Perspective of Carl Jung Essay

The most obvious thing Carl Jung had an opinion was the psychology of the times, and how the mind worked. His main interaction of the ideas of the time was through his, what one could call, feud with Freud. Freud believed that there were two parts that affected human thought and action: the conscious, and the subconscious. The conscious was what we thought, believed, and other things that we were able to easily access in our minds, such as strong memories. The subconscious however, was everything that affected our behavior and though, but wasn’t easily reachable, such as recessed memories and thoughts and instinct. Jung’s system was a slightly more complex system made up of three parts: the conscious, the subconscious, and the general subconscious. The conscious was basically the same, but the subconscious lacked Freud’s instinct, and the general subconscious was totally new. Jung believed that every human being tapped into a general subconscious, which allowed instinct, similar reactions to things, and another key subject in Jung’s psychology: Archetype and symbols. In Jung’s psychology, he believed that there were many symbols and ideas that were immediately recognizable to people of any education, race or class. The thing was that since this was a part of the general subconscious, we were likely not even able to recognize that we recognized these symbols! This recognition may stem out of an emotional response, or a simple nagging feeling at the back of the mind, if anything at all. Another important pillar of the Jungian psychological ideas was the interpretation of dreams. Again, he ran against Freud in his ideas about interpreting dreams. The Freudian method of ‘free association’ allowed for any detail of the dream to be focused upon, and continually broadened upon until the ‘problem’ was found. The Jungian method believed that the dream as a whole had a specific purpose. The overall feeling, topic and main details of the dream were focused upon in this method rather then any individual one.