The Handy Psychology Answer Book. Lisa J. Cohen
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Название: The Handy Psychology Answer Book

Автор: Lisa J. Cohen

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Общая психология

Серия: The Handy Answer Book Series

isbn: 9781578595990

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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      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.

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      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. The functional types refer to ways that people process information. Believing the mind to be composed of opposites in continual tension with each other, he proposed two polarities: thinking vs. feeling and intuition vs. sensation. Each polarity was mutually exclusive from the other one. You could not process the world through feeling and through thinking at the same time. One side of the polarity was always dominant, the other relegated back to the unconscious. Extroversion vs. introversion described the attitude toward the outside world. The extrovert attends primarily to external reality, to other people and objects. The introvert is turned inward, preoccupied with internal, subjective experience.

      What personality tests are derived from Jung’s theory of personality?

      The Meyers-Briggs test is a well-known personality test that is often used in the work-place to identify employees’ different personality styles. This test uses all three polarities mentioned above, extroversion vs. introversion, thinking vs. feeling, intuition vs. sensation, and adds one more, judgment vs. perception. Extroversion is also measured on scales associated with the Five Factor Model of personality, such as the NEO personality inventory. This test, formulated to identify dimensions of personality in non-pathological adults, uses 240 items to quantify five areas: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

      What was Jung’s relationship with mysticism?

      Jung was always drawn to mysticism and late in life he traveled extensively to learn about the spiritual practices of other cultures. He visited the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, he traveled to Kenya and India and, he collaborated on studies of various Eastern religions. He viewed the symbolism in all the religious traditions as expressions of universal archetypes. Jung’s view of mental health was also religiously tinged. Our happiness is dependent upon our communion with a universal reality that is part of us but yet larger than us. In his concept of the collective unconscious, he combined psychology, evolutionary biology, and the spiritual traditions of many diverse cultures.

      What are archetypes?

      Archetypes are patterns of experience and behavior that reflect ancient and fundamental ways of dealing with universal life situations. Archetypes reside in the collective unconscious. There is a mother archetype, a child archetype, an archetype of the feminine, of the masculine, and many more. Archetypes can never be directly known in consciousness but can only be glimpsed through the images that float up from our unconscious in dreams, creative works of art, mythology, and even religious symbolism. Through interpretation of this visual symbolism, we gain greater knowledge of our deepest selves.

      HUMANISTIC THEORIES

      What is humanistic psychology?

      Humanistic psychology refers to a group of psychological theories and practices that originated in the 1950s and became very popular in subsequent СКАЧАТЬ