Contrast Between Great Minds

Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud. He believed that people could be cured by using therapeutic techniques which works on people’s unconscious mind. Although he is known as the founder of psychoanalysis, he is not the only person focusing on the unconscious as a subject. Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud can be called the pioneers of psychology. Even so, their theories are differing, they have a great impact on understanding the human mind and treatments of the human psyche. Jung is the friend and student of Sigmund Freud. They were comrades and saw each other as a member of their family. His mentor Freud has a great impact on Jung’s perspective but as time goes by, their theories starts to show great differences. To many people, Jung, significantly improved Freud’s theory on the human psyche. 

Sigmund Freud was born in a little town called Freiberg on the 6th of May 1856. He was an Austrian neurologist. He wanted to study law but he changed his mind and studied psychology. He worked on hysteria with Joseph Breuer. Breuer and Freud published Studies on Hysteria in 1895 and began to work on the ideas that led them to psychoanalysis. After working with Joseph, he began to develop his own self-analysis. He came up with the idea of people’s unconscious thoughts affect human behavior. There are several forces to push this situation but the most powerful one is the sexual desires from childhood which were repressed by the conscious mind. Many people disagreed with his theories. However, he founded the International Psychoanalytic Association with Carl Jung as president. He published The Ego and The Id in 1923. He died at the age of 83.

Carl Gustav Jung was born in Sweden on the 26th of July 1975. He was the founder of Analytical Psychology and also one of the founders of Depth Psychology. His father was a priest so he had different religious ideas. He was an admirer of Freud’s work and he met with him in Vienna in 1907. They talked for thirteen hours straight and developed a half-decade friendship. Freud saw Jung as his successor in psychoanalysis however Jung’s ideas were different from key points of Freudian theory. He disagreed with Freud’s theory because he used sexuality as the source of his work He commented on Freud’s view of the unconscious as limited and poor. In 1912, Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious which results in his separation from Freud’s theory in general. It was the basics of Analytical Psychology. 

He believed that the human psyche consists of three parts. These are the personal unconscious, the ego (the conscious mind), archetypes, and the collective unconscious. Jung interpreted the collective unconscious as the storage of experiences and knowledge of mankind. This is the major line between his theory and Freud’s theory on the unconscious. Jung was very knowledgeable in mythology, religion, and philosophy. Jung used his knowledge in these areas to understand the symbolism behind them. He believed that humans experienced the unconscious on a daily basis of life such as dreams, art, and religion. He had a great impact on the field of psychology although there are many critics of his theory. One of the most debated issues about him is the disagreement between his theory with Freud’s. Their theories differ in many ways.

One of the central problems between their theories is the different concepts of the unconscious. Freud believed that the unconscious mind was the center of our repressed thoughts, bad memories, and our sexual desires, and violence. He saw it as a bunker for all sexual urges which later causes neuroses or in other words mental illness. The separated human mind into three parts; the id, the ego, and the super-ego. To him, the id drives our unconscious and its only purpose is to satisfaction of human pleasure. The ego is the conscious that deals with the memories and thoughts that make people able to deal with reality. The superego is socially acceptable behavior. People tend to accommodate to social life. Just like Freud, Jung divided the human mind into three parts. However, in Jung’s view, the unconscious was divided into the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. To him, the ego is the conscious, the personal unconscious has the memories which can be either recalled or suppressed, and the collective unconscious stores the experiences which are genetically transferred when we are born. Eastern philosophy and religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism inspired his studies on the human psyche. He believed that the unconscious contains more than just repressed materials.

Freud and Jung interpreted dreams differently. Freud believed that the interpretation of dreams can give us information about an individual. He argued that people do not show their deepest desires because of reality which you can call “the ego” and also morality which is the “superego”. During their sleep, people break the chains of their desires and can experience them in their dreams. He believed that dreams are our access to our repressed or unacceptable thoughts (mainly sexually repressed desires) that cannot be performed directly for fear of embarrassment. To him, people create a symbolic form in their dreams. For example, if a woman sees a ship in her dream, Freud interpreted it as, having sexual urges.

