The Handy Psychology Answer Book. Lisa J. Cohen

Twenty years separated Freud’s parents, Amalia and Jacob, the same age difference between Freud and his mother. Freud was his mother’s (but not his father’s) first born and by many accounts had a particularly close and intense relationship with her throughout his whole life. She died at age ninety-five, only nine years before her son died.

      In the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, the title character unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother; then he gouges out his eyes when he realizes what he has done.

      What is the Oedipal period?

      Freud believed that the libidinal instincts moved through a series of developmental stages, corresponding with different erogenous zones at different ages. In the phallic stage (approximately ages four to seven), the little boy goes through the Oedipal crisis, which results in the formation of his super-ego. Around this age, the little boy falls in love with his mother. Recognizing his father as his rival, he feels murderous rage toward his father, controlled only by his fear of his father’s greater strength. His fear that his father will cut off his penis in retaliation is termed castration anxiety.

      As a solution to this dilemma, the little boy identifies with his father, realizing that he will grow up to be a man just like him and then have a wife all his own. This internalization of the father and the father’s authority is seen to be the foundation of the super-ego and of a boy’s moral development. Freud was not as sure how to account for female moral development and assumed women to have weaker super-egos due to their obvious immunity to castration anxiety. While the specifics of this theory have been roundly criticized by feminists and developmental psychologists alike, Oedipal behavior is often observed in children this age, who can show strikingly romantic behavior towards older relatives of the opposite sex.

      How is Freudian theory seen today?

      Since the inception of psychoanalysis, Freud has always had passionate loyalists and detractors. Psychoanalysis has been trashed as all hocus-pocus; Freud’s writings have also been treasured as the Bible and seen as infallible. To some extent this is still the case today. However, many advances in our understanding of behavior and of the brain have shown that Freud was often onto something, although he was wrong in many of the specifics. Modern neuroscience, for example, has revealed the frontal lobe and the limbic system to function in dramatically similar ways to the ego and the id.

      How has psychoanalytic theory changed over the years?

      There have been many developments in psychoanalysis. In contemporary psychoanalysis, the schools of object relations, self psychology, and relational theory have translated Freud’s original ideas into interpersonal terms. The emphasis has shifted from sexual instincts to consideration of how early childhood relationships affect adults’ capacity to relate to others and manage emotions. Principles from attachment theory and ideas about self-reflective functioning (as found in the work of Peter Fonagy and Mary Target) have also informed contemporary psychoanalysis. Arguably, the integration of psychoanalytic concepts with advances in neuroscience currently forms the cutting edge of psychoanalytic theory.

      JUNGIAN ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

      Who was Carl Jung?

      The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was one of Freud’s closest collaborators until he broke off to form his own school of analytical psychology. While clearly grounded in Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian analytical psychology moves away from the dominance of libido and toward a mystical understanding of the human unconscious. Interestingly, Jung came from a long line of clergymen. His father was a minister in the Swiss Reformed Church.

      Fairly early in his career, Jung worked in Zurich at the renowned Burghölzli clinic under Eugen Bleuler, a prominent psychiatrist and the originator of the term “schizophrenia.” Here Jung became involved in research with word association, detecting unconscious meaning through the way people grouped words together. This work led him to Freud’s psychoanalytic research and the two men met in 1907. An intense and dynamic collaboration followed but ended acrimoniously in 1913 following a 1912 publication in which Jung was critical of Freud’s work. From 1913 on, Jung referred to his own work as analytical psychology to differentiate it from Freudian psychoanalysis.

      What was Jung’s relationship with Freud?

      Jung was a favorite protégé of Freud until they broke off their relationship over doctrine. Jung rose quickly within the psychoanalytic world, becoming editor of a psychoanalytic journal and president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Freud favored him in part because as a non-Jew, he offered a bridge to the wider non-Jewish scientific community in Europe. Jung’s relationship with Eugen Bleuler also offered the promise of greater scientific respect for psychoanalysis, which was something Freud craved. Jung grew increasingly uncomfortable, however, with Freud’s insistence on sexuality as the sole motivating force. He agreed with Freud’s energy-based conception of psychological motivation—that normal and abnormal psychological processes were a product of energy flow—but he believed sexuality to form only a small part of human motivation.

      Carl Jung, once a collaborator with Freud, went his own way to become the father of analytical psychology.

      Temperamentally, the two men differed as well. Jung had a mystical bent, nurtured perhaps through his family’s religious heritage, and a lifelong interest in the occult. Freud was a fervent rationalist, believing religion to be little more than an infantile form of neurosis. It is unlikely Freud would have had much respect for the occult either, except perhaps as clinical material.

      Why was Carl Jung interested in the Eastern practice of creating mandalas?

      Mandalas are religious artworks created by Buddhist and Hindu monks. Jung was strongly attracted to Eastern religions and viewed the mandala as a symbol of the personality. For Jung and his followers, the structure of the mandala, with its four corners bound to a central circle, represents the path of personal development. In our personal growth, we strive to unite the opposing forces of our personality (the four corners) into a comprehensive, all-inclusive, self-awareness (the central circle). To gain this awareness, we must turn inward, just as the outer corners of the mandala point inward toward the circle.

      How did Jung’s view of the unconscious differ from Freud’s?

      Like Freud, Jung believed the mind was divided into the conscious and unconscious parts and that the conscious part comprised a small fraction of the total psyche. Jung also believed, like Freud, that repressed and forbidden ideas were banished to the unconscious, intentionally kept out of consciousness. Unlike Freud, however, Jung divided the unconscious into the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious contained personal experiences that had slipped out of consciousness, due either to simple forgetting or repression. The contents of the personal unconscious came from the individual’s life experience. The collective unconscious, however, held the entire, evolutionary heritage of humanity. It contained the entire library of our typical reactions to universal human situations. It was not limited to the individual’s life but encompassed the great, impersonal truths of existence.

      Mandalas are religious designs used in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

      What are the personality traits that guide our conscious awareness?

      Jung developed a typology of personality traits that has had wide influence on personality psychology. He divided the conscious mind into both functional modes and attitudes toward the world.