Freud And Jung: The Personal And The Collective Unconscious

Three authors Plato, Freud and Jung propose different theories about the conscious and the unconscious. In his article “Plato’s Allegory of The Cave”, philosopher Plato vividly states the conscious and the unconscious through an allegory. Freud, an Austrian neurologist, formulates the Oedipus complex as the key tenet of psychoanalytical theory. Jung, a Swiss psychologist, proposes a new understanding of the conscious and the unconscious in his article “The Personal and The Collective Unconscious”. The different views between Freud, Jung and Plato explain the main difference of the conscious and the unconscious.
The main similarity between Plato and Freud is that both of them are agnostics. Plato believes that the reality is an ideal world which …show more content…
Freud believes that the contents of the unconscious include the original impulse and all kinds of instincts of human race and all desires that are depressed. Most of the contents depressed are the negative memories that are relative to sexual frustration or sexuality which individuals suffered and experienced in their early childhood. Jung states that “In Freud’s view, as most people know, the contents of the unconscious are reducible to infantile tendencies which are repressed because of their incompatible character. Repression is a process that begins in early childhood under the moral influence of the environment and continues throughout life” (Jung 930). Jung argues that such a view is too narrow. Jung agrees with Freud’s view of the personal unconscious, however, he believes that the personal unconscious depends on a furtherer level which is the so-called collective unconscious. To rebut Freud’s the above view, Jung states that “According to this theory, the unconscious contains only those parts of the personality which could just as well be conscious, and have been suppressed only through the process of education” (Jung