Enantiodromia: From Objectification to Subjectification

Not so long ago, the principal complaint was about the “objectification” of the subject. That was the complaint about the Old Normal, as it were. But there has been a dramatic reversal of this dynamic, a seemingly revealing example of Jung’s “enantiodromia” or reversal at the extremity. The problem of the “New Normal” is the subjectification of the objective.

This notion of the subjectification of objective reality was something we already explored in earlier posts in The Chrysalis, particularly those posts dealing with Rolf Jensen’s book The Dream Society. This “Dream Society” can only be understood as the subjectification of what we normally take to be “objective reality”.

I didn’t object to Jensen’s basic thesis about the new primacy of the Imagination. What I did object to about the book was its attempt to harness the imagination for purposes of social and psychological manipulation and control — basically, capturing the imagination and spiritual enslavement, which is precisely what Jean Gebser called the “demonic” or “the sorceric” as also being the grave danger of an “Age of Subjectivism”, as Aurobindo called that.

What twigged that again was reading an article today that described covid-19 delirium. “‘They Want to Kill Me’: Many COVID Patients Have Terrifying Delirium“. Reading the article, I realised that a coronavirus delirium doesn’t seem much different from the pandaemonium of our present “chaotic transition,” or what we often refer to as “the New Normal”.

What does that suggest but the breakdown of the conventional membrane that separates the subjective and objective and a weird twist of fate by which the objectification of the subjective suddenly reverts into a subjectification of the objective, something that Stirk’s referred to as “the Triumph of the Irrational” (Technology and Magic).

The subjectification of objective reality would certainly bring with it a “crisis of truth” by our inability to discern between what is conventionally seen as the unreal and the real. But what the subjectication of objective reality leads to cannot be described in such terms, but only as the “irreal”. The irreal (which is, I’m sure, related to the word “eerie”) is the domain where sasquatches and Loch Ness serpents, monsters and aliens from outer space, unicorns, devils and angels all roam freely and assume objective form (such as the egregores). What also roams freely are formerly repressed fears, anxieties, complexes, phantasmagoria, fantasies and nightmare all of which seem to assume objective reality.

This subjectification of all objective reality would definitely describe the meaning of “the culture of narcissism”.

The word “delirium”, which is Latin, has pretty much the same meaning as the Greek “paranoia” — para + noos. Oddly, delirium originally suggested being stuck between two furrows (or, as we might say today, not in the groove) as Greek “paranoia” or insanity meant being of two minds or stuck between two minds (or, as we might say today, “beside oneself” or “not in one’s right mind”).

In the previous post I referred to the problem of the “conflation” of the subjective and objective which is pretty has pretty much the same meaning as the subjectication of objective reality and equivalently a loss of discernment — a failure of discerning reason. The danger here is not so much that we take the objective into ourselves, but that we dissolve completely into the objective, which was the fate of Narcissus. And we are certainly close to this when we invest our identity in certain “brand” images and lose ourselves in them so that they begin to seem more alive than we are:

“Come alive with Pepsi” as it were. We have to keep our wits about us.

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