Thursday, December 22, 2011

Malaysian Psycho: Jung and Freud

Today, I'm going to write a very simplified and condensed take on the works of Jung and Freud by using myself as an example.

You can read about their stuff on Wikipedia, so these are only things I myself have taken and thought about. This came about when some people told me I was probably insane or suffered from some form of autism.

Asperger's syndrome, probably.

I ruled out Asperger's because the syndrome requires that I be socially awkward most of the time and I do not have repetitive types of behavior common in the sufferers of such a disease. The social awkwardness I experienced early on in life was just me being young. And my moves have been random, only some of the times deliberately so.

My interests are broad, ranging from comics to Jungian psychology. Jung is by far my preferred authority on the matter simply because his analytical psychology fits with my world view. I irrationally reject MOST of Freud's derivations and theories simply because I find his penis-envy and seeking pleasure to be too simplistic.

Jung talks about a collective unconscious, which has been proven in some lab studies with white mice. White mice a few generations later could navigate through the maze better than the first few who encountered it, even if the babies were separated from birth - ruling out a kind of mice language for knowledge transfer.

Freud, meanwhile, believes in a subconscious dictating our moves and patterns of behavior. His theory points to the ego. In fact, he came up with the terms the id, ego and super-ego to explain what is basically - to me - the ego trying to convince the self that it is the self.

Jung is particularly useful in analysing mass crowd movements. The book Generations adhered to this theory somewhat in their take on each generation embodying a certain archetype.

I think I have written enough big words today. Now, for some tweeting before sleep.