Jung's Perspective: Sigmund Freud And Carl Jung

Individually, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung had extraordinarily thought-provoking perspectives on the substance of the unconscious. Freud approached the subject of the unconscious by supposing awareness existed in stratums and there existed considerations occurring beneath the surface. He possessed a pessimistic obsession with the mechanisms of the unconscious, and surmised that it was motivated by instinct and stayed in unremitting turmoil. He believed in a rational, measurable approach that was mechanistic and scientific in its nature. Similarly, Jung’s approach also believed there existed components of the unconscious but unlike Freud he remained optimistic, open-minded, and willing to embrace a spiritual, unmeasurable, integrative aspect of the unconscious. Both had proposed a method for gaining access to the unconscious through dreams and fantasies; however their approaches split on some significant explanations of the pathway to comprehend the unconscious. The presumption of Freud in reference to the psychoanalytical mind, suggested an intellect in which division existed in three interconnected zones that he categorized as the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious. The preconscious was a layer between the conscious and unconscious that could be accessed easily, and the conscious was readily accessed; however the unconscious was grounded in repression, denial, and mechanisms of defense. He believed that individuals entertained considerations and outlooks that were so distasteful that they would repress them and they would comprise the unconscious. Consequently, Freud established three key parts of the unconscious which he labeled the ego, super ego, and id. According to Freud, “the id is the mother of the ego” (p.47) since it is irresolvable to incessantly need one’s desires satiated in which the id demands. The id, which Freud called a “chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations” (p. 47) is the root to psychopathology if not monitored by the superego (conscience, and ego-ideal) and mediated by the ego. Unlike Freud’s cultural anchor of the wealthy and white male, Jung possessed an open mindedness to cross cultural ideas and philosophies. …show more content…
Relative to his religious training, he conceptualized a two part unconscious consisting of the collective unconscious and personal unconscious. The collective unconscious which transcends individual cultures and affects the human psyche with opposing drives that causes a self-regulation of balance to occur; these opposing drives are “made up of motives, urges fears, and potentialities” (Suppl. 3A, p. 9) also known as archetypes. The collective unconscious is considerably grander than the personal unconscious, and this concept was in direct opposition to Freud’s base fundamental drives of the unconscious. Jung believed that there was an instinctive or inborn transcendental function in which he called individuation that was a fluid multi-dimensional scheme of thought that represented nature itself. He did not believe in psychopathology per se, but he did believe even though an individual that subsisted justly intended could inadvertently transpire into a critical divergence without comprehending their life journey due to the oppositions in the psyche. In other words, they are lost till they question and develop awareness to reach individuation; a progression which usually happens in the second half of their life. Both Freud and Jung believed the access to the subconscious was through dreams. Freud called dreams the “the royal road to the unconscious” (p.47) and Jung referred to dreams as “the via regia (royal road) to the unconscious, however, is not the dream but the complex, which is