Mental health concepts and applications

Mental Health

Comparison of the Theories of Freud, Adler and Jung

Personality Theories

Personality has been analyzed as an individual's most remarkable or main characteristic. If human actions were fully understood, there would be no need for personality theories. Such theories in point of fact correspond to detailed assumptions or theories about why people act the way they do. They have both explanatory and analytical functions in psychology. A personality theory is explanatory in that it serves to put in order human behavior methodically so as to render it understandable. A good personality theory therefore, makes available a significant background within which human behavior can be consistently described and interpreted.

Sigmund Freud started off his psychoanalytic approach based on his experiences in his psychiatric practice. He observed that many of his patients behaved according to drives and experiences of which they were not consciously aware concluding that the unconscious played a major role in shaping behavior. According to him, the human behavior has three levels of consciousness, which is a subjective phenomenon whose content can be communicated only by means of language or behavior (Kaplan & Sadocks, 1998).

The conscious which involves thoughts which you are aware, the preconscious which involves thoughts which you are not immediately aware but can bring to conscious attention easily and rapidly and the unconscious which are thoughts held in reserve from conscious understanding in the course of the force of control or repression.

In further explaining the human behavior, Freud created key ideas of personality in the course of time. The id is the biological side of personality and the pleasure-seeking, instinctive drive which is also associated to sexuality and the location of the unconscious where introverted memories are house and where dreams come about (Kincheloe & Horn, 2007). The ego satisfies the instincts of the id, the normal self.

It controls behavior and bridges the mental images and the outside world and has to do with conscious perceptual functions such as realistic thought and decision making. It allows one to function and make distinctions between this and that (Kincheloe & Horn, 2007). The superego thrives in the direction of moral precision. It is one's sense of right and wrong which confirmed the interpretation that when projected, it can be considered as the image of God (Argyle, 2000).

Carl Gustav Jung's stretched out Freud's unconscious concept by describing the collective unconscious which formed his theory of analytic psychology. He described the total personality as the psyche, classifications as follows. First is the ego which is the conscious dimension of personality, then the personal unconscious which includes anything that is not presently conscious. It includes memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason excluding the instincts that Freud includes. And then there is the collective unconscious, a pool of our experiences and a type of familiarity we are all born with and yet we can never be directly mindful of it.

It persuades all of our experiences and behaviors, the majority in particular the disturbing ones, but we only know about it in some way, by looking at those influences. There are some experiences that give you an idea about the effects of the collective unconscious more clearly than others such as the experiences of first love, of deja vu, and the instantaneous appreciation of certain signs and the meanings of certain tradition, could all be understood as the unexpected concurrence of our outer realism and the inner reality of the collective unconscious.