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Discover .Your .Mind New .Ideas .in .Psychology .and .Idealism

Influences of

Freud, Rogers, Laing and Jung

I greatly admire Freud, and it is to him that I owe the inspiration to cultivate a clear writing style (he was a marvellous stylist when he wanted to be).

Jung dealt mainly with symbolism and myth, as far as I remember. This is useful for exploring the major ideals or themes that drive human aspirations or yearnings. But it does not really explain motivation. Symbolism or myth is the intermediate step between ideals and motivation. To understand how the subconscious mind works with patterns (or symbols), it is necessary to dig deeper and explore motivation

However, motivation itself is a weird arena. Freud looked at some of it in his explorations of neurosis, and he came up with ideas that are still unacceptable to most mainstream psychologists even today. However, even Freud had to rely on symbolism to some extent.

The first main issue is this:

If I discover a definite process that occurs in the subconscious mind, then I can teach it strait-forwardly. But if I rely on symbolism then I am interpreting a process or pattern. It is not easy to teach someone else how to make interpretations.

For example, Freud was brilliant at interpretation of symbolism, but how many of his followers had the same gift ? - Answer, none (that I am aware of).

The second main issue is more technical:

Freud and Jung sometimes use different terminology to explain the same ideas. Plus the fact that counselling psychologists like Carl Rogers use different terminology yet again. And then you have thinkers like R D Laing and Rollo May using existential terms.

During the middle part of my self-analysis I had to decide what terminology to use. The procedure that I adopted to compare these thinkers was to interpret Freud in ways that I could understand and which fitted my own experience, and then find what interpretations of Jung, Rogers, Laing, fitted with Freud. That way I could compare these thinkers. I found this process extremely hard to do. For some time I chopped and changed the vocabulary that I was using, before eventually settling down to my present one.

Basically, what I was doing was this : when I was absorbed in some experience, I then explored which ideas best described it. The Ariadne's thread that I followed was: what did Freud mean in this kind of situation, what did Rogers mean, what did Laing mean ? In essence, I followed meaning. This comparison of thinkers took me a long time. Each of them is brilliant in some ways and muddled in others.

Jung has never really interested me. To be fair to Jung, by the time that I had adopted a working vocabulary of ideas after comparing Freud, Rogers and Laing, I was nearly intellectually exhausted. I did not feel like making an extensive study of Jung, especially as Jung was the most difficult of the theorists to read.

Ian Heath
London, UK

www.discover-your-mind.co.uk/

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