Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung

Sigmund Freud was a famous Austrian neurologist (1856 – 1939), who stated that dreams were the manifestation of the unconscious. Himself and another neurologist, Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961), believed that conscious behavior derived from unconscious instinct which exists in all of us.

These unconscious thoughts were linked to suppressed sexual desires. Freud identified three key stages in the life cycle where the child’s tendency to focus on sexual areas of the body changes over time.

Freud argued that in these stages of unconscious repression, male children are attracted to their mother and become instinctively aggressive towards the father. The father reciprocally injects fear into the child by his male superiority, thus insinuating an essence of competition and games theory. Either way, the prime fact is that the child must grow to become sexually active and mature.

Differences Between Jung and Freud

Jung believed that a persons’ brain consisted of the forgotten consciousness and a cluster of memories of past experiences. He came to this hypothesis by studying humans suffering a mental disorder, who had hallucinations that were not a past recollection, thus Jung deduced there was another component of the brain adding to this illusion, i.e. the unconscious.

Essentially, this method of thinking, and approaching the brain from a self-realizing approach, neurology has been able to develop since these initial theories by Jung and Freud.

It also paved advances in psychiatry, and methods of psychotherapy to combat mental disorders, which are investigated upon in the next tutorial.