Personality: Carl Jung and Karen Horney

Now we come to Carl Jung, another psychoanalytic theorist, not really somebody who engaged in research, and I’ll emphasize Freud did not do research Freud just theorized. Other people did research as a result of Freud. He had a profound impact on society.

You’re familiar with some of his terminology, and you’re familiar with some of his concepts just by being a member of our society. And, if you go to the magazine rack at any checkout counter, and you’ll see things like sex surveys and how to be better in bed and all kinds of things that are just kind of old hat. And, nobody, you know, bats an eye at.

But, those things didn’t happen when he first brought up these concepts, and in someways he freed us up to talk about sexuality in ways that we now take to be commonplace but weren’t. So he shook up society and shook up science. Carl Jung is another theorists and used to be a partner of Freud early on. So, Freud actually named him his crown prince successor if that gives you an indication of Freud’s own narcissism and ego, right, that he could name a crown prince successor clearly he became famous in his own time as did Jung. And, Carl Jung would would agree with Freud on a number of things but eventually he deviated from Freud in a way that Freud couldn’t tolerate and Freud apparently did not play well with others.

And, if you didn’t go along with his theories as he thought they should be advanced then he didn’t work with you anymore. So he went from a colleague he thought was going to be his Crown Prince successor to rejecting Carl Jung out right and never having any associations with him further after Carl deviated too far from him and his theory.https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/974676/simda-dating-app-help And, Carl thought he put too much emphasis on sexuality and not enough emphasis on spirituality which is an interesting take on it so his ideas were that yeah we have a personal unconscious he agreed with Freud, you know, there’s this massive force within us that drives our behavior that we’re unaware of and unable to appreciate examine and probably alter because we’re unable to be conscious of it. But, then he said further we have a collective unconscious that we all share and of course these are constructs within your personality.

And, then we share this collective unconscious because we’re all human beings. As human beings we are going to be influenced by our own genetic history in the sense that we have come down through the ages with certain concepts that no matter where you’re born as a human being you will share those concepts so that we don’t get away from being human no matter what our cultural influences are. And, one thing that Jung had done that Freud had not done is that he had traveled and he had examined other cultures and he had noticed that there’s commonalities no matter how disparate these cultures were in terms of societal practices or beliefs he noticed that they all had theories of good and evil that they all had creation stories how we came to be. That they all had hierarchies and organizations. They all shared certain characteristics but expressed them differently and that those expressions could be traced back to some very common archetypes.

The archetypes are symbols thoughts with universal meaning to all human beings so we have our wise old man archetype. We have our motherly old woman nurturing woman archetype. Those things have been played out since Greek dramas. If you look at all the dramas and the tragedies and the comedies going all the way back to the pre-Socratic philosophers you’ll find that the themes that we see in television and movies today are the same themes we’re just rewriting the characters in the details but the themes remain the same you look at Star Wars and you’ve got Yoda the wise old man you got evil incarnate in Darth Vader but a conflicted evil because he’s also Luke Skywalker’s dad well Luke Skywalker’s the the young hero who has to save the damsel in distress and that no matter how you express it whether it’s CSI or whether it’s Shakespeare then you’re seeing the same theme being repeated over and over and over because it’s who we are why do people want to see the same story again and again and again week after week all we’re doing is changing a little plot changing a little character but the core symbols the core universal archetypes the good versus the evil the overcoming obstacles these stories that we find so inspiring are us they’re who we are such that from the point of view of archetypal human if you could theoretically take a group of babys and somehow magically transport them over to a new planet and they had zero influence from adults and they could be raised of course that’s impossible but assuming that you could do that for hypothetical purposes what you would find from Jung’s point of view is they would tap into the collective unconscious and they would develop a story about how they were created and came to be in that space they would develop concepts of good and evil they would develop organizational hierarchies for society and they would ascribe to the archetypes they would have very similar themes regardless because they’re humans and we share that and then that influences us each individually as people what we identify with what we don’t identify with what we are drawn to or repulsed by et cetera and the unconscious that we all have individually he acknowledged but he went beyond that again this into a more spiritual realm of human existence not supported necessarily in any way by science and keep in mind science is what we are in psychology we’re talking about historical perspectives here philosophically these are pretty fascinating concepts very hard to operationalize and test scientifically so in that sense we just look at this as one of the big launching points of personality research and then we have finally for Carl Jung introvert and extrovert now this concept goes all the way back to Aristotle and probably beyond that the idea that they’re people who are more individually shy and reticent to gauge in lots of social interaction and other people who just can’t seem to get enough social interaction they crave it they seek it they want it. Right?

Now we come to Carl Jung, another psychoanalytic theorist, not really somebody who engaged in research, and I’ll emphasize Freud did not do research Freud just theorized. Other people did research as a result of Freud. He had a profound impact on society.

You’re familiar with some of his terminology, and you’re familiar with some of his concepts just by being a member of our society. And, if you go to the magazine rack at any checkout counter, and you’ll see things like sex surveys and how to be better in bed and all kinds of things that are just kind of old hat. And, nobody, you know, bats an eye at.

