5 Steps to a 5 AP Psychology, 2010-2011 Edition - Laura Lincoln Maitland [126]
• During adolescence, individuals pass into the final stage of maturity, the genital stage. The adolescent develops warm feelings for others, and sexual attraction, group activities, vocational planning, and intimate relationships develop too. This is a smooth period for those lucky enough to have little libido fixated in earlier stages, especially not during the phallic stage, according to Freud.
Critics (including neo-analysts, who were psychoanalysts that disagreed with parts of Freud’s theory and developed their own), now discount most of this theory. Some neo-analysts, also called neo-Freudians, were Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Karen Horney.
Carl Jung’s Analytic Theory of Personality
A contemporary and colleague of Freud, Carl Jung rejected Freud’s sex theory. The son of a Swiss pastor, Jung became a psychiatrist. Jung believed that personality is shaped by the cumulative experiences of past generations extending back to our evolutionary past. He studied mythology, religion, ancient symbols and rituals, customs and beliefs of different societies, dreams, and symptoms of mentally ill patients in his search to understand the development of personality. According to Jung’s analytic theory of personality, the psyche—or whole personality—consists of interacting systems including the ego, the personal unconscious with its complexes; the collective unconscious with its archetypes, attitudes, and functions; and the self. The ego is the conscious mind, responsible for our feeling of identity and continuity.
The personal unconscious is similar to Freud’s preconscious and unconscious, a storehouse of all our own past memories, hidden instincts, and urges unique to us. It contains complexes, which are groups of associated, emotional, unconscious thoughts that significantly influence our attitudes, and associations that act as driving forces. The collective unconscious is the powerful and influential system of the psyche that contains universal memories and ideas that all people have inherited from our ancestors over the course of evolution. The inherited memories are archetypes or common themes found in all cultures, religions, and literature, both ancient and modern. Jung’s attitude of extraversion orients the person toward the external, objective world, whereas the attitude of introversion orients the person toward the inner, subjective world.
Jung believed