Toe in the Water

You're Okay, How Am I?

You’re Okay, How Am I?

Listening to yet another Jordan Peterson video the other day, I realised something that has struck me many times in the past. It’s the kind of thing that makes a big impact for a while but then drifts away in the busy-ness of life until something happens and it’s enormously apparent again.

Jordan was in the middle of one of his complex explanations of something psychological and deep when it occurred to me. Psychologists are just rediscovering things that writers have known for hundreds of years. And it’s because they’re Johnnies-come-lately that they invent new names for everything and dress things up in such complex language.

I know it sounds big-headed but there’s truth in it. Do you think Freud knew anything that Shakespeare didn’t? And Jung wiser in the ways of humanity than Aristophanes? No, they just used different language to muddle their way through to the same understandings.

Humanity has been the study of humanity since the invention of language. And its our own complexity that makes it endlessly interesting and variable. There are more schools of psychiatric thought than there are denominations of Christianity. And all that in not much more than a hundred years. Making up new words is a task that can go on forever.

Which is not to belittle psychology or Mr Peterson. They make a lot of sense at times. But let’s not forget who got there first.


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