Welcome to Humanities 102 brief lecture
on Freud and Jung:  the story of our
unconscious minds. From from both a
Freudian and a Jungian perspective the
unconscious mind is very important. That's why I love this photo, because it
shows a ship on the surface of the water
that looks remarkably like a Viking ship
and it shows everything that's lurking
underneath the surface. That's what
we mean by the unconscious mind. All the
processes happening in our brain that
were not necessarily conscious thoughts. We need to start with Sigmund Freud. He
lived a good chunk of his life in the
Victorian era and I mention this
because Victorian theories of sex and
sexuality play very big in the theories
of Sigmund Freud. He has a belief in what
we call "Psyche," which is the totality of
human mental processes that includes
conscious processes such as the one I'm
engaged in now and giving this
lecture and preparing the lecture as
well as unconscious processes that may
be going on in my brain that I have no
immediate awareness of. He focuses a lot
of his theories of mental illness and
"less than mental well-being" on theories
of repressed experiences that are
lingering in the unconscious mind. Now
Freud's emphasis on repressed experiences
focuses very heavily on sexual experiences
or sexual feelings and urges. As I said
he's a product of the Victorian era and
as we discussed in Modernism and the
Victorian era, legs were considered so
sexually charged
that even tables had to keep
their legs covered. Freud has this
idea of the unconscious mind, which is
unique and individual to each one of us.
The contents of my individual mind or
my unconscious mind are going to be very
different than the contents of your
unconscious mind and even siblings will
have their own unique unconscious mind.
He invented techniques used in
psychoanalysis,  things like free
association where you might throw out a
word, let's see what words somebody
responds to, and continue that layering
of words. If I said "dog" what
response would you say?  Some people would
say "cat." Other people might say "mother"
and through all these associations that
would help Sigmund Freud with diagnosing
what is ailing you. This process becomes
early psychoanalysis, but that's going to
go through a lot of evolution to our
own present time. As I mentioned for
Freud this role of repressed energies
that are primarily sexual are critical
aspects of what's going on your
unconscious mind and one of the goals of
Freudian psychoanalysis is to get to
reveal those repressed energies and help
people deal with them in a more
conscious manner. He was a believer an
interpretation of dreams.
Our dream images could provide clues to
our repressed memories or repressed
experiences or issues that are causing
us mental health challenges.
He also focused a great deal of his work
on the Oedipus myths from the ancient
Greek world. For those of you who
aren't familiar with this tale, it's the
story of a man who is told by a psychic
that he's going to kill his father and
marry his mother.  Because he believes
this will actually happen,
he leaves his hometown and travels far
away and ends up killing a man and then
becomes king of a new city-state in
ancient Greece and marries the Queen. It
turns out that he was adopted. The
parents he left behind, were his adopted
parents and the man he killed on the
road was his father and the Queen he
marries is his mother. Freud really
focuses on this one myth as the
essential psychic contents of Western
humans. Then he's really focused on
science. That's a very interesting
point with Freud. He's very focused on
the work that he's doing being taken as
significant scientific research. He was a
medical doctor and he wants to make sure
that people cannot dismiss his ideas
because he has scientific proof that his
ideas are true. Then we get to see
C.G. Jung or Carl Jung. Earlier in his life he preferred Carl
and then later in his life he preferred
the initials. The first thing you need to
know about Jung is that he is as you can
see he's born 20 years later in 1875 and
lives quite a bit longer than Freud.
As a young man
also becomes a medical doctor and works
with the mentally ill:  Schizophrenics and
people who've been institutionalized for
a wide range of reasons but a lot of
them having to do with severe mental
illness. As he starts exploring the
world that's going on with his
schizophrenic patients, he writes a
series of papers that he sends to
Sigmund Freud. Freud sees in Jung a
potential son from a scholarly
perspective and they establish a
wonderful friendship, a collaboration
where they're sharing ideas and
comparing ideas.But then as happens with
your son, whether it's your literal or
scholarly son, the son grows up and has
ideas of his own. When Jung begins
to contradict or expand upon some
Freud's ideas,  they have a scholarly
disagreement, a personal disagreement and
they never interact again. Carl Jung
also believes in the psyche just in the
way that Sigmund Freud believes in it.
But he also expands this knowledge for
this idea of psyche to include not just
our individual mental processes but a
more collective mental process. One could
call this the instinctual aspect, the
idea that in culture and in human
culture, we have mothers, we have fathers,
we have the idea of a baby that is a
type of instinctual process that is
common to all human
cultures no matter the time or location
that they live. As he is working with
the mentally ill, especially the
schizophrenics,
who are having what one might call a
visual hallucination. They are
experiencing images from distant
cultures. In Jung's research, he
realizes that the images that some of
his patients are experiencing or the
people or the characters or the events
come from cultures which this person
would have no personal knowledge of.
 Remember back in this era, you didn't
have the Internet.
Travel was much slower. Everybody didn't
have in their head an image of Mount
Kilimanjaro for example or volcanic
eruptions in Hawaii or West African
drumming or any one of a number of
cultures that are very distinct from
what the cultural milieu is in Western
Europe. This leads him to believe in
the importance of dreams because not
only are the mentally ill seeing and
experiencing these images, but people
that appear to be mentally competent
from a cultural standpoint are having
dreams with these images as well.
This leads Jung into an emphasis on
mythology. These mythic stories,
these mythic characters, the mythic
images live on in all of us and not only
that,  they
cross-cultural lines. This leads him
to the idea of the archetypes.  The
archetypes are an idea that is common in
all cultures but when a person
experiences an image of it, whether it's
due to a hallucination or a dream, the
image of the archetype is culturally
inflected. I know that's a big idea and
I'm going to try and simplify just a
little bit. If we talk about the
archetype of mother. In different
cultures, in different eras, in different
geographical locations, the image that
that society created of what a "good
mother" is and how a good mother looks
may vary significantly. but every culture
has an idea of mothering and what
mothering looks like. In our own
culture, we can see that mothering is
being separated from gender expression.
We realize now that men can mother,
transgender people can mother, homosexual
women can mother, heterosexual women can
mother. Mothering is an archetypal energy
that manifests in different forms and
shapes in different cultures. Jung also
believes very much in this idea of
amplification of the dream images.
This amplification is a process that
one would go through in psychoanalysis
but artists might also engage in it as
well. Then he focuses on a symbolic
understanding
so unlike Freud who's trying to be very
scientific Jung is more concerned with
psychic processes,  symbolic understanding
and how humans perceive the world , which
oftentimes is less than scientific. To
wrap up this brief lecture on Freud and
Jung, I put together this quick little
table on some key points that show the
overlap but also the differences between
Freud and Jung. For Freud the
unconscious mind is very much individual.
It's your repressed 
psychic contents and there's an emphasis
on your sexual contents. Whereas for
Jung
that's true, but also you have this
collective unconscious common to all
humans and the repressed memories and
ideas aren't necessarily sexual. For
dreams, we have a lot of similarities
between Freud and Jung. The dreams allow
us access to our unconscious mind. For   Freud, the dream analysis was based
on that premise that dreams were of past
psychic materials not present psychic
materials. For Jung
