Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 2: A Troubled Relationship with Freud – and the Nazis." GUARDIAN June 6, 2011.

All in all, from early on, Jung was nagged by the thought that Freud placed his personal authority above the quest for truth. And behind that lay deep theoretical differences between the two.

Jung considered Freud too reductionist. He could not accept that the main drive in human life is sexual. Instead, he defined libido more broadly as psychic energy or life force, of which sexuality is just one manifestation. As to the Oedipus complex, Jung came to believe that the tie between a child and its mother was not based upon latent incestuous passion, but stemmed from the fact that the mother was the primary provider of love and care. Jung had anticipated the attachment theory of John Bowlby, which has subsequently been widely confirmed.

Jung also believed that the contents of the unconscious are not restricted to repressed material. Rather, the unconscious resources an individual's life. A human person is built up of layers. The conscious aspect is the psychosomatic whole that comprises the body and cognisant mental life. Beneath that lies a personal unconscious, a supply of material from the life of the individual. And beneath that lies a collective unconscious that is inherited. Jung believed he had objective evidence for this common heritage from his studies of schizophrenics, who apparently spoke of images and symbols they could not have discovered in their reading, say, or culturally. . . .

Visit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/06/carl-jung-freud-nazis.

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