But, those things didn’t happen when he first brought up these concepts, and in someways he freed us up to talk about sexuality in ways that we now take to be commonplace but weren’t. So he shook up society and shook up science. Carl Jung is another theorists and used to be a partner of Freud early on. So, Freud actually named him his crown prince successor if that gives you an indication of Freud’s own narcissism and ego, right, that he could name a crown prince successor clearly he became famous in his own time as did Jung. And, Carl Jung would would agree with Freud on a number of things but eventually he deviated from Freud in a way that Freud couldn’t tolerate and Freud apparently did not play well with others.

And, if you didn’t go along with his theories as he thought they should be advanced then he didn’t work with you anymore. So he went from a colleague he thought was going to be his Crown Prince successor to rejecting Carl Jung out right and never having any associations with him further after Carl deviated too far from him and his theory. And, Carl thought he put too much emphasis on sexuality and not enough emphasis on spirituality which is an interesting take on it so his ideas were that yeah we have a personal unconscious he agreed with Freud, you know, there’s this massive force within us that drives our behavior that we’re unaware of and unable to appreciate examine and probably alter because we’re unable to be conscious of it. But, then he said further we have a collective unconscious that we all share and of course these are constructs within your personality.

And, then we share this collective unconscious because we’re all human beings. As human beings we are going to be influenced by our own genetic history in the sense that we have come down through the ages with certain concepts that no matter where you’re born as a human being you will share those concepts so that we don’t get away from being human no matter what our cultural influences are. And, one thing that Jung had done that Freud had not done is that he had traveled and he had examined other cultures and he had noticed that there’s commonalities no matter how disparate these cultures were in terms of societal practices or beliefs he noticed that they all had theories of good and evil that they all had creation stories how we came to be. That they all had hierarchies and organizations. They all shared certain characteristics but expressed them differently and that those expressions could be traced back to some very common archetypes.

The archetypes are symbols thoughts with universal meaning to all human beings so we have our wise old man archetype. We have our motherly old woman nurturing woman archetype. Those things have been played out since Greek dramas. If you look at all the dramas and the tragedies and the comedies going all the way back to the pre-Socratic philosophers you’ll find that the themes that we see in television and movies today are the same themes we’re just rewriting the characters in the details but the themes remain the same you look at Star Wars and you’ve got Yoda the wise old man you got evil incarnate in Darth Vader but a conflicted evil because he’s also Luke Skywalker’s dad well Luke Skywalker’s the the young hero who has to save the damsel in distress and that no matter how you express it whether it’s CSI or whether it’s Shakespeare then you’re seeing the same theme being repeated over and over and over because it’s who we are why do people want to see the same story again and again and again week after week all we’re doing is changing a little plot changing a little character but the core symbols the core universal archetypes the good versus the evil the overcoming obstacles these stories that we find so inspiring are us they’re who we are such that from the point of view of archetypal human if you could theoretically take a group of babys and somehow magically transport them over to a new planet and they had zero influence from adults and they could be raised of course that’s impossible but assuming that you could do that for hypothetical purposes what you would find from Jung’s point of view is they would tap into the collective unconscious and they would develop a story about how they were created and came to be in that space they would develop concepts of good and evil they would develop organizational hierarchies for society and they would ascribe to the archetypes they would have very similar themes regardless because they’re humans and we share that and then that influences us each individually as people what we identify with what we don’t identify with what we are drawn to or repulsed by et cetera and the unconscious that we all have individually he acknowledged but he went beyond that again this into a more spiritual realm of human existence not supported necessarily in any way by science and keep in mind science is what we are in psychology we’re talking about historical perspectives here philosophically these are pretty fascinating concepts very hard to operationalize and test scientifically so in that sense we just look at this as one of the big launching points of personality research and then we have finally for Carl Jung introvert and extrovert now this concept goes all the way back to Aristotle and probably beyond that the idea that they’re people who are more individually shy and reticent to gauge in lots of social interaction and other people who just can’t seem to get enough social interaction they crave it they seek it they want it. Right?

So the introvert then from this point of view being developed further by Carl Jung is a person who’s just preoccupied with the inner world inside their unconscious or their conscious selves they are experiencing thoughts feelings emotions that they are fascinated by. The concepts that they are interested in, they might find it very fulfilling to read books or to watch movies alone or to you know engage in solitary activities like puzzles or hobbies or music or things like that where they just find great gratification in that there’s nothing wrong with it’s just a way of being that Jung thought was attributable to being preoccupied with an inner world where the extroverted person would be more preoccupied with the external world the people the experiences that one could have in the world and that they would seek that out because that’s stimulating and gratifying to them not wrong not bad just that’s the predominant drive is to go out and to interact with the world. Where the other person’s predominate drive is to withdraw and to expand on what they can do by themselves. And, so you look at this and we’ll see that when we get to trait theory there’s a thread gets continued all the way through until we get up to the Big Five personality factors.

