The most valuable question raised by Stella O’Malley’s conversation with Ian Cox on Beyond Gender concerns what happens when psychotherapy becomes an instrument of collective belief. Can a profession devoted to understanding people tolerate practitioners who disagree? Cox’s accounts of professional exclusion deserve attention. Yet, the discussion weakens its case when it compresses Marxism, postmodernism, qualitative research and contemporary activism into a single destructive force. A Jungian reading asks whether the desire to expose ideological certainty can itself become a source of certainty.
Cox describes students reluctant to work with conservative clients and reports that placement interviews tested allegiance to his views. If accurate, these claims raise serious concerns about professional openness. Cox’s strongest argument, therefore, is that therapists must recognize their prejudices, but the broader claim that these incidents reveal one underlying ideological machine requires evidence beyond the incidents themselves.
What an Ideology Offers
What is an ideology? A useful working definition is a framework connecting beliefs about society with values and proposals for how people should live. Liberalism and conservatism qualify alongside socialism. Having such commitments does not automatically make someone dogmatic. The danger emerges when a framework claims exhaustive explanatory power, treats disagreement as moral failure and makes itself immune to correction.
In The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel describes ideology’s attraction to people experiencing uncertainty: “To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home” (2010, p. 25). The passage concerns the post-totalitarian system he opposed; its psychological insight can travel further. Ideology offers belonging, relief from ambiguity and a ready explanation of suffering. Those consolations help explain why intelligent people sometimes defend a framework more fiercely than they examine it.
Is this comparable to religion? Sometimes, but religion cannot simply mean irrational belief. Religious traditions involve ritual, community, ethical obligations and relationships with what they understand as sacred. Secular movements can acquire comparable patterns of orthodoxy, heresy and redemption without becoming religions in every respect. Calling an opponent’s position religious identifies little unless we specify the resemblance.
In The Undiscovered Self, Jung distinguishes collective creeds from an individual’s relationship with a transcendent reality. Religious experience could counterbalance collective power; religious institutions could also demand conformity. His distinction complicates any easy division between enlightened secular reason and irrational faith. Psychologically, the question is whether a belief deepens responsibility or transfers it to an unquestionable authority.
Jung and the Totalising Idea
Jung’s warning becomes especially pointed when applied to psychotherapy. In The Practice of Psychotherapy, he writes: “When the political aim predominates there can be no doubt that a secondary thing has been made the primary thing” (1966, p. 107). He then describes the danger of reducing therapy to a technique serving the totalitarian state. The individual’s development becomes subordinate to an external programme.
This supports Cox’s objection to political conformity. It also challenges his assurance that Jung would endorse his position because Jung warned against adopting counter-ideological weapons to battle with any prevailing drift towards idealism that we are contesting. Jung was principally in favour of individuals and challenged anything that resulted in the massificaiton of human experience. Jung’s concept of the shadow, for example, concerns what we fail to acknowledge in ourselves, including aggression, dependence and the wish to dominate. Jung’s development of the idea of Projection locates those qualities not simply in others, but also within ourselves. As above, so below, and as without, so within. A depth-psychological reading therefore asks what happens when one camp becomes the repository of everything destructive while our own represents reason and humanity? This is a question about the argument’s structure, not a diagnosis of either speaker.
Jung’s principal of individuation involves differentiating oneself from collective identities while recognizing unconscious influences and obligations to others. It does not mean that every conscious self-description is beyond examination. Equally, invoking the unconscious does not entitle a therapist to impose a preferred identity or outcome. Jung offers a discipline of inquiry: “Every interpretation is an hypothesis, an attempt to read an unknown text” (1966, p. 150). His own formulations must remain open to criticism too.
Untangling Postmodernism and the Linguistic Turn
Much of what Cox calls postmodernism, I would take issue with, as Cox offers largely a polemical account of poststructuralism, particularly its attention to discourse, unstable meanings and the relationship between knowledge and power. Derrida’s deconstruction and Foucault’s historical investigations are distinct projects, although both are commonly associated with postmodern thought. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cautions that these thinkers resisted such labels.
