology and radicalism, but we need a new positive politics that goes beyond both figures.

Fromm was also an original revisionist psychoanalytic theorist and creative clinician who helped inspire object relations, as well as relational and interpersonal versions of psychoanalysis. Thus, his therapeutic work is useful for those thinking about how to respond clinically to the Peterson challenge. And yet Fromm never wrote a major book on his clinical approach, and he has been criticized for not properly analyzing the issue of transference, and for allowing his political views, and some say his own narcissism, to distort his clinical work (Frie, 2003; Funk, 2009, 2019; Maccoby, 1995; Silver, 2017). From a sociological perspective, furthermore, Fromm’s fame and the fact that he was, much like Peterson, playing multiple roles as a political activist, scholar, prophet, celebrity intellectual, psychoanalytic theorist, and clinician all at the same time both improved and damaged the coherence and power of his analysis (McLaughlin, 2021b, 2021c). Modern psychoanalytic theory has made enormous progress beyond Fromm and a full response to Peterson will require efforts on the part of a whole range of schools of thought and approaches (McLaughlin, 2017, 2019).

Psychoanalysis can only effectively engage in public dialogue in opposition to both left and right-wing authoritarianism and address the crisis of democracy and meaning that modernity faces with the development of a synthetic general psychoanalysis that addresses public issues without the jargon, internal bickering and factional infighting that has characterized the psychoanalytic world since Freud’s time (McLaughlin, 2019). Real theoretical and clinical issues divide Kleinians, orthodox Freudian, object relationists, interpersonal, self and relational, Lacanians, and Jungians, but the public debate Peterson has created has opened new space for psychoanalytic thinking that calls for a united effort directed toward addressing the big issues while bracketing questions that are only relevant to specialists and training analysts. Peterson is taking much of our public debate about psyche and society in the wrong directions, but he is not wrong about everything (Burgis & McManus, 2020; Burgis et al., 2020), and must be substantively responded to with better analysis rather than cheap smears and deplatforming.

Erich Fromm provides a starting point for this serious response to the Jordan Peterson problem. Answers to the questions Peterson has raised will have to be generated out of lively and open debate among psychoanalytic students, theorists, clinicians, friends and supporters of the power and utility of depth psychology for thinking about politics and the psyche. We have attempted here to lay out some of the contours of what that discussion might look like. There are fewer more important debates to be had in the psychoanalytic world as how to deal with the political polarization, anger, and confusion that has spun out of control in a numbingly information-saturated world riven with increasingly painful, political and emotional conflict. Ignoring the popularity of Peterson will not work, and continuing attacks on him as a person reinforces rather than moves beyond the polarization issue that good psychoanalysts should be working on transcending through a project rooted in the desire for emotional healing and self-understanding. Erich Fromm’s relevance for today’s depth psychology and clinical work becomes even more clear when one directly addresses the contemporary crisis of both psychoanalysis and democracy through the political and institutional lens we have offered here.

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Notes on contributors

Neil McLaughlin

Neil McLaughlin, Ph.D., is a Professor of Sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and has a courtesy appointment at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. His most recent publications include Erich Fromm and Global Public Sociology (2021 and 2023 paperback: Bristol University Press). He studies public intellectuals, the politics of higher education and Soros conspiracy theories.

Neil Wegenschimmel

Neil Wegenschimmel, M.A., is a graduate student in social psychology at the University of Waterloo where he researches cultural change, radicalism, and authoritarianism. He is broadly interested in belief in different contexts: religion, extremism, radicalism, polarization, nihilism, media, and information consumption, and the effect of digital social life on what we see as being real or true.

Notes

¹ 12 Rules for Life was already underway when Peterson published his controversial YouTube videos. While we cannot say whether his publishing contract was locked in, it appears the book was largely written before he skyrocketed into public attention.

² A brief perusal of Peterson’s recent activity on Twitter sees it filled with adjective-loaded insults directed toward individuals and institutions that he opposes (with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau getting special attention), allusions to World Economic Forum (WEF) conspiracies, and more outwardly pro-Trump and pro-populist activity, including a video by Trump originally posted by cultural critic turned conspiracy theorist James Lindsay, where the former suggests a number of legal reforms to eliminate “wokeness” from education – in order to protect free speech, of course.

³ Seen in the expansion of freedoms for women in the workplace and domestic spheres, the extension of civil rights to African Americans, and legal protections for the sexuality and identities of gay and trans people respectively.

⁴ For background on this debate from the gender critical perspective, see Joyce 2021 and Maitlis 2023.