Jung or Freud?
 

Who’s your preferred psychologist of the two (for those with a bit of an interest in psychology)?

I personally very-much dislike Freud’s teachings, but that’s just me. For me, his kind of psychoanalysis was what made psychiatry between the ’50s and ’70s (including the undermining of the severity of bipolar disorder and deep clinician depression and over-attribution of bipolar/depressive psychosis to schizophrenia) but I can accept that some of his contributions (especially about anxiety) have the right to stick and are actually pretty well-crafted as far as conceptualisation goes. So I can’t begrudge him of everything. I just think he was a bit pervy and not in the full know about the severity of “mood disorders”.

One thing I will say about Freud, in his favour, is his underpinning of the unconscious/subconscious mind, in terms of shadow-parts to our personalities and so-on. He had a point there, and I even mentioned the possibility he (and other frameworks) lay/s out there in the poll-options of my thread about pure good vs. pure evil (and everything in-between), even if I didn’t have Freud in-mind when I crafted that option.

I've never studied either in depth. Did a bit of Freud in AS-level psychology before I dropped it - the ego, superego and the id and all that. Seemed relatively plausible. Jung I've never read but Jordan Peterson draws on him a lot and I like most of Peterson's work even though that's not a very popular thing to say these days

Apart from the odd time where I get a bit "rabbit-holey" I'm not particularly interested in psychology...

... but I love history and mythology, so Jung's work on Archetypes and how it ties into the various pantheons and recurring stories is interesting to me.

Q: What's a Freudian slip?

I think they are both useful historically in the context of you have to start somewhere if you are going to attempt to understand/explain something because it encourages thought and discussion.

Personally, with billions of people on the planet and an almost infinite number of defining influences on peoples lives, i just don't think there are simple answers.

I think it's an area where AI can be put to good use though, so watch this space is what i would say

Speaking of how Freud distorted mid.-20th-century psychoanalytics, I had a psychology teacher at A.S. level who routinely minimised the potential severity of depression, likening it to the common cold of psychological problems whereas schizophrenia (which he’d always bang on and on about) was like cancer, irony being that people who have experienced both cancer and severe depression would tell you straight-up, oftentimes, that the depression is worse than any physical illness they’ve experienced, including cancer. Then we watched a case-study about a woman with psychotic depression, with bog-standard depressive delusions and hallucinations involving the devil and satanic transformation (really not unusual in the context of psychotic depression), who was re-vitalised with electroconvulsive therapy (a controversial treatment, sure, but undoubtedly life-saving in the most severe cases of depression). And it was me who had to write that 12-marker answer in an AQA paper to open his eyes to the rest, and he was shook. Shook at how stupidly and dismissively wrong he’d been, shook that he ever mistakenly took depression for a uniformly mild mental illness, especially side-by-side with his favourite topic (schizophrenia), not knowing that both illnesses have a lot more in common than he’d initially realised. Even when it is mild, a next step is often suicide, and that’s no joke.

That’s fair enough. Archetypes is fascinating. When it comes to introversion/extroversion psychology, I do prefer the more standardised derivatives (MBTI; socionics is a bit too much, even for me; not that obsessed with it) but Jung set the blueprint for that. It’s just that his descriptions of cognitive functions can be quite exaggerated and geared towards making more of a borderline-pathological example of them. Also don’t like the way he speaks about women with Fi (introverted feeling). He falls victim to, almost like, ‘contrary misogyny’ of the time, and it’s hard to read. But I think he had the right idea all-in-all.