Jung, Adler, Horney

Carl Jung had theories about the collective unconscious and archetypes.  Everyone has a personal unconscious, where memories are stored and not thought about.  This is the part of each person's mind that they don't think or know about.  It is the part of the mind that is not accessible in everyday life. The collective unconscious, he said, was the unconscious "mind" of all humanity.  The unconscious mind contains the thoughts and knowledge of all humans.  It contains all thoughts, ideas, religions, and cultures of humanity.  It is, in essence, the ghost of people past, with all of their urges, instincts, and memories.  Archetypes are part of the collective unconscious.  They are the models based on differing but repeating patterns across all human cultures.  There are several human archetypes.  For example, each person knows instinctively what evil and beauty are.  Unconsciously, we just know and have a model for these things.



















Alfred Adler coined the idea of the inferiority complex.  He said that all humans are born feeling inferior because they are helpless and surrounded by powerful adults.  As a child grows, he or she strives to feel superior and powerful through accomplishment.  However, if a child fails to meet certain life challenges, then the child will develop an inferiority complex.  So, every child feels inferior, but only those who fail develop an inferiority complex.  Those people who develop an inferiority complex feel inadequate frequently and have a tendency to get down on themselves easily.

Karen Horney had conflicting views with Freud over the psychoanalysis of men and women.  Horney rejected Freud's idea of penis envy.  She said that he was just picking up on women's jealousy of man's power in the world.  Instead, she said that men had womb envy.  She claimed that men were jealous of women's ability to bear children.  Men need to have their name live on, so they need women as much as women need men.  She believed that men's overcompensation in personal achievement was due to their relatively small part in creating a child.  I think that Freud believed men were superior to women while Horney was an outraged feminist.  Both had dumb, opposing ideas that belittled the opposite sex.