Hello there. Maybe you found my website because you listened to me on a podcast or heard about my book about Jung and Spinoza. Maybe the SEO labyrinth designed by our tech overloads smiled upon me and brought you here, to my humble piece of online real estate. Or maybe you stumbled here by complete accident while you were looking for the homepage of a much cooler Robert H. Langan. To this I can only say sorry.
My ‘formal’ bio on the front page covers the basics. I’ll repost it here in case you’e really curious–also because I’m getting the hang of how to use Markdown to write up blog posts, and so I might as well endanger whatever readership I have by fooling around:
Robert H. Langan holds a doctorate in Psychoanalytic Studies from the University of Essex. A scholar of Jung and Spinoza, he also specializes in speculative metaphysics and psychological types. He lives in southern New Jersey.
That PhD almost never happened. I dropped out of school over ten years ago when I decided that the academy just wasn’t right for me. On that point I might still be correct. But passing up the opportunity to write about two thinkers whose writings had greatly influenced me, and to connect them in a way no one had been able to do before, bothered me for a long time. In a lot of ways I consider myself very fortunate that when I was finally able to get over myself some years later and I decided to finish the damn thing, that no one else had sat down and tried to solve the riddle of Jung’s relationship to Spinoza.
What did I have to ‘get over’? Well, there were many valid reasons why I dropped out of school: the money, the career prospects, the money, the fact I was not equipped well enough intelectually to tackle the problem I wanted to solve, and the money. The fear of being intelectually inadequate is something I go into more detail about in the introduction of Jung and Spinoza (not a plug). Another issue however, and perhaps the biggest, was that I also write fiction, and I was convinced that continuing scholarly work would somehow endanger or taint my more ‘artistic’ endeavors. Trying to write speculative ficton while you’re also commencing a doctoral dissertation is indeed difficult to balance–especially when you’re in your twenties, have little discipline, and are way too precious about your craft. There were many nights where, after struggling to spit out a few mindless sentences about Jung’s treatment of Spinoza, I’d then try to work on a story but decide that my prose was coming off too technical, too rigid–naturally I’d blame my mind being too stuck in an ‘academic voice’, and therefore something was gonna have to give.
Artist or Academic?
In hindsight, to me these kinds of fears smack of immaturity, insecurity, and narcissism. “Get over yourself, kid! Just figure it out!” That is what I’d now shout at twenty-something Bob, before slapping the glass of Beefeater out of my hand and stealing the bottle before I return to my own time. But perhaps I should be fairer to my younger self. After all, the twenty-something year old me was correct to conclude that if I pushed through with my dissertation at the time, it would have been shit. It certainly would never have been good enough, in my mind, to get published as a book (not a plug!). Similarly, I think my fears about being unable to balance the two sides of myself was, at the time, completely accurate.
As the aforementioned ‘professional’ bio states, among my interests are Jung’s theory of psychological types. The Myers-Briggs interpretation of typology states that someone who is a ‘Perceiver’ (or what Jung would say is a dominant ‘irrational’ function) tends to be good at multi-tasking and juggling a lot of things at once. To weigh the pros and cons of typology, especially in terms of ‘pigeonholing’ people so they become compliant and ‘useful’ members of the American workforce, is not the purpose of this blog post. I will say however that, as someone who is apparently a ‘Perceiver’, a good multi-tasker I am not! I am most comfortable when I can focus on one ‘big project’ at a time.
Academic or Artist? Fiction or non-ficton? Scholarship or stories? Both ‘sides’ of myself required a lot of effort, hard work, and creative energy. At the time I didn’t see how I could do both–even though I’d hear stories of, say, an MIT Neurology student who also wrote a Broadway play. Congratulations, progial one. I supppose I thought by assessing I didn’t have that in me, that was being humble. And so, eventually, I quit school. I was happier working whatever-gigs while trying to write fiction, I had decided. And so it stayed that way, for a time. Working a late night shift at a Whole Foods and coming home to try and hammer out a chapter about metaphysical athletes fighting creatures made of pure passive affect was, in hindsight, a bizarre existence–but I kind of enjoyed it.
For a time.
A Middle Third etc
This is not the first website I have tried to launch. I once ran a website purely with the name of the speculative fiction series I’ve been working on for . . . far too long. Around the same time I launched that website, I also decided to give the PhD another go. The reasons for that were both personal and intellectual. I had kept reading Jung and Spinoza, among other great thinkers, during my years away from university. Quite simply I think I had enough confidence to ‘go for it.’
More years passed. For more ‘precious’ reasons, I scrapped that initial launch of my fiction and decided to bide my time to give it another go.
Now here I am, trying to launch everything under one roof. And using my own name as the (ugh) ‘brand’.
Why?
Honestly, I’d be much happier just writing shit, throwing it out into the cybernetic ether, and seeing if anyone cares. But if one wants to make any sort of living off their own work, they have to play this Godless game of having ‘an online presence.’ And it seems to me, rather than hiding behind either side of myself, the academic or the artist, I would present both aspects of myself, with me as the headliner. Now, if someone told me my personality was going to be necessary to having any shot of making money off my writing, I probably would have stuck to a traditional career. But here I am, dear reader. Trying to present both sides of myself under the ‘brand’ ‘Robert H. Langan’.
But please, call me Bob.
A final note on all this. Jung is of course famous for his usage of opposites. To him, the unascertainable realms that the psyche glimpses can only really be gleaned through paradox and antimony. Hence the Jungian love of symbols and shadow. I confess, one of the many reasons I’m not a very good Jungian is that I don’t have a lot of patience for Jung’s reliance on opposites. It is a crutch that I think at times keeps his vision of the psyche in a hermetically sealed vessel. I go into this more in Chapter 4 of my book, Jung and Spinoza–(No, stop insulting me, please. This is not a plug. Although, if you have a minute, please check out the book and if you happen to read it and enjoy it, please leave a review!). The way out of the closed ‘vessel’ I think is to see the opposites has manifestations of an idea we only have inadequate knowledge of–the middle third that emerges from these opposites would be ‘beyond’ them.
So goes a Spinozist interpretation of Jung. And so I suppose this isn’t just about ‘selling’ myself as a godforsaken brand, but also my own synthesis at work–that I am the one consistent thing in all my different pursuits, and so perhaps it’s best to try and own that rather than be anonymous. Part of my Spinozist critique of Jung was to abolish that ‘introverted’ shell–I could demand the same thing of myself, to stand by my work in all its different iterations, to avoid being in my own silo as I try to ‘get shit off the floor’. Will that work in terms of bringing eyes to my ‘content’? I don’t know, and please don’t ask that wretched question again. I do know that looking at my life this way ends the stupid tension between the two sides of myself, and lets me look at it all from a unified but open perspective. And at this point, that’s what I need to get going.
And so reader, welcome to my piece of the internet where I’ll be launching all my projects going forward. What’s coming up on the fiction front? Stay tuned.