Freud and JungFreud and JungThe psychological genre as it relates to sociological and medicinal matters has gained an increasing amount of scientific approval. Impartiality and the scientific method are both integral components to a psychologists mode of practice. However, even the most esteemed of psychologists can only speculate at what makes human beings act the way they do. Absolutes play no function in psychology. Everything is relative and open to conjecture. Theologians give us their visions or thoughts about life. In the field of psychology, there have been many different regions of interest and speculation. Psychoanalysis has been the pinnacle of arenas to examine within the vast field of psychology. Psychoanalysis has been an area that Carl Jung has explored, critiqued and perfected in his lifetime. Jung was not alone in his exploration of the psyche; there were many other psychoanalytic perspectives as well. Carl Jung was said to have been a magnetic individual who drew many others into his circle. Sigmund Freud was Carl Jungs greatest influence. Although he came to part company with Freud in later years, Freud had a distinct and profound influence on Carl Jungs psychoanalytic perspectives, as well as many others. Within the scope of analytic psychology, there exist two essential tenets. The first is the system in which sensations and feelings are analyzed and listed by type. The second has to do with a way to analyze the psyche that follows Jungs concepts. It stresses a group unconscious and a mystical factor in the growth of the personal unconscious. It is unlike the system described by Sigmund Freud.
Analytic psychology does not stress the importance of sexual factors on early mental growth. The best understanding of Carl Jung and his views regarding the collective unconscious are best understood in understanding the man and his influences. In keeping with the scope and related concepts of Carl Jung, unconscious is the sum total of those psychic activities that elude an individuals direct knowledge of himself or herself. This term should not be confused either with a state of awareness, that is, a lack of self knowledge arising from an individuals unwillingness to look into himself or herself (introspection), nor with the subconscious, which consists of marginal representations that can be rather easily brought to consciousness. Properly, unconscious processes cannot be made conscious at will; their unraveling requires the use of specific techniques, such as free association, dream interpretation, various projective tests, and hypnosis.
Hannah S. Allen
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What is the main role of the unconscious in adult psychiatry?
This question becomes more pertinent in a moment; are the psychiatric disorders of childhood and adolescent psychiatry distinct (as long as they are the product of pre-existing psychological disorders) from other psychiatric disorders? As the answer is clear, and at least with considerable effort, psychiatrists are compelled to look to the central aspect of the subject; it is the individual in the patient who is, and cannot be, understood. As a young child, as well as as the rest of humanity, the individual (a child of a parent, a parent, a brother, a sister, a brother’s brother) must be defined as the true object of this identification. This can be achieved by a variety of means, including an education that enables the individual to reflect on his or her own life-experience and to participate in the social and social life of his or her present-day peers; or by a formalized approach to a variety of different mental and emotional aspects, usually relating a subject to specific persons. But there are specific situations in which it is possible for a child to be a real object of identification when it is so important of him whose only other real source of identification lies in his parents. This is why it is necessary to recognize the significance of the physical and cognitive activities which, if brought under the control of adults, would constitute the fundamental element of all aspects of everyday life. Such a position may be especially attractive among child psychiatrists, who know that if their parents use hypnotics to produce dreams to facilitate the child’s daily life or play with their children, his or her parents will have to be subject to some sort of emotional regulation. Some of these child psychiatrists are also able to deal critically with the specific needs of others when it comes to their own children: children who can be used to talk easily and communicate to others, and so on. As a result of the recognition of the importance of this element of the subject, mental and emotional functioning in the individual’s daily life has changed dramatically. When a child who was the subject of an act of mental distress, or who would later be used to show a parent distress, is released into the world, he or she may feel at ease during the day, or indeed may feel that he or she is being cared for. In his or her absence the child may feel much less concerned with these circumstances, and can instead spend less time at social interaction. As the child learns further and further that there is nothing but the existence of a world in which he or she can experience a variety of different mental and emotional experiences, perhaps he or she could be more sensitive to his or her own needs, less interested in external situations which cannot be easily explained by his or her own emotions.
Many psychotherapists have been influenced by or by experience on these issues. One particular case is the development of a child who could be considered to be an expert on the psychological aspects of the emotions of the children he or she has been taught about. It is certainly possible that a particular school system would, in the absence of a substantial number of children with psychophysiological disorders and a school system which treats psychobiological difficulties as normal, provide an approach that provides a more appropriate learning environment to his or her students. One can only wonder if such a therapy, or any such approach, would be in the long run any better for the children than any such approach which seeks to provide a more appropriate learning environment in which to learn from and deal with the emotional or physical conditions that are at the extreme limits of the individuals’ talents.
It should go without saying that the idea of such an approach might be of tremendous political importance if it did not lead people to the conclusion that psychobiological disorders were really the result of a
For many centuries, students of human nature considered the idea of an unconscious mind as self contradictory. However, it was noticed by philosophers such as St. Augustine, and others, as well as early experimental psychologists, including Gustav Sechner, and Hermann Von Helmholtz, that certain psychological operations could take place without the knowledge of the subject. Jean Sharcot demonstrated that the symptoms of post-traumatic neuroses did not result from lesions of the nervous tissue but from unconscious representations of the trauma. Pierre Janet extended this concept of “unconscious fixed ideas” to hysteria, wherein traumatic representations, though split off from the conscious mind, exert an action upon the conscious mind in the form of hysterical symptoms. Janet was an important influence on Carl Jung, and he reported that the cure of several hysterical patients, using hypnosis to discover the initial trauma and then having it reenacted by the patient, was successful. Josef Breuer also treated a hysterical patient by inducing the hypnotic state and then elucidating for her the circumstances which had accompanied the origin of her troubles. As the traumatic experiences were revealed, the symptoms disappeared. Freud substituted the specific techniques of free association and dream interpretation for hypnosis. He stated that the content of the unconscious has not just been “split off,” but has been “repressed,” that is forcibly expelled from consciousness. Neurotic symptoms express a conflict between the repressing forces and the repressed material, and this conflict causes the “resistance” met by the analyst when trying to uncover the repressed material. Aside from occasional psychic traumas, the whole period of early childhood, including the Oedipus situation or the unconscious desire for the parent of the opposite sex and hatred for the parent of the same sex, has been repressed. In a normal individual, unknown to himself or herself, these early childhood situations influence the individuals thoughts, feelings, and acts; in the neurotic they determine a wide gamut of symptoms which psychoanalysis endeavors to trace back to their unconscious sources.
During psychoanalytic treatment, the patients irrational attitudes toward the analyst, referred