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 the unconscious. Human beings are subject to emotions and affects irrespective of their expectations and wishes, and so they always experience the impact of the unconscious. From moment to moment human beings receive messages from the unconscious in the act of remembering, and Jung says that the immediate availability of memory is comprehensible if we assume the existence of the unconscious (Bennet, 1961, pp. 79-80).
The traditional conception of the psyche ...