Jung’s Theory of Personality #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter J post in the #AtoZChallenge. On Monday, I discussed Freud, so it follows almost naturally that I’d be talking about Jung as well.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), like Freud, postulated that the human psyche consists of both an unconscious and a conscious part. He, however, believed that the unconscious consists of two parts: the personal unconscious (which is similar to Freud’s unconscious) and the collective unconscious, which includes archetypes universal to all humans.

The personal unconscious includes all of an individual’s acquired information that influences a person’s behavior but that has been forgotten or repressed. For clarity’s sake, it is not always negative. I think of this as the fact that positive triggers (also known as glimmers) are a thing too.

Jung says that the personal unconscious includes “complexes”, that is, associated collections of information that influence a person’s behavior.

The collective unconscious is mainly expressed in art, religion and other symbolic representations. It also shows up in dreams. The collective unconscious is universal. This is apparent from the fact that, as Jung observed in his interactions with psychotic patients in a mental hospital, there are certain underlying themes common to their dreams. According to Jung, the archetypes present in the collective unconscious, are the same for everyone across cultures and time periods. These archetypes, for example, include the Mother, the Hero, the Child, the Trickster, etc. I can’t help but notice how some of these are traditionally gendered.

Jung also believed people have a dominant attitude towards life: introversion or extraversion. They also have a dominant function, be it feeling, thinking, intuition or sensing. As such, Jung believed there are eight different personality types. As I’ve shared a few times, current thinking says that most people are not one type, but exist somewhere along a continuum.

Freud’s Theory of Personality #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. For my letter F post in the #AtoZChallenge on personal growth, I want to talk about Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality.

According to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the human personality consists of three main components: the id, the ego and the superego.

The id refers to sexual and aggressive drives that, Freud claims, are fully unconscious. More broadly, it refers to the drive for pleasure and the drive to avoid discomfort. This is the only part of the personality that Freud thinks is present from birth. As such, an infant cannot delay their need for gratification. For instance, when they are hungry, they are not able to keep themselves from showing this.

The ego is the part of the personality, both unconscious and conscious, that helps regulate the id and express our impulses in a way that’s acceptable in the real world.

The superego, which doesn’t start developing until a child is about five-years-old according to Freud, is the part of the mind that allows a person to distinguish right from wrong. This part includes the conscience, which is the part of the mind responsible for signaling that something is “bad”, as well as the ego ideal, which holds the person’s ideas of what is desired of them or what is “good”.

Healthy personality development can only happen if there’s a balance between the id, the ego and the superego, that is, if the ego is capable of moderating the other two parts of the personality. As such, if a person has an overactive id, they are thought to become impulsive or otherwise antisocial. On the other hand, if a person has an overactive superego, they will become overly judgmental. Freud actually claimed that pretty much all mental illnesses are down to imbalanced personality development.

Freud describes several stages of personality development, which are all related to the way the child interacts with their body. For instance, the first stage is called the oral stage, in which a baby discovers their environment through their mouth.

It has been nearly twenty years since I read about Freud. Back then, I only saw how Freud’s theory was wrong on so many levels and particularly judgmental, especially towards women. For instance, Freud reasoned that women have a less well-developed moral sense than men. This is obviously not true.

However, now that I read up on Freud’s theory, I can see certain parallels between Freud’s thoughts and the modern ideas of emotional development. For example, behavior signaling pleasure or discomfort is still strongly associated with Anton Došen’s first stage of emotional development. This is not, for clarity’s sake, meant to defend Freud, whose theory is not only grossly outdated but also horribly anti-woman, like I said. I guess this is a case of the saying that a broken clock is right twice a day.