The ‘image of thought’ and the State- form in Jung’s ‘The undiscovered self’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Treatise on nomadology’

In this chapter Christian McMillan explores conceptual affinities between Jung’s work and that of Deleuze and his co-writer Félix Guattari (1930-1992). He draws extensively from one of Jung’s final essays, ‘The undiscovered self (present and future)’ (1957), which was first published after the two world wars and in the immediate aftermath of the Red Scare in the United States. Jung’s essay is noteworthy for its critique of the role of the state in modern times. Jung analyses the ways in which the state organises and orientates thought in a one-sided, ethically deleterious manner that excludes alternative forms of organisation. McMillan parallels this with Deleuze’s critical focus on the organisation and distribution of relations within thought systems, of which the state is one variation. In the first half of the chapter McMillan examines various concepts that Jung presents in his essay: positive concepts such as ‘individual’ and ‘whole-man’ and negative concepts such as ‘mass man’, ‘statistical man’, and ‘State’. In the second half of the chapter McMillan relates Jung’s analysis of the ways in which thought is orientated by the abstract idea of the modern state to Deleuze’s critique of the image of thought, which formed a crucial part of his Difference and Repetition (1968).