My take on McGilchrist in 2025 is still essentially everything I picked-up from his 2021 “The Matter With Things” with its Sacred Turn and the added interest of his much earlier 1982 “Against Criticism“. His thinking is an important, embedded part of my own story at several levels.
Since TMWT was published there was also a Channel McGilchrist forum run by people on his behalf, but I let my subscription lapse because, frankly, the interchanges didn’t seem well enough informed on Iain’s work as a whole and most people seemed to be plugging their own pet theories, with little proper dialogue. Since then apart from specific talks and interviews by Iain I’ve taken my eye of this ball.
What I hadn’t noticed (or remembered) was that Iain had started a SubStack called The Matter With Things. I’ve had a dormant SubStack since it first existed in 2021 and used to cross-post my Psyberton content there, but let that lapse too – I really have zero interest in monetizing (yuk!) my writing. Anyway, the only reason I noticed Iain had a SubStack was because today someone posted some concerns about it in Channel McGilchrist – a link that only works for paid subscribers, but here-below the intro from the notification email from Peter Barus:
‘I’m reeling after reading Iain’s recent repostings. For a fuller discussion of this, I’ve created another group, “Hannah Spier Psychobabble”. I did not comment on Iain’s substack, after reading some of the comments there, hoping for a sober conversation about what seems a shocking 180-degree whiplash turn on Iain’s part. And there’s a lot at stake, for me at least, as I’m just finishing a book that cites TMWT everywhere. Contemplating a rewrite. What the hell, it only took ten years to get to the last chapter.
As Annie Dillard wrote in “The Writer’s Life”:
The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it is also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin.’
(Guessing it’s this Peter Barus – WordPress and SubStack? Interesting in itself.)
Obviously the “shocking 180 degree whiplash turn on Iain’s part” caught my eye. What the? So I did some digging:
Long story short – Iain’s been posting on his SubStack since February this year – mostly elaborations and commentaries on content / chapters from TMWT – On Sept 17th / 18th & Oct 1st he recommended and further discussed a “Psychobabble” SubStack post from Norwegian psychiatrist Hannah Spier.
So far as I can tell her post is analytical and speculative without any prescriptive conclusions, but expresses many different thoughts about motivations behind violent conflict in our perplexing time of polycrises / metacrisis. Interesting is all I would say on a first read. BUT she used the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk as an example.
Not surprisingly doing psychoanalysis in the context of a specific political lethal conflict has produced the polarised partisan political responses of our social media ecosystem. More negative heat than light – which has disappointed Iain.
I can’t for the life of me see where Iain has done a 180? Maybe the people expressing the concerns are part of that political polarisation. Anyway – just a holding post – I’ll need to do a closer read of all three posts and comment threads starting from the one linked above.
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PS – I may in due course migrate my ongoing writing to SubStack or Medium entirely – once I have a secure fixed navigable archive version of my WordPress “Psybertron” – but that’s no trivial condition, with so much invested in 25 years of blogging in WordPress, and, did I mention, so many other writing priorities.
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