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Comparing Freud and Jung's Theories

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Select two of the major theories (Freud's psychoanalysis, Carl Jung's analytical psychology, Alfred Adler's individual's psychology, Karen Horney's interpersonal psychoanalytic theory) and compare and contrast them to each other.

On what issues would they be in agreement?

Over what ideas would they likely disagree?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of each perspective?

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Solution Summary

This solution selects two of the major theories and compares and contrasts them to each other on vaiorus dimensions e.g.
issues in agreement, ideas they would likely disagree, and the strengths and weaknesses of each perspective, etc. Supplemented with additional information on Carl Jung's theory.

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Let's look more closely at each section from various sources, which you can draw on for your final copy. I also attached an article on Jung's' contributions to Psychology.

RESPONSE:

Select two of the major theories (Freud's psychoanalysis, Carl Jung's analytical psychology, Alfred Adler's individual's psychology, Karen Horney's interpersonal psychoanalytic theory) and compare and contrast them to each other.

1. On what issues would they be in agreement?

Freud's psychoanalytic theory was the earliest well-defined theory of personality. Carl Jung (1875-1961), a Swiss psychiatrist, who became interested in Freud's psychoanalysis around the turn of the century. In 1907, Jung visited Freud in Vienna and a close friendship between the two men was formed. It lasted until 1914 when personal and theoretical frictions caused the association to break up. Both men relied heavily upon the notion of unconscious determinants of behavior (http://online.sfsu.edu/~psych200/unit12/124.htm).

For both men, the essence of their creative and defensive emotional and transference relationships was possibly the paternal complex of them both. Both men had parental issue that played out in their theories. For example, Freud's Oedipus Complex reflected his family, where his mother was 21 and his father was 20 years older. Freud explains the father-son relationship through the lens of his parental relationship and thus came up with the crisis of the Oedipus Complex. Jung's crisis with his father came in adulthood with religious differences, so his crisis is located in adulthood instead (http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:nqXWjqvvMJkJ:www.carlosbyington.com.br/downloads/artigos/en/freud_and_jungin.pdf+comparing+freud+and+jung&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=25&gl=ca&client=firefox-a).

Freud and Jung both believed in unconscious processes, but Freud placed more emphasize on the role of unconscious in personality development, and Jung, the conscious mind. They both believed that dreams were meaningful and could be interpreted. Jung possibly got to know about Freud's thinking by reading The Interpretation of Dreams(1900) because in his own Psychiatric thesis -About Occult Phenomena?he quoted Freud's work three times (http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:nqXWjqvvMJkJ:www.carlosbyington.com.br/downloads/artigos/en/freud_and_jungin.pdf+comparing+freud+and+jung&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=25&gl=ca&client=firefox-a).

2. Over what ideas would they be likely to disagree?

Jung and Freud differ is how they explain the structure of personality. For Freud, the structure of personality involves three warring parts: the id, the ego, and the super-ego. The personality is complete at 5 or 6 with the resolution of the Oedipus Complex:

? The id contains the drives that people have. These are the drives for pleasure. If humans have instincts, this is where they are. The id wants its wishes immediately and directly fulfilled. The id is governed by the pleasure principle, which suggests that all processes operate to achieve the maximum amount of pleasure. Also, the id is almost completely unconscious.

? The superego contains all of the moral lessons the person has learned in their life. This is the internalized voice of authority. Freud suggested that usually the moral lessons a person has in their superego were learned from their parents, although as the person gets older the lessons may be learned from others as well. Our conscience is in the superego. This is also where we have a notion of what our ideal person is. The superego is also partially unconscious.

? The ego is the mediator between the id and the superego. The ego tries to reconcile the wishes of the id, and the moral attitudes of the superego. That reconciliation may entail that the ego postpone the immediate gratification demanded by the id for later, and greater, gratification. The ego is in touch with reality, and may do reality testing, which is thinking about what the best course of action is to attain goals of the id and superego. The ego is governed by the reality principle, which suggests that the person gets as much satisfaction from the world as possible. Finally, the ego is the conscious mind (http://www.a2zpsychology.com/great_psychologists/freud_psychosexual_thoery.htm).

Instead, Jung's theory divides the human psyche into three parts including:

? The ego, or the conscious mind.
? The personal unconscious, which includes anything which is not presently conscious, but can be, and the collective unconscious.
? The collective unconscious is considered one of the most widely recognized aspects of Jung's theory. It can be described as the knowledge and the experience that we are all born with (http://www.quazen.com/Reference/Biography/The-Life-of-Carl-G-Jung-and-His-Contributions-to-Psychology.19144).

Jung does not emphasize the early years of life as Freud did. Instead, he sees life as a series of periods identified by different uses of psychic energy (as opposed to Freud's view of psychic energy being sexual in nature). For Jung, people reach one of the most important points in their late thirties or ...

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