Carl Jung
Carl Jung was born in 1875 in Switzerland. Growing up he was close to his father but he considered his father to be weak. He also loved his mother, but at times she was happy and cheerful and others she was depressed. According to Jung, as a child he viewed his mother as two different people. Jung describes his mother as fat and unsttractive, and according to him, not all boys have sexual longing for their mothers as he did not. One can say, that his experiences as childhood maybe the reason for why he rejected Freud’s Psychosexual Developmental theory. Freud was very found of Freud’s Psychoanalysis theory. As a yound child, Jung believed in dreams and fantacies, whenever he faced a problem, he would rely on his dreams for a solution. Jund studied medicine at the University of Basel, and he decided to specialize in psychiatry which might give him an opportunity to perssue his interests in dreams. He became Freud’s associate in 1907, at the time Jund had already gained professional reputation. Their relationship was so strong that Freud once said to Jung that “I formely adopted you as an eldest son” (Schultz & Schultz, 2005).
Even though, Freud had a lot of hopes for Jung, Jung had his own idea of how personality develops in humans. Jung went his own way in 1917 to propose his theory of personality. He did agree with Freud’s idea of unconscious and conscious, but Jund believed that those were the minor parts. According to Jung, there was another part called collective unconscious. He believed that this part of mind is common to everyone in which the set of themes are inherited. These themes are contained in the “fundemental symblic patterns” (Lester, 1995) called archetyes. Jung believed that these archetypes are imprinted on our psyche, sensations, feelings and experiences; and are expressed through our dreams and fantacies. According to Jund, there are four different types of archetypes: persona archetype, anima archetype, shadow archetype and self archetype.
Jung proposed that one’s personality develops trough what we hope to be (fantacize) and what we have been. He rejected Freud’s idea of past events being the shaper of personality. He believed that we develop through regardless of age, and are always moving towards a more complete level of self-realization (Schultz & Schultz, 2005). Jung divided his developmental theory into three parts: Childhood, Puberty to young adulthood and Middle age. My main focus is going to be his Childhood part of development. According to Jung, ego begins to develop in early childood years because their own unique identity has not been formed yet. He believed that a child’s personality develops which is a reflection of both of his/her parents and a little more modified to that. Parents have a big role in child’s development of personality, they can help shape the child his/her personality through their influenes. Jung believed that conscious is formed in a child starting when a child is able to say the word “I”. And through that, the more a child distinguish him/herself from others and the world, the more ego develops. According to Jung, psyche assumes a difinite content not until puberty. That is when a teenager struggles through difficulties; and he/she also beging to fantacize.
As we can see, alhough Jung was influenced by Freud’s personality theory, but his personality theory focuses on parents’ influence on a child’s personality and ego. Carl Jung died in 1961.