Always introspective, Jung’s theory was partly elicited in a dream. Jung was on the second floor in a Renaissance Period house ornately furnished in baroque style. He wandered to the first floor, which was detailed in a less ornate, medieval style. Descending further into a stone floored basement, he found a trap door that led to a dusty, dank cave in the very bottom of the house. There he found two bashed in skulls (Baer, 2003, p.177). At the time, Jung enjoyed a working relationship with Freud and asked his interpretation of the dream, but was not satisfied with Freud’s wish fulfillment concept. Instead Jung believed, “the unconscious appeared as something natural, as a natural function that is completely independent from consciousness” (Baer, 2003, p.178). Using his dream as a guide, Jung envisioned the mind divided into three different levels. The conscious is the realm of the ego where reality and awareness reside. In fact, Jung considered ego and consciousness as interchangeable terms (Stevens, 2001, p.62). He depicted the ego as the center of consciousness but part of the bigger Self, or entire personality. Ego develops in early childhood and gains strength during the adult years of establishing oneself before reconciling its lesser role in a process called individuation. In contrast, the personal unconscious holds forgotten or repressed memories and is unique to the individual. Therefore each thought, every experience, and long ago memories are stored within
Freud believed human behavior was not consciously controlled, and credited three parts in the mind to any psychological activity. These are called the unconscious, the preconscious and the conscious. Personality too was given three parts, the id, the super ego and the ego. Freud believed these parts in our mind have their individual parts to play in the way we go about life. He also stated the only way to work through conflicts that arise from our subconscious and unconscious mind is through dream analysis and psychoanalysis. Other key concepts in psychodynamic theory are the psychosexual stages of development, anxiety, defence mechanisms, and free association.
Our memories are in fact like a “car” that disappears around a corner. Just because it is no longer visible it doesn’t mean that the car is no longer existent. It is the same with our thoughts and memories. Once we think or experience something it becomes stored in our minds. This is then what begins to dictate the way in which we carry out our lives. Our minds are continuously working and our personal unconscious allows us to store information and experiences that can either be retrieved or unconsciously applied. The personal unconscious, therefore, is distinguished by the fact that “the materials contained in this layer are of a personal nature in so far as they have the character partly of acquisitions derived from the individual’s life and partly of psychological factors which could just as well be conscious” (494). Not only is the personal unconscious different for each individual, it can easily be recalled or conscious. This is what separates the personal conscious from the collective unconscious.
The point of view of which Freud interprets and examines the manifest of dreams content to obtain their latent meaning is of a professional psychologist and clinical observer who looked for a way to explain how our minds work and how the individual psychology functions. He based his work on clinical experiences and clinical neurosis of the matter of his own interpretations to be able to confirm his theories as a proven fact. The result Freud gets from the patients he observes and interpretation of their dreams are stereotyped to the complete human condition.
Jung agrees with Freud that personal conscious is a repository of content previously conscious, even though they may have been forgotten. For example; collective unconscious can be hereditary and transferred to another, which is why Jung agreed with Freud’s argument that Anna transferred her affect to Breuer. Both Jung and Freud agree that a human’s unconsciousness is buried deep and few are able to reach it on a psychoanalysis level. However, Jung disagreed with Freud’s claims that sexuality is the basis of unconscious
As a child, Jung was often introverted and isolated. At 12 years old Jung was pushed so hard to the ground by another classmate that he lost consciousness. Afterwards, his parents were led to believe that he may have had epilepsy. It is unknown whether this event had a negative impact on him in the future. Jung grew up with the belief that he had two opposing personalities: One personality being a typical schoolboy, and the other being a largely influential figure from the past. Carl Jung’s work was largely influenced by his experiences as a child. As a boy, Jung would visit his attic to bring a small wooden mannequin he had carved small sheets of paper with
Carl Gustav Jung (a.k.a. C.G. Jung) was born in 1875, in Switzerland, and worked closely with Freud for many years, he learned many things from him in this time. Eventually Jung split from him because his ideas and concepts of psychoanalysis began to differ from those of Freud. Jung was a convectionist, unlike Freud who was a reductionist. Jung saw dreams as a way to come up with solutions to problems you are facing in your waking life. Jung took Freud’s one technique of “free association” and expanded on it. Unlike Freud, he saw this concept as being extremely important. He thought that the dreamer’s thoughts and opinions on what the dream could mean are even more important than anyone else’s, including many times an expert. Dreams, to Freud, are a way of interacting with your unconscious. Carl Jung’s methods to interpreting dreams could be a very important step to help people lead happier and healthier lives. He believed that the manifest content in our dreams is just as important as the latent content when it comes to interpreting our dreams. Freud took a very hands on approach when interpreting people’s dreams, but Jung put forth less information from himself because he thought dream interpretation relied heavily on the dreamer himself. A college student who is experiencing nightmares consistently may visit a psychologist who knows about the meanings of dreams. A psychiatrist who believes more in Freud’s ways may take the dream as being
Both Freud and Jung provided important and interesting theories on dreams; encompassing their functions, their roots, and their meanings. Freud looked at dreams as a result of repressed memories, particularly repressed sexual memories from our childhood. Jung however, believed that dreams delved beyond sexual repression during younger years, to other problems, be it trauma, anxiety etc. Jung also believed dreams changed predominately through middle adult years, while Freud believed the opposite. There is little empirical evidence to reinforce either Freud or Jung’s theories, however, their contributions to the study of dreams in psychology cannot be lessened or denied.
