Question

What is one major similarity and one major difference between Freud and Jung?

Answer 1

• Freud believed the unconscious mind was the epicentre of our repressed thoughts, traumatic memories, and fundamental drives of sex and aggression. He saw it as a storage facility for all hidden sexual desires, resulting in neuroses, or what we would nowadays call mental illness.
• He declared that the human mind centres upon three structures – the id, the ego and the super ego. The id forms our unconscious drives (mainly sex), and is not bound by morality but instead only seeks to satisfy pleasure.
• The ego is our conscious perceptions, memories and thoughts that enable us to deal effectively with reality. The superego attempts to mediate the drives of the id through socially acceptable behaviours.
• Jung also divided the human psyche into three parts. But in Jung’s view the unconscious was divided into the ego, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. To Jung, the ego is the conscious, the personal unconscious includes memories (both recalled and suppressed) and the collective unconscious holds our experiences as a species or knowledge that we are born with (for example, love at first sight).
• Jung’s take on the human psyche was inspired by his studies into Eastern philosophy and religion such as Buddhism and Hinduism. He also believed that the contents of the unconscious are not restricted to repressed material.
• One of the biggest areas of conflicts, if not the biggest, between Freud and Jung was their differing views of human motivation. To Freud, repressed and expressed sexuality was everything. He felt it was the biggest motivating force behind behaviour and as such psychopathology.
• This is clear from his dogmatic theories regarding psychosexual development, as well as the infamous theories of the Oedipus complex, and to a lesser extent, the Electra complex.
• Jung felt that Freud’s attention was too focused upon sex and its impact on behaviour . Jung decided that what motivates and influences behaviour is a psychic energy or life force, of which sexuality could be only one potential manifestation. Jung also disagreed also with Oedipal impulses. He thought that the relationship between mother and child was based upon the love and protection granted by the mother to the child.
• Similarities:-
• Jung and Freud believed the unconscious plays a vital role in people’s lives. They believed that there are contents in the unconscious that affect people’s conscious personalities, contents that people can become conscious of, especially through dream analysis.
• They also both postulated the theory of complexes: that people carry repressed emotional charges in their unconscious’ that are organized around certain ideas and/or images.
• Another similarity between Freud and Jung was that both thought the content of dreams needed to be interpreted, which would enable the effective treatment of patients.