Discussion 4: The Concept of Self

9/15/20, 8*18 PMPrint

Page 2 of 11https://content.ashford.edu/print/AUPSY330.12.2?sections=sec2.5,s…ntent&clientToken=3ed39d32-b486-85b9-4af7-79d8296911bc&np=sec1.1

WARNER BROS PICTURES/Album/Album/SuperStock

This popular figure is a merging of the traditional hero archetype and archetypes that represent a darker side.

2.5 The Neo-Analytic Movement Freud's work stimulated many other theoreticians who shared some of the basic assumptions of psychoanalytic theory, but who nevertheless established separate schools of thought. Neo-analytic theorists are those whose work was based on, and branched out from, Freud, but whose work typically differed from (or was even opposed to) Freud on least one major theoretical tenet. As a result, each of these schools of thought are sufficiently distinct to merit considering them separately. We here present a brief overview of some of these individuals and their major theoretical contributions.

Carl Jung and the Collective Unconscious

Carl Gustav Jung was like Freud in that he was awarded a medical degree and emphasized psychiatry (he was both a psychiatrist and psychotherapist). Jung collaborated with Freud from 1907 to 1912, becoming one of Freud's favorite followers. But Jung eventually broke with Freud and began to develop his own theory, which he called analytic psychology, as well as his own method of practice, in which the primary goal was to integrate conscious and unconscious thought and experience (termed individuation) while still maintaining some degree of autonomy.

Jung's theoretical disagreements with Freud largely centered on: (1) a refusal to accept the sexual instinct as the primary force in mental life and (2) the emphasis on the collective unconscious, rather than the personal unconscious. According to Jung, the collective unconscious refers to what is essentially a public-access and universal version the unconscious that contains memory traces common to all humans. The collective unconscious refers to the inherited themes that are represented in symbolic ways by different cultures, and Jung found these themes expressed in literature, art, and dreams. These themes deal with common experiences, such confronting death, gaining independence, and striving for mastery. Jung termed these common, recurrent, and symbolically represented themes archetypes of the collective unconscious. Examples of archetypes of the unconscious include concepts such as God, the self, birth, death, the wise old man, the nurturing mother, and power symbolized as the sun or a lion.

In his analytic work with patients, Jung sought to bring material from the collective unconscious into conscious awareness through the use of free association and dream analysis, two techniques he borrowed from Freud. Indeed, although Freud is widely known for his work on the interpretation of dreams, Jung also contributed heavily to this practice. One important difference between the two was that Jung placed a greater emphasis on the manifest content of dreams (the surface meaning), whereas Freud was more likely to make interpretations of the latent content, the underlying meaning (typically sexual or aggressive in nature). Jung also believed that one could examine the presence archetypes in dreams and predict the incidence of creativity (i.e., more creative individuals have more archetypes of the unconscious in their dreams, and creativity comes from the sampling of this unconscious material).

Jung also introduced the concept of the persona, a term for the identity or mask that individuals adopt. Jung suggested that we consciously create the persona, but that it is derived from our experience of the collective unconscious as well as conscious experiences (e.g., socialization). Jung argued that one of the primary functions of the persona was to serve as a compromise between who we are and what society expects us to be by both hiding aspects of ourselves that are incongruent with societal expectations and "creating" aspects of ourselves that are consistent with society's expectations. (Note: The persona is similar to the actual and ought self-concepts forwarded by Higgins and discussed in Chapter 9).

One aspect of Jung's writings that actually undermined the proliferation of his ideas in psychology was that he focused on mysticism, as indicated by his writing on religions, philosophy, and the occult. In fact, Jung believed that these areas were all central to the process of individuation.

In what is arguably his most durable contribution, Jung (1923) developed the concept of two attitude types: the extrovert, who tends to be outgoing and very socially oriented, and the introvert, who tends to be quiet and withdrawn and is more interested in ideas than in people. Jung also described four functions (thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting), which, when crossed with the two attitudes, result in eight basic types (e.g., extroverted sensing, introverted sensing, extroverted feeling, introverted feeling, etc.). These basic types would later serve as the basis for the famous Myers-Briggs Inventory, which is still widely used in industrial-organizational settings, and this is where some aspects of Jung's

theory continue to thrive.

Alfred Adler and Inferiority Complex

Like his contemporaries, Alfred Adler was also awarded a medical degree, but he practiced ophthalmology and general practice before moving to psychiatry and joining a discussion group with Freud and Jung. Adler, Freud, and Jung are typically credited as the founding fathers of what is known as depth psychology, which emphasizes the psychodynamics of the unconscious. However, Adler was the first to break away from Freud's inner circle, founding the school of individual psychology (Adler, 1923), which posited that all people were unique and that no theory could capture their complexity. He also adopted a holistic approach (focusing on the importance of the whole) in his work, emphasizing the importance of social context. Indeed, Adler identified three fundamental social tasks that all people would have to experience; occupational tasks (careers), societal tasks (e.g., friendships), and love tasks (finding a long-term intimate partner). He also emphasized that a social, rather than sexual or aggressive, motive underlies all human behavior. Perhaps most noteworthy was Adler's clear emphasis on conscious motivation (i.e., ego psychology), as indicated by the fact that the three fundamental social tasks are explicitly known and pursued. Of course, Adler still believed in the unconscious and its influence on the individual, but relative to both Freud and Jung, he attributed considerably more importance to conscious experience.

Adler is probably best known for his formulation of the concept of the inferiority complex. He believed that all people struggle with feelings of inferiority, which are based on