Psy/310 - Carl Jung

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26^th, 1875 in Switzerland. He was his parents’ fourth child, but the only surviving child. As a child, he was very introverted, and was happy when left alone. His mother was constantly depressed, but she got better when Carl moved closer to her family. When he was twelve years old, Carl was pushed to the ground by another kid, and lost consciousness. After that, he would often faint when he had to go to school or do homework, but when he heard his father’s concern that he would never be able to work and take care of himself, he became focused and committed to school.  Although his fainting episodes would sporadically occur after that, he eventually was able to overcome the problem. Later, Carl Jung explained that those episodes were his first encounter with neurosis (Wikipedia, 2012). 

Although Jung wanted to study medicine, he was fascinated with spirituality. That combination of interests led him to devote himself to the field of psychiatry. In 1902 he graduated from the University of Basel with a medical degree, marrying his wife Emma Rauschenbach a year later. Early in his career, Jung worked at the University of Zurich asylum, and after writing his “Studies in Word Association”, in 1906 after his work with the psychiatric patients in the asylum, he sent a copy of the work to Sigmund Freud, which would start his friendship with the famous psychiatrist from Vienna. (Wikipedia, 2012). One of Jung’s most important theories is the one that divides the psyche into three parts. The first would be the Ego, or the conscious mind. The second, the personal unconscious, which is basically anything that can be conscious, even though it may not be conscious at the moment. The third part, the collective unconscious, is the source of humans’ experiences, or a type of knowledge that is inherent to us from birth, although we are not aware of it consciously but always influenced by it. Some good examples of the collective unconscious are love at first sight, or déjà vu (Boeree, 2006). 

Another important contribution of Carl Jung to psychology is the definitions of introversion and extroversion, although the concepts are today somewhat confused to what Jung first presented. Today, it’s common to associate introversion and extroversion to shyness and sociability respectively, but Jung’s primary definition was introverts being those people who prefer the internal world of thoughts and feeling, while extroverted were the people who preferred to be around other people, or in other words, one type values the persona and the outer reality while the other values the collective unconscious (Boeree, 2006). 

Freud represented a big influence on Jung’s theories, and contributed to his fascination for the unconscious mind. Although at some point Jung was considered to be Freud’s protégé, the two men began to drift apart after their ideas and theories started to diverge. For example, they disagreed on the matter of sexuality being a motivation force, which Freud, in Jung’s opinion, was too focused on. He also believed that Freud's concept of the unconscious was too negative and limited. Freud believed that the unconscious was only a source of repressed thoughts and motivations, but Jung argued that the unconscious could also be a source of creativity (Cherry, n.d.). When comparing Jung to Alfred Adler, it is imperative to understand that Adler's school of psychology, the Individual Psychology, was based on the idea of the indivisibility of the personality. Unlike Jung, Adler believed that the human being must be view as a whole, and not as a combination of parts. The main difference between Carl Jung and another important psychologist, William James, is their view on religion. Jung believed that religious understanding was unavailable to some people, while James believed that to understand religion, it was crucial to actually have some religious experience (Stone, 2011). 

References

Boeree, C. G. (2006). Carl Jung. Retrieved from http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/jung.html

Carl Jung. (2012). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung

Cherry, K. (2012). Freud and Jung. Retrieved from http://psychology.about.com/od/sigmundfreud/ig/Sigmund-Freud-Photobiography/Freud-and-Jung.htm

Stone, D. (2011). Theoretical Positions of Freud, Jung, Adler, and Jame. Retrieved from http://psychological-musings.blogspot.com/2011/02/theoretical-positions-of-freud-jung.html