The linguistic turn is broader and earlier still. It redirects philosophical attention towards language and how it shapes the questions we can ask and the accounts we give of reality. It includes traditions far removed from poststructuralism. Richard Rorty’s 1967 anthology helped consolidate the term, but these overlapping histories cannot be reduced to a coordinated assault on science. Chomsky, whom Cox includes in his genealogy, explicitly defended rational inquiry against attacks on science and Enlightenment ideals.
Recognizing that categories have histories does not establish that bodies are imaginary, or that evidence is optional. Likewise, qualitative inquiry is not synonymous with postmodernism. Cox’s concern about poorly defined concepts is valuable, but disagreement over a definition of creativity does not show that creativity is unreal. It shows why definitions, methods and interpretations need scrutiny. Jung’s attention to dreams, symbols and individual experience would sit awkwardly within a blanket dismissal of subjective material.
Warnings About Reality and Representation
Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard and Philip K. Dick, perhaps, offer another way to approach postmodern culture. They are not interchangeable theorists, and Dick is principally a novelist. Their work can nevertheless be read as warnings about manipulated reality, interpretative overconfidence and systems that manufacture belief, rather than instruction manuals for destroying truth.
For Baudrillard, simulation goes beyond copying an existing reality: models and signs increasingly organize what counts as real. Hyperreality names the resulting condition in which representation and reality become difficult to distinguish, and models precede what they supposedly represent. His account of Disneyland unsettles the reassuring division between an artificial entertainment space and an authentic world outside. Applied to this podcast, the warning concerns political labels that become so convincing that actual people disappear behind them.
Eco’s irony offers awareness of inherited language and the limits of innocence. In his postscript to The Name of the Rose, he explores how people can still communicate meaning while acknowledging that familiar expressions have already been used. Irony need not destroy sincerity; it can prevent sincerity from becoming self-important. Read this way, the novel warns about certainty defended against laughter and inquiry.
Dick’s 1978 essay on constructing fictional universes examines the power of manufactured realities to produce inauthentic human responses. His unstable worlds ask what remains trustworthy when appearances collapse. Reading these writers as endorsing deception confuses the disturbing conditions they explore with a programme they want us to adopt.
Building After Critique
Cox’s question about what follows deconstruction deserves an answer. Metamodernism names several attempts to recover commitment and constructive ambition without forgetting postmodern criticism. In their 2010 essay, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker describe an oscillation between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony. This is an account of an emerging sensibility, rather than a unified political platform.
The political strand associated with Hanzi Freinacht’s The Nordic Ideology moves more explicitly towards a coherent programme linking democratic development, empirical inquiry, community and inner growth. The point raised by Frienacht is explicit: after the deconstruction must come the reconstruction. Perhaps what Cox is reaching for is a renewed focus on the process of deliberation and the capacity to work with complexity. Any pattern of agreed coherence is valuable, but it must enable reaction action and remain revisable. It becomes dangerous if developmental language licenses a new elite to dismiss everyone else as insufficiently evolved.
For psychotherapy, the constructive task is concrete: protect disagreement, examine evidence carefully, explore experience without predetermined conclusions, and make room for people whose lives unsettle our categories. This includes conservative clients, trans people and people who detransition. The strongest response to totalising ideology begins when understanding another person matters more than securing their agreement. As Robert Prus noted:
“What is required to address the intersubjectively-mediated reality in which and on which human group life is constituted, is a pragmatic appreciation of the human life-world as it is accomplished on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis” (Prus, 1996, p. 246). “This means developing theory that is methodologically grounded in (and informed by) people’s experiences […] rather than embarking on high-level (grand) theorising or pursuing agendas intended to change or control the nature or direction of community life.” Robert Prus, Beyond the Power Mystique (1999), p. 6,
Sources from the Quotes Collection
C. G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, second edition (1966), pp. 107 and 150. Collection file: Jung-The-Practice-of-Psychotherapy-001-2026-04-20.docx.
Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, edited by John Keane (2010), p. 25. Collection file: Vaclav Havel – The Power of the Powerless 001 2013-09-08.docx.
The discussion of Freinacht also draws on the collection’s The-Nordic-Ideology-Review-001-2020-03-31.docx, a review of The Nordic Ideology (2019), rather than treating the review as a primary quotation from Freinacht.
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