Carl Jung And Psychoanalytic Theory

The Psychoanalytic Theory propounded by Sigmund Freud, is a ground breaking that changed the way human psyche was understood. It affected not just the field of psychology but transversed across various fields and the understanding of the subject of their study. Carl Gustav Jung, was another pioneering figure who collaborated with Freud and supported his theory of the deep-seated unconscious. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung was born July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland. The only son of a Protestant clergyman, Jung was a quiet, observant child who packed certain loneliness in his single-child status. However, perhaps as a result of that isolation, he spent hours observing the roles of the adults around him, something that no doubt shaped his later career and work. Jung was widely believed to be the one who would continue the work of the elder Freud. However, viewpoints and temperament ended their collaboration and, eventually their friendship. In particular, Jung challenged Freud's beliefs around sexuality as the foundation of neurosis. He also disagreed with Freud's methods, asserting that the elder psychologist's work was too one-sided. The final break came in 1912 when Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious. In it, Jung examined the unconscious mind and tried to understand the symbolic meaning of its contents. In the process, the work also took head-on a number of Freud's theories. Seeking to further distinguish his work from Freud's, Jung adopted the term "analytical psychology" and delved deep into his work. His most important development from this early period was his conception of introverts and extroverts and the notion that people can be categorized as one of the two, depending on the extent to which they exhibit certain functions of consciousness. Jung's work in this area was featured in his 1921 publication Psychological Types. During this period he also allowed himself to explore his own mind, eventually proposing the idea that there was not only a personal unconscious but also a collective unconscious from which certain universal symbols and patterns have arisen throughout history. Shared by all individuals in a culture, the collective unconscious could be regarded as the, repository of racial memories  and of the primordial images and patterns of experiences, which he calls archetypes. A philosopher, psychoanalyst and a disciple of Freud, Jung treated the human self as the totality of all psychic processes. While Freud believed literature to be an expression of the repressed conflicts and desires of the author, Jung regarded literature as an expression of the collective unconscious, as it provides access for readers to the archetypal images buried in racial memories, thereby helping in revitalising the psyche of the culture as a whole.Hence the importance of using myths and legends in African, Native American and other resistance literatures in a desperate attempt to reclaim the past, redefine history and assert their cultural identities. A powerful explication of this concept can be seen in Eugene O’Neill‘s Emperor Jones. Jung’s theory has also been a cardinal formative influence on Northrop Frye‘s Archetypal Criticism. Jung also postulated the concept of the Self as constituting of the anima and the animus—the anima being the unconscious female component in men, and the animus being the unconscious male component in women. At the heart of analytical psychology is the interplay of these with the ego, a process he labeled individuation, by which a person develops into his or her own "true self." Jung published numerous works during his lifetime, and his ideas have had reverberations traveling beyond the field of psychiatry, extending into art, literature and religion as well. He died in 1961.