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. 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, and for Jung the psyche is the personality as a whole (Hall and Nordby, 1973, 32). 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 (Hall and Nordby, 1973, 33). 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 (Hall and Nordby, 1973, 35-36).
The traditional conception of the psyche is that it develops as the result of personal experience, but Jung does not accept that the origin of consciousness can be explained in terms of personal experience. Instead, he holds that consciousness arises in the first place from the unconscious. It is only because the child's mind is still near the unconscious that it operates intermittently. In considering how complexes develop, Jung came to see that they must originate in something deeper than childhood experi...