Does the Jungian notion of collective unconsciousness have any legitimacy in the light of modern (neuro) science?
Jung came up with the idea of the collective unconscious when he was working at the Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich (arguably, the idea has been around in different forms before Jung). He noticed that the visions of some of the patients were very similar to myths found in cultures from around the world. He doubted these patients had been exposed to these cultures personally, and so postulated a symbolic structure of the psyche that belongs to humanity. In other words, the mythological patterns of the psyche can be found around the world in disconnected cultures.Many problems seem to arise, however, when people try to bring Jungian psychology together with neuroscience. The problem, it seems to me, has to do with fundamentally different worldviews. Neuroscience is materialistic and reductionistic in it's conception of the human being. Consciousness is something that emerges from matter, being an epiphenomenon (secondary). In Depth Psychology, the worldview includes direct human experience as the primary source of data by which to form one's worldview in the first place. For example, to understand dreams, we look at people's experience in their lives—their fears, hopes, desires, thoughts, all things that cannot be seen and understood in a microscope, and yet exist, and are powerful factors in quality of life. We then correlate these "things" with the dream content and witness obvious correspondences. In neuroscience, the quest is for the "chemical cause". Phenomena are real if their physical parts are found and labeled. Bringing the world of "meaning" and human experience together with chemical cause is difficult.Often, people don't see that they are embedded in a materialistic, reductionistic paradigm, and therefore see anything that has to do with the human soul, psyche, collective unconscious, as being fairly ridiculous. The gap between worldviews is difficult to bridge. I see this as a personality typology problem.
How can I apply the collective unconscious to a current issue within the study of personality or therapy?
How can I apply the collective unconscious to a current issue within the study of personality or therapy? I have an understanding of what Jung's collective unconscious is, but I cannot wrap my head around it enough to come up with a way to apply it to a situation. Thank you in advance for your help!!
Can the essence of our ancestors' thoughts, feelings, and emotions be passed down through DNA like their physical characteristics are?
This is an important question and deeper than it first appears.As Alexander alluded to, certain traits can be genetically inherited. We call these cultural traits and they influence a person's world views.If you’re looking for specific memories of an event, that's unlikely. However, there is another kind of memory that is ingrained into your very nature. It is instinctual memory. These are very basic memories, how to breath, how to walk, how to make sense of your senses.This may seam trivial, but the differences are astounding. We humans take an unconventional amount of time to learn to stand and walk, but a baby deer, standing in 10 min walking within 7 hrs of birth.Now you might say, but that's a different animal, and you’re right. Which proves the point that different species of animals (from humans to deer) have different “culturally” ingrained instinctual memories.The next question is to ask, how far does this extend? We obviously don't share memories of the Napoleonic wars. Yet we do still carry the emotional baggage of our forebears.An interesting study was done on our friends the crows. It turns out crows can remember human faces and emotions. A crow will remember a specific person and how that person behaves towards it, is the person a threat, do they have food, will they just ignore me? It turns out that their facial recognition is so accurate that an unfriendly persons wearing a random mask, once they remove the mask the crow recognizes the unfriendly and acts accordingly. However, if that random mask is removed and the person underneath is known to be friendly, the crow recognizes no threat and acts accordingly.The really fascinating thing? Take these same crows and have them go off and raise some offspring with no contact from the researchers. When the researchers came back and tried to perform the experiment on the untested young, these new birds that had never before been in the experiment, immediately started recognizing specific friendly or threatening people and acted as their parents would have.The conclusion being that somehow the crows were able to pass along specific faces and emotional cues to their offspring.While it's clear that full blown memories aren't shared, our friends the crows show that more than just kinesthetic instincts is passed along.
Why do people dismiss Jung as being merely a mystic without contending with his ideas?
Because of a key issue Jung himself challenged in his writings. Empiricism is the culprit as to why modern day scientists remain wary of Jung. He speaks of archetypes and the unconscious whereas today’s psychologists focus a lot more on brain structures and their deviation from normal to diagnose illness.The main goal of modern psychology presupposes that they have generally identified what are in the category of mental illnesses. It is now their goal to correct for these effects through empirically tested methods of therapy or the use of prescriptive medication. In an attempt to step away from personality or temperament being the foundation of the psyche, modern psychology generally ignores that question. They believe that to attack this problem they must first understand subjectivity in its completeness and by necessity, one must also understand consciousness. Because consciousness has no real place in the identifiable structures of current science, there is no way to “test” the validity of the conscious and unconscious as two separate entities. Personally, I think that current evolutionary biological studies allude to such a thing as a collective consciousness vs individual consciousness. With a little bit of gymnastics we can get an unconscious and collective unconscious.The problem remains that the current direction of psychology is strongly focused on objectivity. For Carl Jung, the whole story of humanity cannot only be accounted to objectively. There is an undeniably subjective component that informs what our objective aims are. Because of the submission of the latter to the former or at the very least, the co-dependency of them both, we are only telling half the story with our current approaches to psychology and the human psyche. The reason his ideas are not contended with are chiefly because there is no “evidence” of any of the archetypes Jung proposes as the foundation of his theories. In order to be taken seriously by the “scientific community” your methods of investigation must follow very strict criteria. There is no such thing as knowing something that can’t be empirically verifiable, they will argue. Subjectivity has no place when discovering the facts of reality. It also doesn’t help that Jung heavily relied on ancient stories and religious allegories as the crux of his theories.
What is the definition of social hysteria?
Mass hysteria — other names include collective hysteria, group hysteria, Mass Psychogenic Illness, or collective obsessional behavior — is the sociopsychological phenomenon of the manifestation of the same or similar hysterical symptoms by more than one person. A common manifestation of mass hysteria occurs when a group of people believe they are suffering from a similar disease or ailment. Mass hysteria typically begins when an individual becomes ill or hysterical during a period of stress. After this initial individual shows symptoms, others begin to manifest similar symptoms, typically nausea, muscle weakness, fits or headache. The features of mass hysteria include no plausible cause found, ambiguous symptoms, rapid escalation of cases - often spread by line of sight - and rapid remission of symptoms. Demographically, cases are higher in females and those with greater use of medical services. Other factors that contribute to the severity of the symptoms and spread are protective clothing worn by emergency services and mistaken or misleading investigations. Sightings of religious miracles are often attributed to mass hysteria. In 2009 in Fort Worth, Texas, 34 people were sent to the hospital after they complained about having symptoms when they mistakenly thought they had been exposed to carbon monoxide. In 2008 in Tanzania, about 20 female school pupils began to faint in a schoolroom, collapsing to the floor and losing consciousness, while others after witnessing this sobbed, yelled and ran around the school. A local education officer was quoted in news reports saying that such events are "very common here"
Research Paper on Freud Versus Jung's Theory?
Man..I have to write a 6 page research paper on Freud Psychoanalysis versus Jung's Neopsychoanalytic theories, and there is so much information out there, I am just lost on its highways! Any ideas how I can begin to prepare to set up this complicated paper without failing? Thanks a Lot!