For over 75 years Freudian and Jungian psychologists have done little to reconcile their differences. Is it because a reconciliation of their differences is an impossibility. Would Freudian psychology implode, if one of its most fundamental precepts the Oedipus complex was given archetypal roots in the collective unconscious? How could the Oedipus complex possibly override the matriarchies ubiquitous and almost universally established mother son incest taboo. It can't. The mother son incest taboo is rooted within the archetypal realm. The Greeks accordingly portrayed this oedipal constellation as an illness. A human tragedy.
Freud may have discovered his own character embedded in the Oedipus myth but surely his psychic illness should not be made the basis for a universal psychology of man should it?
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well that is a relief as i was not sure i had made the connection between the freudian oral phase of development with a taming or civilizational enterprise of the male child sufficiently clear. So i will reword my response a bit...If a male child is going to attain physiological independence he must tame that element of the physiological aspect of the sexual impetus which is preventing him from gaining such... and the same principle would apply to the nutritional aspect blocking his acquisition of physiological independence.
Sex between animal parents is the least interesting part of the relationship from the point of view of their cub.
"Psychic illness" is the fastest way to see things differently, so in a way it's fine if a person sees something differently because he/she is mentally challenged. Also, if a psychoanalyst "admits" that his mother is hot, he assumes that he was enough of a bad boy and there's no really any filth, chaos, and confusion left beneath the surface. Of course my mother has influenced how I treat and what I expect from other women (just as my father has influenced (but not determined) how I see myself within society), there is much more to the relationship between mommy and daddy than a few perverted minutes (that I don't see anyway). Occam's razor is used in order to find the simplest possible description of reality, the one that should be accurate if it was complete. Maybe Freud had cut off too much before he started developing his theory.
Are you familiar with the Gödel's theorem? It claims that there are truths beyond logic and axioms. Freud had started with a few sexy axioms, but later he was forced to include bits and pieces from parapsychology, to "eat" cigars and embrace cocaine (and have a dead friend in the process), to add Thanatos to Eros... Also, his student was Wilhelm Reich. It sounds to me like clumsy and ad hoc attempts to include "something else".
When Freud and Jung were separating their ways, Freud fainted. Jung carried him to a couch.
Alex you used the Freudian technique of free association in formulating your response to the Freudian Phallacy. Jung did adopt and adapt the free association method as well. The point I was trying to make was Freud and Freudian psychology could and cannot move into the realm of the collective Unconscious because the oedipal complex embedded therein could only be interpreted as a psychic illness. The anthropologists have collected a massive amount of data indicating the mother son incest taboo is central to the organization of the matriarchal order.
In terms of who digs deeper, I vote for Jung. I can't tell anything about other men through history, but in Freud's approach sexuality (with all those something-erotic phases - a baby doesn't eat because he/she is hungry, but because he/she wants sex) is the link between mind and matter. On the other hand, Jung seems to be exactly that - the founder of the point where mind and matter touch. I'm about to have my chapter published (I hope they won't let me down) where I elaborate it. I've written a psychedelic parody of it or rather an invitation for active imagination: http://communityalchemy.com/eWorkshop1/Will.pdf
We can only imagine who would Jung be without Freud. Also, I assume the part of the conflict is Jung's mysticism and people's doubts how far can active imagination go, how much it can make a difference (wherever one expects a difference). I know that when I was buying some Jung's books with their silly illustrations that something inside me was telling me (in Serbian): "This is not science".
Hunger like sex is a physiological urge. I suspect these two urges are interconnected insofar as I suspect a man who is nutritionally dependent is not going to get much in the way of sex never mind establish a meaningful relationship for more than a one night stand. As with the shadow it may well be, IT IS the spiritually/civilizationally based element of our personality which must tame/harness/integrate the sexual impulse while simultaneously disciplining physiological nature in order to secure our nutritional survival. Obviously I am operating under the assumption that childhood constitutes a dry run preparation for how we subsequently approach adult existence.
I absolutely agree with you that Freud overlooked the importance of physical hunger for food and its importance in the breast feeding phenomenon. cough cough any breast feeding mother will tell you that taming of the child is an inherent part of the breast feeding phase of existence. :)
Exactly. Not to diminish Freud's importance, he was there first. With an exception of maybe William James, but he was too medical for my taste (just as sometimes a composition, book, or film seems to be too good or complex for me to understand it). I find it interesting for instance that many engineers interested in artificial (vs. natural) intelligence/consciousness/life (matter interacting with mind from the other side) know nothing about Jung's ideas, even though everyone has heard about him.