Freud and Jung

 

Freud and Jung


Most of the posts under this Psychology label have dealt in some way with depth psychology, and the importance of communicating with one's subconscious mind. The two outstanding pioneers in this field were Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Both attained a measure of acclaim for their work, but each of them, in some major respect, misused that fame.

Freud's problem arose when he found, through analyzing many dreams of his patients, that the evidence for telepathic dreams was undeniable. That was something supernatural, and that finding was a cause for alarm for him, because he recognized the popular fascination with anything that dealt with the supernatural, and he was aware of the dangers that lay in that direction, which he called “the dark mud of the occult. To avoid those dangers he did not emphasize them, but focused on dreams as a means of uncovering repressed urges. For some reason he formulated the “sexual theory”, which was a dogmatic interpretation of all dream symbols as repressed sexual urges. Jung felt that the study of the subconscious was a science, and that there should be no place in science for dogma.

Freud's dogma of interpreting all dreams as resulting from sexual repression now seems absurd, because sex is not repressed in this day and time. On the contrary, it is openly expressed as a common subject of everyday social conversation, and as common subject of TV sitcoms and dramas.

Unlike Freud, Jung recognized that the dreams of his patients offered a wealth of information when their messages could be decoded from their symbolic forms. He and his students and colleagues worked hard, to interpret, compile, and categorize hundreds of symbols. It was clear that the dreams offered far more insight into the patients' psychology than simple resources like ink blot tests and word association tests.

One could argue that Jung himself had in some sense become mired in that dark mud oft the occult. He was one of those rare individuals in which the material world and the spiritual world interact with relative ease. In his book, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections he recounts a number of surprising miraculous experiences.

He recognized that he was a special person, and that bolstered his ego to an extreme. First, he thought of himself as an ubermensh, as described by Nietzsche. In analyzing the problems of his patients, he found that many of those problems stemmed from repressed guilt over malevolent thoughts or actions; but he was proud of the fact that he could get away with violating moral codes without guilt feelings. I won't comment further about his flaunting his immoral life style. But Jung carried his egotism to the point that he assumed a persona superior to God. However, that problem falls more in the category of Religion, so I'll reserve comment on it for the Mysticism label.

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