Jung's Conception of the Mind

Jung's conception of the mind quite naturally colored his conceptions of mental processes and of mental disease. For most people, the concepts of Freud are more familiar than those of Jung, and there are some similarities as well as differences between the two. Basically, though, they had a different conception of the human mind. Freud sees human nature and human behavior as produced by "the irremediable antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization" (Strachey in Freud, 1966, 4). Human nature in the state of nature is thus one thing, while human nature in civilization has been reshaped and produces a different form of alienation in the Freudian conception. As the individual develops during the life cycle, the ego, or the sense of self, changes from encompassing everything to detaching itself from the external world and thus including only the inner world of the self.

Jung's conception of the mind is based on a recognition of a link, the relation of mental contents with the ego, and without such an awareness there could be no consciousness of the object. Without consciousness, says Jung, there would be no world, for the world exists only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is related to the outer world through the psychological functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition, and at the same time there is the simultaneous contact with the inner world, the world of th

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(Campbell, 1971, p. 324) Hunt (1992) refers to the dreams recorded by Freud and Jung in their respective works Interpretation of Dreams and Memories, Dreams, Reflections and finds that the form of dream experience in each carries with it the beginnings of their respective interpretive techniques. Jung reports on his dreams with coherence and vivid detail, often as encounters with mythological-spiritual beings. Jung sees dreams as foreshadowing events and as illuminating mythological meanings in a particular way: The dream has a metaphorically based sense of immediate significance that obviates the need for the kind of allusive unravelling found in the metonymic interpretations favored by Freud. (Hunt, 1992, p. 31) Hunt believes that in comparing Freud and Jung and their interpretation of dreams, "the blindspot of one was the special strength and source of open possibility in the other" (Hunt, 1992, pp 43-44). Freud is stronger in the area of relatedness which pervade his dreams and interpretations, but he misses the possibility of an open self-validating dimension that intuits wholeness and being such as can be found in Jung. Jung criticized the monotony of Freud's sexual interpretations, and each would find something to

Category: Psychology - J