Like Freud, Jung believed that dreams are the windows to our unconscious mind. However, he didn’t think that all dreams are necessarily sexual in nature or that their true meanings are hidden. Jung explained dreams in symbolic imagery. He believed that the dreams of people could be differed according to their relationships with their community. Jung didn’t believe in the idea of the fixed meaning interpretation of dreams. He argued that dreams are the symbols, images, or metaphors of people’s external or internal world. He criticized Freud for focusing only on the external, and objective side of a person’s dream. Looking from both objective and subjective sides of dreams can guide the truth. The unique part of Jung’s dream theory was that dreams could express private content as they show collective or universal contents. Carl Jung explained them as universal, archaic images and patterns that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct. They have inherited potentials that are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior on interaction with the outside world. They are autonomous and hidden forms that are transformed once they enter consciousness and are given particular expression by individuals and their cultures. In Jungian psychology, archetypes are highly developed elements of the collective unconscious. The existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by using stories, art, myths, religions, or dreams.

The most important debate between Freud and Jung was in the area of sex and sexuality. Freud pointed out that repression and expression of sexuality are everything. He saw it as the biggest motivational force of behavior. He suggested two theories about the sexual tendency of people. Freud called them the Oedipus complex and Electra complex. Oedipus was a Greek hero who murders his father and marries his mother and has children with her. He took this story as a starting point. He argued that male children have strong sexual urges towards their mothers and vicious feelings toward their fathers. In the Electra complex, female children have sexual urges toward their father and want to surpass their mother. Male children fear that their fathers will cut or damage their penises for their urges toward their mother, and it is called the Castration complex. For female children, realizing the fact that they can’t have a penis to have a relationship with their mother leads them to envy their father’s penis, and they develop sexual desires for their father. Freud believed that these urges were later repressed and will end through defense mechanisms. In his theory, Jung disagreed with the focus on sex, and its effect on behavior. He believed that sexuality could be only one of the potential exteriorizations of human behavior. He refused the Oedipus complex theory. Jung said that the relationship between mother and child was based on the care, love, and mercy of the mother to her child.

Freud and Jung disagreed in the area of religion as well. Freud was born into a Jewish family. He saw religion as a way out for most people. He believed that religious beliefs should not spread out. He worked on mythology and religion for a very long time. He believed that religion is the expression of hidden psychological neuroses and distress. In some of his writings, he claimed that religion was a control mechanism to deal with the Oedipal complex. On the other hand, Jung saw religion as an important component during the individuation process and a way of communication between people. His points in the area of religion came from archetypes and symbols. They are all translated from different languages into the same meanings. He didn’t focus on a specific religion. He worked on different religions, especially Eastern religions. Because of the arguments between them, Freud accused Jung of being antisemitic.

Another disagreement between Jung and Freud is parapsychology. Freud tried to find a way to define parapsychology through psychoanalysis. Because of the problems he faced he gave up this idea. Throughout his life, he was skeptical about the idea of the paranormal. Jung on the other hand was interested in the work of para-psychology, especially in psychic phenomena such as telepathy and synchronicity. Later on, these concepts would be a major part of his theories. In one of his interviews, he defined parapsychology with these words; “Parapsychology is the science dealing with those biological or psychological events which show that the categories of matter, space, and time (and thus of causality) are not axiomatic.”

In the early years of his life, he heard stories about bizarre events such as foreseeing the death of a specific person, clocks that stop at the moment of death, etc. In 1909, Jung visited Freud to talk about Freud’s opinions on the paranormal. Freud saw it as an unimportant subject and discourage Jung from wasting his time. During this meeting, there was an event that Jung commented on as paranormal but Freud disagreed with him. Later on, Jung proved the paranormal activity to Freud and they never spoke about it again. His beliefs in the paranormal affected his work and he came up with the theory of synchronicity which was controversial at that time. He experienced some paranormal activities in some of his therapy sessions. These events led him to believe that there was no coincidence however the very important connection between the external and internal worlds of the individual. 

Freud and Jung have several differences in the world of psychology. They lived and grew up in different cultures and they have different personalities. Because of these reasons, the theories may differ. They inspired each others’ works and they encouraged each other to develop. There is an ongoing debate about who is the winner of their battle. However, there is not a particular answer to this question. Modern psychotherapy has made significant progress with its theories. Their theories are still used in many areas of psychotherapeutic treatment.