William James and Phenomenology - Essay Example

Simplifying and to a large extent over-ruling James's ideas came Sigmund Freud and his concept of psychoanalysis. Freud based his notions of the unconscious mind as a reservoir for repressed memories of traumatic events that continuously influence conscious thought and behavior. Freud divided the state of mental activity to exist at three levels: the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. He considered Id as the center of our primitive instincts; something that caters to the business of gratifying our desires and pleasures.

To Freud, the new-born infant is the personification of the Id and the Ego develops out of the Id as the child grows. The Ego acts as a sensor to the Id, checking the primitive desires for immediate gratification, and conflicts between the Id and the Ego can result in a person having neuroses.  Related to these questionable assumptions of psychoanalysis are two equally questionable methods of investigating the alleged memories hidden in the unconscious: free association and the interpretation of dreams.

If Freud said that the goal of therapy was to make the unconscious conscious, a younger colleague of his, Carl Jung, was to make the exploration of this "inner space". For Jung, an empirical investigation of the realms of dream, myth, personality, and soul represented the manner to understand the "inner space" of the human psyche. He regarded the encounter between the individual and the unconscious as the most important facet of this process. Jung held that human beings experience the unconscious through symbols encountered in all aspects of life: in dreams, art, religion, and the symbolic dramas we enact in our relationships and our day to day life.

Essential to the encounter with the unconscious, and the reconciliation of the individual's consciousness with this broader world is learning this symbolic language. Jung believed that only through attention and unprejudiced, flexible powers of thinking can the individual be able to harmonize his life with what he called the "archetypal forces". To undergo the individuation process, the individual must be open to the parts of oneself beyond one's own ego. The modern individual must pay attention to dreams, explore the world of religion and spirituality, and question the assumptions of the operant societal worldview.

Alfred Adler examined human personality around the same time as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. They worked on some theories together until Adler rejected Freud's emphasis on sex, and maintained that personality difficulties are rooted.