During the time of Freud and Jung, psychology was still a budding field which could not be explained empirically. This made it harder for psychologists to determine which theory was most relevant. Comparing theories seemed like the only way to come to a conclusion. This paper looks into some key concepts uncovered and compares and contrasts the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
Sigmund Freud had a guilt-ridden childhood due to an unstable family that led to him psychoanalysing his own unconscious feelings. He graduated from medicine but instead decided to focus on the nervous system and worked with Jean Charcot, who used hypnosis to treat patients. He them went on to meet Joseph Breuer from whom he learnt to encourage patients to talk about their problems and so, began to develop his own theory.
Jung too had an emotionally deprived childhood and spent most of his time alone reading. He studied to become a psychiatrist and worked under Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term ‘schizophrenia’ and worked with schizophrenic patients.
Freud and Jung collaborated for five years as they had similar ideas when it came to development of psychology. They parted ways later due to Jung not accepting Freud’s view that most of our unconscious desires have to do with sexual needs.
The Unconscious
One of the major concepts popularised by Freud is that of the presence of an unconscious as a level of consciousness. The unconscious according to Freud consisted of the urges that are kept repressed due to them being unacceptable. The conscious is not aware of these feelings existing as they are being actively kept hidden – repression. This material however, may come out during traumatic experiences or in dreams and may cause mental disturbances.
Instead of using the term consciousness, Jung called the total personality, the psyche. One aspect of this being the personal unconscious. It contains all the experiences blocked from the ego (central consciousness) because they are unacceptable. However, these maybe unacceptable due to varying reasons and not just about sexual needs.
Freud and Jung agree on the idea of an unconscious that contains repressed material. They even agree on the use of psychoanalysis or hypnosis as being able to bring this material into the consciousness.
However, they do differ on the structure of the unconscious as Jung claims that the unconscious also consists of a collective unconscious which is innate. He also thinks of the repressed material in the unconscious as being traumatic and not purely unacceptable urges.
To this day Freud’s idea of the unconscious carries relevance and it has been identified by neuroscientists that the unconscious memory mediates emotional learning. Showing that the idea of the unconscious is now vastly accepted even if it were not before.
Dreams
To Freud dreams exemplify urges present in the unconscious and show them as being fulfilled in order to preserve sleep. By interpreting the patients dream, Freud was able to learn the true meaning behind the symbolisms in dreams. As with the rest of his theories, he believed the content of dreams to be sexual in nature, often deciphering the meaning of certain symbols in dreams. He thought of it as being a way for the repressed material to surface without alerting the unconscious.
In the psyche along with the personal unconscious, Jung also described the collective unconscious which consisted of innate and hereditary thoughts common to all individuals. For him, dreams are a combination of the personal and collective unconscious. The collective unconscious gives rise to archetypal dreams that are intense and tend to reoccur when stressed. These dreams are similar to the fears common to most people. The dreamer attempts to solve problems in his dreams instead of just viewing them as fulfilled. He believed that the symbols in dreams had to do with the patients fears and life and were not about hidden sexual urges. Analysing dreams helped Jung discover the patient’s underlying fears.
Having earlier lost all credibility about his ideas on dreams, more recent work has revealed dreams may just be controlled by instincts, which supports Freud’s theory. These instincts may be of a sexual nature but can also have to do with the person’s emotional and motivational needs. Thus, Freud’s idea that dreams had symbols in them is true, but like Jung it has been shown that these symbols may not always be sexual desires.
The Ego
In his structure of personality, Freud considered the ego to work on the reality principle and control the urges of the id, which consists of sexual and survival impulses that require immediate gratification. The ego develops after the id and balances the impulses of the child against the outside world. The superego is the internalised parental attitudes which oppose the urges of the id. Interaction between the three gives rise to intra-psychic conflict which may cause mental disturbances like anxiety. This is likely when the ego too decides to act on urges like the id causing the superego to oppose the ego as well.
Jung described the ego to be the centre of consciousness and responsible for our feelings and memories. It gives us a sense of being unique. In place of intra-psychic conflicts, Jung devised the principle of opposites which suggests that conscious and unconscious continuously oppose each other creating energy. This energy is the libido or the life-energy.
Jung and Freud both agreed on the existence of the ego, but happen to differ on the role that the ego plays. To Jung the ego is merely our independent consciousness whereas to Freud, it was the mediator for the id that had to be the voice of reality in the consciousness. For Jung the go played the same role as the consciousness did for Freud. Thus showing that the both reached the same idea but gave it different terms.
The Libido
According to Freud, the libido or energy source shifts at each stage of the psychosexual development to parts of the body he calls the erogenous zones. These zones are sensitive to stimulation and focus on pleasure and gratification during a particular stage. They form the basis of adult sexual drive. Libido plays a bigger role in early years when the child has not yet developed an ego. It is the primitive instinct that needs to be satisfied for development to occur.
Jung adopted the same idea of the libido but in a much wider sense than just sexual and aggressive drives. He thought of it as being a motivating force in all aspects of actualisation. For him, the libidinal energy aided in development and acted as a life force.
Pfaff and Panksepp (as cited in Solms, 2006) believe that the instinctual urges that Freud mentions are much more primitive, they concluded that the anatomy and chemistry of the id is not different to that of an animal. Thus stating that the libido acts on primitive impulses that are generally sexual and aggressive, showing Jung’s idea of libido playing a much bigger role to be not relevant.
However, not all neuroscientists support Freud’s idea of the id being solely sexually and aggressively driven. Through studying lesions, drugs and stimulation, four basic instincts have been identified- “seeking/ reward”, “anger-rage”, “fear-anxiety” and “panic”. Thus supporting Jung’s idea of the libido being much more than just sexual energy.
It is clear from the comparisons above that Freud and Jung had different outlooks and that they are both still credible in their respective places. Perhaps with growth in technology and advanced research we may one day be able to settle which one of the two had a more reliable theory. Years have passed since the Freud and Jung have passed and yet their theories still are forces to be reckoned with and are used as foundations for more research. Considering that Jung is a neo-analytic theorist it is expected of him to criticise the views of Freud, he opposed his idea that individuals are motivated primarily by their primitive instincts and that rest of the concepts on the mind fall second. After Freud, most psychologists have taken their place wither supporting or opposing him. However, even with the amount of opposition his theories are still relevant.