Carl Gustav Jung is a Swiss psychiatrist and the successor of psychoanalysis with important intellectual movements of the twentieth century. In his early career, Jung was influenced by the theory of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis (Breger 2000, p. 217). However, they came into disagreement in notions which then broke their relationship. It was because Freud’s view of myth was based on reality, which there was no religion involved, whereas Jung though that myth was based on both reality and religion. Consequently, Jung’s notions were commonly accepted by society because of the wider context. Then, through his research and clinical findings, he developed some concepts like archetypes, collective unconscious, shadow, extrovert and introvert and persona (Carter 2011 p. 442). These concepts help Jung to deepen the explanation about myth. For Jung, myth is a projection of archetypes and collective unconscious. Their form are universal and identical with every society back into history. Myth can be identical because the original form, the archetypes, is configured to be the same among human's unconscious globally where people's psychic realm encounters certain motifs and typical figures that built into the structure of man’s unconsciousness (Jung Myth Ex. 3-4). According to Edward Tylor and James Frazer, myth and science were contradict where science was factual and myth was not (Segal 2003, p. 48). Therefore, myth has an important role in human nature and modern
Freud’s theory is that dreaming is meaningful, unlike the activation synthesis theory. He believed that the mind had three sections, represented in a shape of an iceberg; the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious. The conscious is the tip of the iceberg above the water involves everything we are aware of right now such as our thoughts. The
According to Schredl(2003), Jung divided the mind into three parts. First was the collective unconscious. This is a genetically inherited level of the mind containing mental ideas, legends, religious systems and symbols. Jung believed that this does not depend on personal experiences and it was his theory that reoccurring dreams came from this area. Next is the personal unconscious. This holds forgotten associations, repressed and discarded
According to Jung, “One function of consciousness is to maintain the relationship between the ego and the unconscious”(Laughlin, Tiberia, 131). To understand this completely, we must look at Jung’s ideas involving the consciousness. Jung believed that the consciousness is comprised of innumerable archetypes - defined as a very typical example of a certain person or thing - that we have by simple virtue of being human. Then - depending on how and what the person experiences - some of these archetypes will develop into networks, known as complexes. Finally, one will gain dominance of the consciousness and is called the ego-complex. This brings us back to the point made earlier, that one of the functions of the consciousness is to maintain the relationship between the ego and unconscious. Basically, what Jung is saying is that there is two personalities in the human mind. One is called the ego, and the other is the unconscious. Freud said the same thing, calling it the ego and id. But that is what the story arcs in the novel stand for. The Calcutec has a very well developed unconscious, which is something many people don’t have. So instead of not knowing the personality in his unconscious, he sees it as a coherent story in which he is a completely different story. It is mentioned in the arc of Wonderland that he actually doesn’t know when he is one or the other until the Professor explains it all to him.
Jung also felt his mental patients at the asylum of Burgholzli were lost souls, hanging out in the land of the dead, an intuition that persons undergoing psychosis are lost to the everyday world of ordinary reality and are lost in the imaginal realm of non-ordinary reality (the collective unconscious). On occasion, Jung was able to pull such persons out of this lost realm and back into ordinary life. Certainly through his analytic and psychotherapy practice, he was able to facilitate the recovery of souls, not through trance journeys, but through analysis of dreams, of transference and counter-transference, and through the power of a deep relationship with him (Kindle Locations 1989-1993).
Jung made some major contributions in psychotherapy. Jung was the first to say that a therapist himself must be analyzed (Storr, 1991). Unlike Freud who had his patients lie on a couch, Jung suggested that face to face contact with a patient was essential (Storr, 1991). He wanted to see his patients face. He also saw patients less times a week then Freud did (Storr, 1991). He stated that he did not want his patients to stop living their normal everyday lives. Dreams were an important aspect of Jung’s psychotherapy. He dedicated a great deal of time and work on the interpretation of dreams
In his book, Modern Man In Search Of A Soul, C.G. Jung gives a layperson insight into his ideas on dream analysis. Jung's primary objective in this book is to educate the reader as to what a psychoanalyst does when analyzing a patient's dreams. The principal message in the section of the book centered on dream analysis is that dreams should never stand alone. Dreams are meaningless in a vacuum, but on the other hand when put against a strict set of rules, they are oftentimes misunderstood. The unconscious is a fluid entity and cannot be handled either in isolation or with a static set of guidelines. Dreams are reflections of the unconscious and can represent many different things inside of
Jung typically analyzed dreams with respect not only to the dreamer and their own associations, but also using his own archetypical associations developed throughout human history. Jung also acknowledged both objective and subjective portions of dreams, meaning that some parts of dream may contain deeper significance, while occasionally parts of dreams may have no deeper value. This essay will examine a dream using Jung’s methods.