Thank you have a good day. It looks like everybody’s arguing. You got all these competing theories if you take the personality class in other words an actual upper level Psych class on personality you can take a semester’s long course and find out nobody’s got it nailed down. You look at all those theorist we saw with intelligence, and people like to think well I know what intelligence is, but from a lay person‘s perspective you may know what you think intelligence is but when you get into the scientific side of things it’s debatable and empirically debatable. And, of course that’s the kind of debate we want to be having is what holds up to scrutiny.

And, Freud had a wealth of information. We take it with a big grain of salt because a lot of it was not operationalizable. You couldn’t actually put into terms or variables that could be measured such that it could be refuted or supported. Some of the stuff that he contributed still is with us today because it does have empirical support and it stood the test the time. But, back in his day he was one of the first people to even start to posit a full comprehensive theory of how people come to be an identity.

Who are you? How do other people know you? How do they describe you?

What happens inside of yourself as you go the development process that you come to a point where you have a self image a self view a concept of you as a discrete and unique person compared to all the other discrete and unique persons in our race the human race right. There’s so many of us and, we share so much genetically in terms of how we live as biological entities; but on the other side everyone of us is really unique in some way. And, so that being possibly who you are as a personality, he started to theorize but not everybody agreed with him. He was relatively controversial.

I wouldn’t even say relatively he was extremely controversial. And, people started to do research to either refute him or support him, and you see that certain people who aligned with him modified his views. He didn’t care for that he didn’t like Carl Jung modifying his views. He stopped all professional interaction with Carl Jung. Called him his crown prince successor if that gives you any hint as to Freud’s view of himself.

Who names their own crown prince successor, right? But after he kinda deviated on some key concepts wouldn’t have anything to do with him. But you look at his theory and you say well gosh that’s really misogynistic it’s very unfavorable to women and it’s patriarchal and it’s a little oppressive at the very least and very oppressive at the very most.

It certainly was geared to find what he assumed was the case that men had superiority and women were inferior to men and that was just the way it was and that was about penis envy that women saw that men had this appendage that they lacked and they wished they had it. And, you go through the Oedipus complex and the Elector complex and you resolve all these things. And, then you find yourself socializing into roles through sublimation. And, other people came along and challenged those notions. And, one being a psychoanalytic female and what is probably the most ironic of all pronunciations Karen Horney I is how I’m told it’s pronounced.

It looks like “Horny” to me and a lot of his stuff was based on sexuality not the kind of sexuality that most people think about when they’re thinking tabloid magazines talking about reproduction of the species and drives internal to ourselves that are so primitive and base and animalistic that we don’t even like to acknowledge that they exist. And, so we deny that they exist we repress them and we we push them down into the unconscious, but he says they’re still there they still move us every day and everything we do. We’re just not aware of it; so for him, it’s a deterministic world. You go through your childhood. You get your experiences which load you up on various kind the fixations and compulsions and issues and neuroses, and then your fixed that way.

If you remember we talked about Adler looking at the… excuse me, Erikson, Erik Erikson stages of development where he took the first five and they mapped onto the ones Kyle told you about the other day Freud’s five psychosexual stages of development. But he said you don’t stop developing in your late teens. You keep developing throughout life that were Ericsson modified Freud.

Anna Freud his daughter modified Freud and came out with child psychoanalysis. And, Karen Horney was a psychoanalytic therapist and researcher and theorist. And, she didn’t throw all of Freud out she in fact thought Freud was on to something and wanted to amend it. And, one of the, I guess most classic things that she did was when she was looking at Freudian psychoanalysis and this thing of penis envy and this idea male dominance being kinda culturally ordained because it was somehow the natural order of things she fliped it on it’s head.

She said women don’t want penises. They don’t have an issue where they think that they’re missing and they got gypped on the appendage right. What happens with male dominance and male patriarchy is that women have power. They have the power of life. They have the womb.

You don’t need a man but for a second to create a life, but you need a woman to bring it to term and raise it up. And she said that’s the real power. What’s the ultimate power in this world creation of another life.

And women had the primary ability and responsibility to do it. And, men being jealous of their power then subjugated them physically and socially and politically and emotionally. And she said yeah, penis envy, ha, you all got womb envy and you’re just rationalizing.

If you remember that defense mechanism of rationalization. You’re taking the way it is and rationalizing it so that women are subservient to men. But what in fact is the case here is you all are jealous of women, so you use your power to then control them indirectly. So you control the womb indirectly Interestingly enough, not coming down one way or the other for you, you pick where you want to on anything; but when you look at reproductive laws and reproductive women’s health issues who’s usually talking the loudest about them? Men.

They don’t have a womb, but they got a lot to say about it; and they used to control every aspect of females in society. That’s breaking down as would be predicted by Karen Horney’s idea that one you start realizing that it’s not all about guys it’s about people and understanding how she functioned to stay a psychoanalytic theorist but yet revised pretty profoundly Freud’s views you see they’re amenable to change. They’re other words open to question.

Any if question them, and you start looking at some of the other researchers, many of whom were women psychologists and psychologist of color, who started challenging all these dominant stereotypes with data, the stereotypes don’t hold up.