Paste your essay in here…Freud began his psychological work within the medical field after studying at the University of Vienna. He worked with Charcot and studied hypnosis before deciding the results were short-lived, therefore beginning his belief that issues stemmed from deeper within the psyche and had roots within childhood- pushing him to work with Bruer and develop ‘talking therapy’. Jung also started his work using a medical route in a similar way, although Jung believed religion and culture had a large impact on mental life- he was inspired by his studies into philosophy and religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism (Jacobson, 2016). Although Jung was a close follower of Freud, he was unable to accept the ideas of the Oedipus complex and other psychosexual stages, and therefore their theories differ greatly in many ways: views of the unconscious, religion and the libido.
One key difference in the theories of Freud and Jung were there conceptions of the unconscious mind. Freud believed that the final level of thought (after conscious and preconscious levels of thought) is that of the unconscious, which consists of thoughts and memories that are repressed actively due to their unacceptable nature- for example unacceptable sexual urges or frightening aggressive instincts (Maltby, Day and Macaskill, 2013). According to Freud the unconscious mind is formed by the id, which purely seeks pleasure as opposed to seeking morality. Freud suggested that dreams created a gateway into the unconscious, and that common symbols represented sexual meanings. Within Freud’s theory, the unconscious was all on one level and all stemmed from similar places, as he divided the psyche in a different way to that of Jung. Jung agreed that the human psyche was divided, but developed the unconscious mind further and split it into the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious includes unacceptable personal experiences that have been repressed and much like Freud’s unconscious, this material can be brought into the conscious using psychoanalysis or hypnosis. Jung (1965, as cited in Maltby, Day and Macaskill, 2013) believed that the collective unconscious was deeper into the psyche than the personal unconscious, and that it stemmed from evolutionary development, and therefore it was innate. The collective unconscious holds inherited instincts and archetypes that are universal across cultures as opposed to from personal experiences. Jung suggested that dreams stem from both the personal and collective unconsciousness, resulting in everyday and archetypal dreams, often repeated dreams will occur as a method of amplification (Maltby, Day and Macaskill, 2013). Both Freud and Jung believed that the unconscious was likely to be where mental illnesses stemmed from, but Freud did not go into great detail over this. Jung developed his view of the collective unconscious by using patients with schizophrenia- who all seemed to share similar delusions, hallucinations, fantasies, drawings and dreams that originated in popular myths from ancient cultures, suggesting that there are universal archetypes and symbols (Maltby, Day and Macaskill, 2013).
Another critical difference between Freud and Jung is their basis of religion. Freud was born into a Jewish family, yet held a strong belief that religion was largely an escape for many people and that it needed to be ‘cured’ in a way similar to a psychiatric disorder (Jacobson, 2016). This led to him largely ignoring religion and culture as a factor in mental illnesses, instead focusing on personal experiences in childhood as the roots of later issues. In contrast, Jung believed that religion was extremely important within the individuation and self-realisation process that occurred over a lifetime- he believed that the absence of religion could explain some adult psychological disorders. During the arguments and correspondence between the two, Freud accused Jung of anti-Semitism. Jung also focused on religion as a way of communication- through archetypes and symbols that universally have similar meanings, such as God (Maltby, Day and Macaskill, 2013). As he did not practice a specific religion, he was very curious and therefore explored a range of archetypes throughout religions. This led to Jung identifying many of what he believed to be common archetypes: the persona- the role we take on around other people, the shadow- the dark side/ repressed material, the anima- the feminine aspects of the male psyche, the animus-the male aspects of the female psyche- and the self- the ‘perfect’ individual who has completed the individuation process. Jung suggested that archetypes affected the way people think about and therefore deal with different situations, forming the basis of the personality (Jung, 1954, 1964, as cited in Maltby, Day and Macaskill, 2013).
A further difference between the two approaches was the extent to which the sexual libido was the main mover of a person. Freud considered the sexual libido as the main powerful force affecting personality- focusing on an erogenous zone at each stage of development. He focused largely on the sexual drives, although Freud did later introduce Thanatos (death instinct) and was aware of other life-preserving drives. The sexual libido formed the basis of Freud’s psychosexual stages- which is what most of the conflict between he and Jung was based upon. Jung believed that the powerful force guiding the personality can change throughout the lifespan, for example a young person may be driven by the sexual libido. Jung suggested that the libido was a biological driving force that wasn’t necessarily sexual and can be applied to the psychological growth of the person throughout their life- such as moving from eating and elimination, to the energy being concentrated on spiritual and philosophical aspects in later life (Maltby, Day and Macaskill, 2013). It may be suggested that their differences in opinions on the sexual libido is due to their childhoods- with Freud being reported to develop a sexual attachment to his mother, leading to a theory preoccupied with sexual drives (based around the Oedipus complex), whereas Jung believed the libido had a wider definition.
In conclusion, the two theories have many parallels due to stemming from similar beginnings. They both focused somewhat on the idea of an unconscious and the importance of dreams in understanding problems and this led to Freud and Jung having a very close relationship for quite some time, until Freud was unable to accept Jung’s broader theories. It was this breakdown of the friendship that caused Jung to further much of his work in an attempt to see where their differences were rooted. Although Freud’s theory is heavily criticised for its narrow approach, many of his basic explanations can be applied outside of his strict theory of psychosexual development. On the other hand, Jung’s theories continue to cause debates among and outside of his field of research, and many of aspects of his theories have been adopted by more recent psychologists, for example Eysenck used the concepts of introversion and extroversion in his work (Maltby, Day and Macaskill, 2013). The two theories both have aspects which are explained poorly or are not clear such as Jung’s overlapping functions (making his theory less parsimonious than that of Freud), but Freud and Jung provided the basis for psychoanalytical therapies which have been developed further as more research is carried out using more efficient and valid means. The psychoanalytical approaches are very hard to test empirically, however both theories were extremely important in the development of psychology in this area, and a combination of their theories are still behind many psychotherapeutic approaches in use today due to the support aspects of the theories accumulated.